Telephonic communications – Telephone line or system combined with diverse electrical... – Polling
Reexamination Certificate
2000-07-24
2003-10-07
Woo, Stella (Department: 2643)
Telephonic communications
Telephone line or system combined with diverse electrical...
Polling
C379S092040, C379S093190
Reexamination Certificate
active
06631184
ABSTRACT:
FIELD OF THE INVENTION
The present invention relates to a system for creating and retrieving feedback and rating information for products, services, and product or service providers using telecommunications systems, and more particularly, to a mobile cellular and/or wireline communications system for providing and retrieving community-generated feedback and rating information based on user-defined communities. The system is operable in conjunction with a user location determiner and a user data input/output device.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
A “community” as used herein is defined as any group of people who are associated by some common factor, or factors, who are users of communication products and services, and who may derive added value from an evaluation service through the use of these telephones in relation to their activities while they are travelling. A “mobile community” as used herein is defined as a group of community members who are also users of cellular telephones. Since these cellular telephone users are also consumers, they are faced with the choice of which product or service to purchase and from which provider.
“Mobile Commerce”, that is, trade based on usage of cellular handsets for the purchase or sale of products and services, is becoming an increasingly important element in commercial transactions. Although a cellular telephone is most often physically with its owner, its potential to provide its user with recommendations and rating information for a service, a product or a product or service provider has not been exploited. In particular, there does not appear to be any existing method or system which generates feedback or rating information while getting the input from community members.
Although, in workstation-based computer communications there are Internet web sites that provide and are able to receive feedback for a specific issue, such as restaurants, conventional systems do not appear to embrace a method or device that will gather and provide ratings and feedback to and from a cellular device to cellular community members. Internet web types of feedback are neither community-based nor cellular-based and also do not have a database for a wide variety of products, services, or product or service providers.
Existing Internet-based feedback systems may provide feedback or ratings, but these are not always available for a user. The feedback can be entered only after a user has the opportunity to physically go to where a PC is located, a PC, that is, that a user is authorized to use. Thus, feedback will not always be entered and many impressions related to a particular experience involving transactions for products and services and their providers can be forgotten until a user gets to his or her PC.
Those who rely on laptops can more readily retrieve and provide feedback, but since this feedback is also generated over the Internet and is not user-community specific or organized, except in very broad user categories in so-called “virtual communities”, a laptop user may not be provided with relevant information for his or her particular needs or from his or her particular community group. A “user-community”, as defined herein, is one specifically composed of those who are engaged in some common, activity, such as mobile communication, and share at least one common attribute, affiliation, or association with others in the group, and who have but are not necessarily related via an Internet connection. A mobile telephone user, for example, can be characterized as present in a particular location at a particular time, whereas one engaged in a virtual community need not be location or time dependent.
Furthermore, existing feedback systems have all users in the same group, thus when someone needs a recommendation or rating for a service or product, a user might receive incorrect or unreliable information as a user might get it from a group of people who have completely different interests or affiliations. Therefore, a recommendation based on their feedback may not be relevant. For example, if one is looking for a good restaurant for a business meeting, one would not like to go to a restaurant for tourists even if it received the highest rating in town, because most of the evaluators were tourists.
A businessman would prefer to get a recommendation for a restaurant for a business meeting from his business colleagues who probably belong to one of his communities.
Furthermore, as existing solutions do not define communities as defined above, the amount of information retrieved for qualitative feedback from virtual communities may be so great as to be unusable. The extent of the information provided makes it almost impossible to navigate within this database, since such information will not have been generated by like-users in specific locations and will have filtering and sorting problems in order to find recommendations which a user can trust.
Also, existing solutions do not integrate newly-available technologies, such as a wireless electronic pen and an electronic writing pad, to enable providing of feedback using freehand drawing and writing.
New, emerging, cellular technologies, such as General Packet Radio Service (GPRS), Enhanced Data GSM Environment (EDGE), Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS), and the like, now enable a cellular telephone to communicate qualitative feedback, including voice, video, image, text, and the like, however, this feedback has thus far not been of the type which exploits the feedback and rating information potential of users in user-communities.
Therefore, it would be desirable to provide a system for generating mobile community feedback and ratings based on user-defined communities of interest using a wireless pen and an electronic writing pad in cooperation with mobile telephone users communicating over their cellular telephones. Feedback may also be generated or retrieved by users of traditional wireline communication products and services, such as a wireline telephone, a PC,.or a PDA.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
Accordingly, it is a principal object of the present invention to overcome the disadvantages of the prior art and to provide a user-friendly network system for providing and retrieving feedback and rating information in realtime in regard to products, services, or the providers of products or services, based on one or more user-defined communities of interest, the network system comprising a data input device operable to facilitate entry of data by a user, a user location determiner operable to determine the location of the user, a first interface operable to provide feedback categories and rating information associated with the data entered by a user, a second interface operable to retrieve feedback and rating information and present them to a user, a feedback and rating information server in communication with the data input device operable to process this data, a communities server in communication with the data input device and operable to provide details about communities with which the user defines a relationship, and a location server in communication with the user location determiner and operable to provide details of providers of products and services in relation to the user location.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a method for providing and retrieving feedback and rating information in regard to products and services, and providers of products and services comprising the steps of entering feedback data corresponding to at least one of a product, service, and providers thereof, into a telecommunications device, transmitting this feedback data to a database via a network, locating a physical location of a user entering this data, providing the user's physical location to a database, storing information relative to different user's attributes in a server, and processing the data with the previously stored information such that quantitative and qualitative feedback data for at least one of similar products, services and provide thereof are organized in accordance wi
Comverse Ltd.
Woo Stella
LandOfFree
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