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Modular computer program for managing dynamic pricing information

Modular computer program for managing dynamic pricing information description/claims

The present application is directed to Internet navigation paradigms, data organization, click flows and relationships between the source of origin of goods in commerce and web sites that display information about goods and services available on the Internet. More specifically, the apparatus and methods disclosed herein provide a new way to organize and provoke participation in bid/ask or dynamic pricing systems available on the Internet and private networks through taxonomic, branding, navigational and participatory techniques.

Electronic commerce on the Internet generally can be organized into two categories, database driven applications and indexing or information portal services. Database driven applications can be further categorized as either transactional or non-transactional applications. Auction sites such as ebay™ are non-transactional database driven applications in that transactions are external to the ebay system and between third party participants that use the system, i.e., ebay as a web site and on-line commerce application does not process payment information or require payment information to participate in the system. Ebay type non-transactional systems are a source of dynamic pricing information.

Transactional database driven applications, among others, such as those disclosed, in U.S. Pat. No. 5,845,265 to Woolston, provide that a site may process payment information associated with the transaction and may further provide surety to the Internet customer that the site is providing transactional and/or performance assurances about participants in the system. Transactional database driven applications are also a source of dynamic pricing information.

Both non-transactional and transactional systems are database driven applications that contain dynamic pricing information in a database that is encouraged to rapidly change—that is, the content about the item for sale or offers to buy, or bid are stored in a database and not, for example, in a static web page format. These systems are dynamic in that the database content, for example, a bid at an auction, is or is encouraged to rapidly change. Further dynamic information content is provided by the transient nature of the dynamic transactions themselves, i.e., an auction for a particular item eventually terminates and bid and ask pricing for a particular good or service eventually expires.

The dynamic nature of such database driven web sites present an indexing problem for the second category of electronic commerce related site such as the search engine or information portal. Take for example the Yahoo™ or Altavista™ search engines which, in general, use web crawlers to search the web for indexable content, such as static web pages. Owing, at least in part, to the large and expanding amount of information available on the web, it is understood that its takes even the most efficient web crawler based system several days to crawl and index the resources on the web. Thus, the problems associated with indexing a database driven application are two-fold. First, the database must be subject to a properly formed search request to retrieve the content of the database. Second, the content in database driven applications is dynamically changing, i.e., a link to an auction in progress, for example, may have terminated and may present a dead link soon after a search system indexes the information. Furthermore, the content of the database presents an instance of dynamic pricing which changes too rapidly for an informational portal to index by conventional methods.

Some attempts have been made to ameliorate the problem of indexing dynamic pricing information, such as allowing individual participants to index information at the informational portal site to point to dynamic content at a database driven application. Another attempt to ameliorate the indexing problem is through private arrangement between the operators of a database driven application and the informational portal site to index dynamic content through application program interfaces. This piecemeal approach is not automated outside of private relationships, if they exist, and still presents the problem of dead links and the like after an auction is complete or a bid dynamically changes or expires. Furthermore, the piecemeal solution does not provide a systemic way to solve the fundamental problems that arise in indexing and searching for instances of dynamic data.

Another class of web sites, the so-called comparison shopping sites or bots, attempt to address the dynamic content indexing issue by imposing another layer that purportedly bridges multiple dynamic shopping sites. These sites require a search request be entered at the central site and the search request is parsed and distributed to multiple sites in a predetermined search format. These sites, thus, purport to make the searching process more efficient by automatically searching a plurality of sites. This type of comparison site, however, does not address the fundamental problem of indexing dynamic content to populate search services for indexable searching by participants. In contrast, they merely impose another layer of complexity on top of multiple dynamic pricing systems.

Another class of services that attempts to address the problem of dynamic pricing information is found in the financial art such as U.S. Pat. No. 5,136,501, to Silverman and assigned to Reuters Limited and its family of related patents. This technology does not address the problem of indexing non-financial instances of dynamic pricing and it does not present a consistent navigational or taxonomy scheme to navigate and find pricing information in a heterogeneous computing environment and found on the Internet, i.e., the Reuters system uses private relationships between the parties to exchange information about dynamic pricing.

The systems and techniques described here are capable of addressing these and many other problems presented by dynamic content by placing a dynamic navigational taxonomy between dynamic content sources and conventional search engines and, thus, making available a fixed or stable point of reference for indexing by conventional search engines while organizing dynamic pricing information into a navigation taxonomy. The present systems and techniques may also employ a taxonomic concentration feature, e.g., the ability to concentrate dynamic pricing information from multiple sources into an organized taxonomy of subjects to provide a micro-narrow cast of information for a particular good or class of goods and services that may be of interest to a participant.

The present systems and techniques may also provide a way to establish a “functional brand”—e.g., a function that designates the source of origin of a particular class or type of goods and services associated with the function, that may co-exist with and enhance famous brands or rapidly establish associated niche brands through a consistent functional branding scheme.

The present systems and techniques may also provide a new way to employ conventional telecommunication switch and routing equipment, e.g., conventional routers, to massively parallel process dynamic content into a useful taxonomy of content-sensitive streams of information.

The present systems and techniques may also provide a novel utility for monitoring a particular good or delineated class of goods or services, while the monitored content dynamically changes, and thereby reduce the hit load on the source of dynamic pricing by engrafting a point-to-multipoint communication structure to efficiently monitor and distribute information about dynamic content to multiple users.

The present systems and techniques may also provide a novel revenue stream by providing a prioritized way to stream continued bid/ask information.

The present systems and techniques may also provide a new target channel based on the subject matter of interest for the distribution of electronic coupons and advertisements.

The present systems and techniques may also provide a novel stream of information created by data mining techniques hereafter referred as “broadcast data mining”.

The present systems and techniques may also provide novel loyalty programs and contests to keep a participant interested in continuing to participate in the system.

The present systems and techniques may also provide a novel way to index items for sale that utilize the Universal Product Code (UPC) inventory and tracking scheme into the new dynamic taxonomic navigation and provides a further use as a source of information to update conventional search engine databases about the availability and pricing of inventory.

The present systems and techniques may also provide a new way to rapidly compare pricing or bid/ask information from multiple sources.

• Provisional Patent
• Utility Patent

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