| New Business Method and Technology Patent Applications Available for Review:
Lend Your Expertise to the Examination Process
We've recently posted LOTS of new applications for review, including both business method and technology patents. Brief summaries of five of the applications are provided below, and a list of all available applications for review is in the sidebar. Thanks for your continued participation and expertise!
One application, submitted by IBM, relates to a data structure technology intended to reduce computation times for any programs that incorporate it. This application deals with reducing latency among “producer” and “consumer” buffers. The invention involves using separate locks to access a particular producer-consumer buffer, one lock for “putter” threads and another for “taker” threads. Rather than making each “putter” and “taker” access both data locks in order to do their job, this invention allows “putters” and “takers” to deal only with one lock and thus reduce latency in the system. When the buffer is either empty or full, an additional mechanism is employed to facilitate communication between the “putter” threads and the “taker” threads. Key to this invention is the idea that the taker and putter operations can occur and take actions on their respective locks simultaneously without interfering with the other operation. Also important is the existence of a separate wait-notify mechanism that facilities communication between the putter and taker threads when the buffer becomes full or empty. This invention is intended to enhance the speed of software by reducing the number of operations required to move data around. The online review period ends soon on this one!
Another IBM application relates to a computer-implementable method that enables a user to customize navigation of User Interface (UI) resources displayed on a computer UI. This method associates user-created metadata with predefined metadata by user-created group metadata and user interface resources. Because this method pertains to tailoring the way interface resources are managed on a UI, it is ideal for users who frequently user large quantities of UI resources. This patent application is also for the computer-readable medium encoded with a computer program comprising of computer executable instructions configured for this method. This method and program also allows for saving the user created metadata as a personal preference for a specific user, as well as a user summary of prior activity.
A business method application from Aid 2 O, LLC, System and Method for Efficient Allocation of Rebates, offers a method of electronically allocating the value of a rebate to a charity organization from a list of pre-selected charities generated by a server. Specifically, the invention involves a server system that allows a consumer to input a rebate having a certain value, and enabling the consumer to allocate the value to a selected charity. For example, a consumer purchases goods or services from a retailer, wherein the goods or services provide a rebate offer upon purchase. The rebate has an identifier such as a bar code, numeric code, etc. which a server will recognize when entered into the server and display the value of the rebate to the consumer. After the rebate is entered into the server, or website, the server presents a list of charities, organizations, etc. enabling the consumer to allocate the value of the rebate to one of the charities from the list. The consumer can choose to either keep the value of the rebate or allocate the value to one or more charities in any proportion or percentage the consumer desires. The server then processes the consumer’s apportionment of the rebate value and disburses the funds to the selected charities according to the consumer’s wishes. Additionally, the present invention allows a user to add additional funds to be disbursed to charity. This application will be available for review for only 23 more days.
A Microsoft business method application discusses online advertisements, which are a considerable revenue generator for many websites and advertisement placement services, as well as companies using those advertisements to reach their target audience. The revenues are generally measured through a click-through model: revenues and payments are assessed based on user clicks on posted advertisements. The high volume of requests makes it difficult for websites and ad placement services to manually select the proper advertisements. Existing automated ad selectors pose a problem of accepting ads with with relevant content but inappropriate to the target audience or for public viewing, which then still requires manual sorting. The application discusses a method and system is provided whereby all parts of this selection process is automated, weeding out both irrelevant ads and also ads with inappropriate content without any human involvement. The invention allows for training the automated selector to identify and isolate ads with inappropriate content.
As new softwares continue to push the envelope on functions that can be performed, software codes required to carry out these funcitons become lenthy and complex. Longer codes usually generate more bugs and require more bug testing. Test Driven Development (TDD) is used by developers to break down large programs into smaller sections of funtionality (units) which are individually testable. Drafting unit codes and testing each individual unit imposes a substantial burden on the developers time, and also leaves rooms for error by the developer due to the large number units involved. This invention described in this Microsoft application is directed to automatically generating unit tests.
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