Data processing: financial – business practice – management – or co – Automated electrical financial or business practice or... – Finance
Reexamination Certificate
2000-06-05
2004-03-09
Kazimi, Hani M. (Department: 3624)
Data processing: financial, business practice, management, or co
Automated electrical financial or business practice or...
Finance
C705S035000, C705S026640, C705S005000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06704713
ABSTRACT:
BACKGROUND
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a system that uses communication lines connecting participants from various locations, such as personal computers connected via the internet, to a central computer which conducts a real-time auction of tickets to sporting and entertainment events.
2. Background of the Invention
The established method of selling tickets to sporting and entertainment events involves pre-setting inflexible prices then releasing the tickets for sale at a box office or by phone. This method has a number of shortcomings. Typically, each sale involves employees taking time-consuming individual orders and trying to describe the prices and seat locations to customers. Another shortcoming with this method is that especially for premium events, it can be highly inconvenient and sometimes impossible for the purchaser to access the sale due to demand. Moreover, for practical reasons, prices are assigned to tickets in large blocks, while, in reality, purchasers often consider tickets within a block to have a wide ranging continuum of values; and these market values can be very hard to estimate before the tickets are sold. Largely because of these shortcomings, many premium tickets are sold for substantially less than their market value. Generally, these shortcomings exist even with new automated methods involving phone or internet sales since the number of tickets is limited and the selling system is still fundamentally the same; with “first-come-first-served” orders taken for pre-priced tickets.
Although it is widely known that the market values some tickets at a substantial premium over face value, there has been no system available for accurately establishing and selling these tickets at their market value. Logistically, auctioning the tickets has not been feasible due to the large quantity of unique seats and even larger quantity of buyers wishing to purchase them.
A few auction systems have been developed that operate using the internet as the communications mode. These systems have been used to auction items such as computer equipment, artwork, and special items for charity. However, these systems are not suitable for use in connection with a real-time mass auction of event tickets. With the currently operating systems, generally the items being sold are of a small quantity or individually unique. In most of the currently operating systems, the items for sale are individually listed, and individually bid upon using e-mail over a period of days or weeks. While, the currently operating systems are useful for such limited purposes, they have several shortcomings.
One such shortcoming arises from the use of e-mail to place bids and to update participants of their bid status. While in theory e-mail is instantaneous, there are occasional routing delays of which the sender is often not immediately aware. In an auction of a slow, deliberate nature such as those presently operating, this is not a great concern. However, in a fast pace auction with numerous participants some bids could be lost as delayed e-mail, unbeknownst to the participant.
An additional problem with the e-mail approach is that time may elapse before the bid information is read and applied. Therefore, the participant may not get instantaneous feedback on other bids which may be taking place simultaneously. The participant often must wait for some period of time to learn if the bid is successful. If the participant has a strategy for bidding on a very desirable item, the participant must return to the auction numerous times to follow its progression.
Most currently operating systems provide some general bid status data, usually a minimal amount of information such as “current” high bid. This “current” high bid is updated by periodically reviewing the bids received, and entering the highest bid to date. Therefore, these “current” bids are not current up to the bids received, and entering the highest bid to date Therefore, these “current” bids are not current up to the second. Moreover, if there are many of a particular item, especially such as event tickets having a continuum of values, participants need to know considerably more than the high bid information in order to make an informed bidding decision.
Currently operating systems do not provide bid status information updates independent of solicitation of the information from participants. Once the internet auction site is accessed, the information conveyed may become outdated as it is being viewed. Again this would be quite unfavorable for fast-paced auctions. Therefore, even with auction sites which were actually being updated real-time, a participant would need to continually re-access the site in order to keep information truly updated.
One internet auction system, “onsale” at http://www.onsale.com/ attempts to overcome the e-mail auction problems by automatically updating its internet site. However, like the other internet auction sites, onsale conducts relatively slow, deliberate sales, and still relies on e-mail to transmit some of the bid information. In addition, although the onsale auction site is automatically updated, it does not automatically present this information to participants. As explained above, participants need to continually re-access the site in order to keep information truly updated.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,689,928 details an auction system for used cars that is capable of interactive, essentially real-time auctioning. Instead of internet based, this used car auctioning system is constructed with a 4-level hierarchy of computers networked to a plurality of auto dealers terminals. At each level, the bids received by the computer are processed and only select bids are transmitted to the next level. The bids are raised in increments of 3000 yen and the participants may bid via a single signal indicating a “yes” in response to the bid being raised. This system is based on the traditional auction format, and is used to sell one item or lot at a time. When a car has been auctioned, a disc is loaded by each dealer into his terminal which shows the photograph of the next car to be auctioned. Bidding is limited to a predetermined group of auto dealers. Because the structure of this system is hierarchical, i.e. not on the internet, it is not practical for use in wide-spread auctions available to consumers. Because of the methodical nature of this system, selling a progression of single items with incremented bids, it is geared for low volume sales of items with relatively high values.
Recently tickets have been made available for purchase on the internet, for example at http.www.ticketmaster.com/ but not in an auction format, as is needed to sell certain tickets at their market prices. At this internet site, sales are of the traditional pre-set pricing, “first-come-first-served” format.
Considering the selling of a large number of tickets to an event, there are unique circumstances which present challenges not manifested in selling other items. For example, in a particular auction, all the tickets may be for the same venue, date, time, and performance. However, each of these tickets also possesses the very unique characteristic of seat location. This characteristic can dramatically effect the ticket value. Ticket values typically vary widely, yet in a continuum from closest to farthest from the performance area. Thus, it is not practical to mass the tickets into simple generic blocks to be auctioned. Nor is it practical to list and auction each ticket individually, since this could present auction participants with a prohibitively large number of individual auctions, and no practical way to obtain contiguous seats. Accordingly, there exists a need for a system which can, within a single, clear format, auction a large number of items with a continuum of values, each at its market price. Furthermore, this system needs to apply logic in sorting bids based not only on price, but on clustering requirements to ensure that within a multiple-ticket bid, the seats are adjoining. This would require a database configuratio
Bashore Alain L.
Fowler, II Russell E.
Ice Miller
ITA Investments, LLC
Kazimi Hani M.
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