Patentseed

Google’s patent application for “MULTIPLE PARTY ON-LINE TRANSACTION” describes a method for making a purchase involving multiple individuals.  For example, you and your boss, where you need a product for work and your boss needs to make or approve the actual purchase.  

The summary describes the invention in this way.

“One method includes the actions of receiving a role associated with one or more parties involved with a purchase transaction, receiving a routing rule associated with the purchase transaction, the routing rule defining how the purchase transaction is routed among the one or more parties, and processing the purchase transaction based on the role of each party and the routing rule.”

The patent application’s first Claim reflects this.  Are there no other systems doing this today?  Perhaps a B2B procurement system?

This patent application by Google may be on to something.  As we’re all intricately aware, Google has done more than anyone else to capitalize off PPC (pay per click).  Their patent application, 11/948,171 brings the same concept to telephone calls.  As coined in the patent application, advertisers would be charged based on a “cost-per-call amount.”  Here’s how the “cost-per-call” advertisement works.  Let’s say an advertiser has a phone number for consumers to place an order, and let’s call this a “second telephone number.”  The “first telephone number” is a number created for an advertisement that is associated with the “second telephone number” - i.e., calls to the “first telephone number” are forwarded to the “second telephone number.”  When an ad is displayed, and somebody calls the “first telephone number,” Google is able to track this call and charge the advertiser the “cost-per-call.”  To prevent call fraud, Google also discusses the concept of a “call-through event” which would make sure that the advertiser wasn’t charged for more than say 5 phone calls from the same number.

Google is always getting smarter.  Expect them to know the sentiment of a company, product, and you soon.  “Sentiment is generally measured as being positive, negative, or neutral.”  Knowledge of sentiment is valuable data, especially to a CMO and Wall Street analysts.  But how can a machine determine sentiment?  One good way is Google’s patent application 11/844,222. 

Today, sentiment is calculated based on identifying positive and negative words expressed in a document about a particular entity.  This however doesn’t capture the full story.  For example, while “low power” may be a negative word for electric cars, it would be a positive word for laptops.  And that same “low power” might mean little to nothing if the entity were a restaurant. 

Google’s answer is to produce a “domain-specific sentiment classifier for classifying sentiment expressed by documents in a specified domain.”  By doing so, Google can more intelligently generate a sentiment score.  If Google can get this right, it will be a golden tool for good PR companies and a thorn in the side for bad PR companies.

Rather than following Apple’s philosophy of only allowing one application to be run on the iPhone at any given time, Google is working to make multi-tasking more reliable on a PDA/phone. As Google’s 11/932,613 discusses, although you can expect a desktop user to close applications, the same cannot be expected of a PDA/phone user. And as applications stay open, memory fills up. Next stop - application crash. Google’s invention aims at solving this problem by automatically terminating applications. Their trick is to save the applications state before terminating, and making it appear to the user that the application is still running. Presumably, it would know if the application is performing something in the background, and avoid its termination.

Anyone know if Android does this today?