Data processing: financial – business practice – management – or co – Automated electrical financial or business practice or... – Discount or incentive
Reexamination Certificate
1998-11-16
2001-03-20
Trammell, James P. (Department: 2761)
Data processing: financial, business practice, management, or co
Automated electrical financial or business practice or...
Discount or incentive
C705S001100, C707S793000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06205432
ABSTRACT:
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
The present invention relates generally to the field of advertising systems, and more particularly to the field of Internet advertising.
The worldwide network of computers connected through the Transmission Control Protocol/internet Protocol (TCP/IP) communications standard, commonly known as the Internet, has seen explosive growth during the last several years. This growth has been fueled in part by the introduction and widespread use of so-called “web” browsers, which allow for simple graphical user interface (GUI) access to network servers, which support documents formatted as so-called web pages. The World Wide Web (WWW), or “web”, is a collection of servers on the Internet that utilize a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which is an application protocol that provides users access to files (which can be in different formats such as text, graphics, images, sound, video, etc.) using a Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), which is an information management standard for providing platform-independent and application-independent documents that retain formatting, indexing, and linking information. SGML provides a grammar-like mechanism for users to define the structure of their documents and the tags they will use to denote the structure in individual documents. The page description language known as Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is an application of SGML. HTML provides basic document formatting of text and images and allows the developer to specify hyperlinks, or “links,” to other servers and files. Use of an HTML-compliant client, such as a web browser, involves specification of an address via a Uniform Resource Locator (URL). Upon such specification, the client makes a TCP/IP request to the server identified in the URL and receives a “web page” (namely, a document formatted according to HTML) in return.
Electronic mail (E-mail) is another important part of online activity. Conventional e-mail is the exchange of text messages and computer files over a communications network, such as a local area network or the Internet, usually between computers or terminals. Routing of e-mail on the Internet is typically accomplished through the use of a protocol for sending messages called the simple mail transfer protocol (SMTP). Multipurpose Internet mail extensions (MIME) extend SMTP to permit data, such as video, sound, and binary files, to be transmitted by Internet e-mail without having to be translated by the e-mail client into ASCII format. This is accomplished by the use of MIME types, which describe the contents of a document. A MIME-compliant client application sending a file, such as one of various conventional e-mail programs, assigns a MIME type to the file. The receiving application, which must also be MIME-compliant, refers to a standardized list of documents that are organized into MIME types and subtypes to interpret the content of the file. MIME is part of HTTP, and both web browsers and HTTP servers use MIME to interpret e-mail files they send and receive. Post Office Protocol 3 (POP3) is a recent version of a standard protocol for receiving e-mail. POP3 is a client-server protocol in which e-mail is received and held in a mailbox for a user by a network server. Periodically, the end user checks the mailbox on the network server and downloads any e-mail. An alternative protocol is Interactive Mail Access Protocol (IMAP), according to which a user views e-mail at the server as though it was on the user's computer, and an e-mail message deleted locally is still on the server. Thus, POP3 can be thought of as a “store-and-forward” service, while IMAP can be thought of as a remote file server. Therefore, an e-mail message is typically sent with SMTP, and after a network server receives the e-mail message on the end user recipient's behalf, the e-mail message is typically read by the end user using POP3 or IMAP.
In addition to older basic e-mail systems, including basic ASCII e-mail clients using SMTP and POP3, some enhanced e-mail clients, such as Eudora Pro Email v. 4.0, display HTML portions of messages according to HTML formatting contained in the e-mail message bodies. Also, web-based e-mail systems, such as are currently offered by Hotmail™ and Yahoo™, are accessible through web browsers. In those systems, e-mail messages are formatted into web pages, or portions thereof, for formatted viewing control through web browsers. Thus, plain text e-mail messages received by those web based e-mail systems are converted into web pages for viewing by web browsers.
Shared public message networks include Usenet Newsgroups, Internet Relay Chat, Fidonet, RIME, ILINK, and a host of others. Public message networks also include public message areas in proprietary online systems. Most are normally set up according to separate general interest categories (e.g., “conferences,” “forums,” or “newsgroups”), subjects within those categories (e.g., “subjects,” “topics,” or “threads”), and finally individual messages or postings within each subject, typically arranged chronologically, as well as according to earlier messages to which they respond. Also included in this category of public messaging are instant messaging programs, which allow users to communicate publically with other users in real time. These conferences typically are carried by many online systems regionally, around the country, or even around the world. Newsgroups also have an Internet protocol which governs their transmission called network news transfer protocol (NNTP). As with e-mail clients, public messages are also accessible through web browsers, enhanced public messaging clients capable of displaying HTML formatting, and basic ASCII clients.
The recent growth of information applications on international public packet-switched computer networks, such as the Internet, suggests that public computer networks have the potential to establish a new kind of open marketplace for goods and services. As web pages, discussion forums and e-mail communications are used more nationally and internationally, it is highly desired that manufacturers and merchants be able to non-offensively advertise their goods and services to users during their regular course of Internet activity. With only limited success, such advertising has been done through the use of images as well as text transferred over the Internet. Advertisements transferred over the Internet often, but not always, make use of trademarks. A “trademark” is a word, design, color, sound, smell, etc., or any combination thereof, used by a manufacturer or merchant to identify their goods and/or services and distinguish them from others. In general, advertisements include most types of communications promoting goods and/or services of organizations or individuals, as well as promoting the organizations or individuals themselves. Entities with access to potential viewers of advertisements often charge a fee to other entities interested in advertising themselves and/or their goods and/or services.
On the Internet, as in more traditional venues of advertising, such as billboards, TV commercials, products, etc., most advertisements (ads) include promotional material intended to be used to interest consumers with particular goods or services. Currently, one primary way to advertise on the Internet is through ad banners, which often contain static or animated images, with or without trademarks, and normally advantageously function as hyperlinks to advertisement owner web pages. Unfortunately, banner ads often disappear with scrolling by the user and take up precious screen space. Furthermore, because of typically large graphical content, banner advertisements are often slow in downloading. As a result, users often move down a web page or to another web page and do not wait for advertisements to complete the downloading process if text or other content is displayed before, or simultaneously with, the advertisements, thereby clearly diminishing the impact of the advertisements. If text or other content is displayed only after an advertisement
Chaffins Bruce R.
Gabbard Chuck E.
Howerton, III Everett B.
Creative Internet Concepts, LLC
Rosen Nicholas David
Thomas Kayden Horstemeyer & Risley LLP
Trammell James P.
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