Buying Birthday Beers for Friends Abroad

March 9, 2007 — -- Have you ever found yourself scratching your head, racking your brain thinking about what to buy someone for a birthday present?

It can be a tedious task, particularly when shopping for friends or family members who live abroad.

Many purchases today are made on the Internet because it's convenient, and online retail is now available worldwide.

But wouldn't it be better if you could use the information superhighway, or simply a cell phone, to buy someone a cocktail or a bottle of bubbly? It would make life so much easier when it comes to choosing gifts, right?

If you currently live in London, where this fun idea is now a reality, you may be in luck.

Steve Rothwell, co-founder and director at Eagle Eye Solutions, has come up with a business technology named Buy Me a Drink. Rothwell's new service allows anyone to buy a beer for a buddy at a local watering hole from anywhere in the world. And the technology, which another company has also tested in Australian cities like Sydney, may soon be available in the United States.

How does it work? It's really simple. All you need is Internet access to register your credit card, and that special someone's cell phone number. A text message is sent to the gift receiver's cell phone, with a number code at the end of your personal message.

It would look something like this:

From: Lama Hasan
Happy Birthday!
ID:12345678
Valid for 1 bottle of champagne@any Corney&Barrow bar

If you received a message like this, all you would have to do is show the barman the code, which corresponds to a particular drink -- a bottle of champagne, in this example -- and soon enough it would be yours to drink, with no cash changing hands, and perhaps accompanied by a toast to your absent friend.

Corney and Barrow (http://www.buymeabeer.com/cb), one of the largest bar operators in London's Financial District, controls the only venues in the United Kingdom that currently allow people to redeem their drinks from the Buy Me a Drink service.

Michael Mak of Bcodedrinks.com, an Australian company that is in the process of relocating to San Francisco, hopes that this idea and some others that employ SMS text messaging technology will soon take off inside the United States.

After all, the latest figures show that Americans are sending about 10 billion text messages a month, and cheap provider deals mean this number is still growing statewide.