1. Field of Invention
This invention relates generally to greeting cards and gift certificates, and more particularly to a computer-printer Internet terminal adapted to produce under the control of the user of the terminal a composite greeting and gift certificate card redeemable by the named recipient at a retail establishment linked to Internet.
2. Status of Prior Art
Internet is a world-wide information highway interlinking millions of computer terminals, each having many users. Associated with Internet are various commercially-operated on-line services, such as Prodigy, CompuServe and Online. One important use to which Internet is put is the retrieval of information from electronic libraries and other data bases, thereby giving each terminal access to a vast treasury of information. Another popular use for Internet is electronic or E-mail making it possible for terminals linked to Internet to communicate with each other.
E-mail communication may take the form of a greeting card composed at one terminal and transmitted to another terminal linked to Internet. Thus the 1995 U.S. Pat. No. 5,426,594 to Wright entitled "Electronic Greeting Card Store and Communication System" discloses a method by which a user of a personal communicator can select and pay for an electronic greeting card and to send it to another personal communicator for presentation to its user.
As noted in the Wright patent, the usual practice in sending a greeting card appropriate to a given occasion, such as a birthday or wedding anniversary, is for the individual to go to a retail store carrying greeting cards for various occasions and to select from what is available a card having an image and message printed thereon suitable for the occasion. The individual would pay for and take possession of the card and then write a personal message on the card before sending it to the party for which the card is intended.
This procedure may be inconvenient to the purchaser of the card, for it requires this individual to go to a greeting card store, search through the many cards there available to find an appropriate card, pay for the card, write a personal message thereon and then mail the card.
In the Wright system a first personal communicator accepts off-line selection of an electronic greeting card from a user, and then transmits a request message corresponding to the off-line selection of the electronic greeting card, the request message including at least an electronic greeting card identifier and a destination identifier. The electronic mail server receives the request message, and processes the request message by wireless transmission of an electronic greeting card message to the second personal communicator. The electronic greeting card includes a representation of an electronic greeting card image being identified by the electronic greeting card identifier. The second personal communicator is also identified by the destination identifier included with the request message. The electronic mail server updates billing information associated with an account of the first personal communicator in response to the electronic greeting card message being transmitted for billing the user of the first personal communicator therefor.
When a person is celebrating a birthday or other special occasion, it is common practice not only to send that person a greeting card appropriate to the occasion, but also a gift. In recent years a gift certificate has emerged as a viable alternative to the purchase of the gift itself.
Gift certificates offer many advantages over the purchase of a gift. If the gift giver is unsure of the needs of the recipient, a gift certificate offers a wide range of goods or services from which the recipient can choose. Currently, gift certificates can be purchased only at retail locations or through catalog houses. This is a drawback, for it is often inconvenient for one to have to travel to a store in order to purchase a gift certificate. To overcome this drawback, the 1993 U.S. Pat. No. 5,243,174 to Veeneman et al. "Method and Apparatus for Generating Gift Certificates" discloses an electronic gift certificate dispenser for printing and dispensing a gift certificate purchased by a credit card. A consumer approaches the dispenser and inserts a credit card into a magnetic card reader. The consumer then chooses a retailer from a menu of participating retailers and enters the gift certificate value.
The machine automatically verifies the credit card, causes the account to be debited and prints the gift certificate. A plurality of gift certificate dispensers devices can be connected in a network under the control of a central processing unit. Information regarding gift certificate purchases is transferred from the dispensers to the central processing unit to be collated and billed to credit card accounts. The central processing unit also informs merchants of the purchase of gift certificates that will be redeemed at their stores.
With the Veeneman et al. electronic gift certificate dispenser, it is no longer necessary to go to the selected retail establishment issuing the certificate to obtain it. But one must travel to the mall or center at which the dispenser is installed; hence the certificate certificate cannot be produced at home.