As the saying goes, “People love to see their name in lights.” Taking this to heart, in 2007, Medea, Inc. of Pleasanton, CA, began working on patented technology for a vodka bottle with a programmable LED message band that lets consumers do just that. The bottle comes pre-programmed with six popular greetings—for example, “Happy Birthday,” “Merry Christmas,” and “Congratulations”—and can be programmed with custom messages that can scroll across the band for up to 45 consecutive minutes, with 20 hours battery time.
“Basically, we had an idea that we wanted to put something like Times Square on a bottle, to make it fun and interactive when you are drinking spirits,” says Brandon Laidlaw, CEO of Medea.
Now, the company has taken interactivity a step further, enabling remote programming via Apple’s iBeacon Bluetooth technology and a free Medea App that together allow consumers direct access to the bottle through their wireless devices. Launched in June 2015, each bottle comes with a unique identifier that the bottle owner can share with friends, giving them the ability to change, modify, or add messages to the owner’s bottle. The App, developed in-house by Medea along with PeopleSoft, knows at all times which bottles are on, which ones are available to be registered, and which ones are ready to receive instructions for setting and displaying messages.
