Example 21. Transmission Of Stock Quote Data
The following hypothetical claims and background are modeled after the technology in Google Inc. v. Simpleair, Inc., Covered Business Method Case No. CBM 2014‐00170 (Jan. 22, 2015), but are revised to emphasize certain teaching points. The patent at issue was U.S. Patent No. 7,035,914 entitled “System and Method for Transmission of Data.” In this Workshop example, claim 1 is an original claim and is later amended. Note that this Workshop example mirrors “Example 21” in the “July 2015 Update Appendix 1: Examples” (July 2015 Update Appendix 1: Examples).
I. Background (Partial Disclosure):
The invention is directed to a stock quote alert subscription service where subscribers receive customizable stock quotes on their local computers from a remote data source. At the time of the invention, stock quote subscription services over the Internet were known in the art. However, existing services experienced challenges when attempting to notify a subscriber whose computer was offline (not connected to the Internet) at the time of the alert, since many stock quotes are time sensitive. Further, many previous subscription services simply transmitted all available stock quote information to the user at a given time, which required the subscriber to sort through large amounts of data to identify relevant stock quotes, and often sent information at an inconvenient time (e.g., after the stock exchanges are closed). The stock quote alert subscription service of the present invention addresses these problems.
During enrollment to the subscription service, the subscriber provides preference information in the form of stocks of interest, stock price threshold (e.g., when the price reaches $100 per share), a destination address of a wireless device (e.g., a number for a cellular phone, pager or PDA), preferred format of the alert, and a transmission schedule indicating the time/date that alerts should be sent. The subscription service uses a transmission server to receive data from a data source and send selected data to subscribers. The transmission server includes a memory, a transmitter, and a microprocessor. The subscription service provides a stock viewer application to subscribers for installation on their individual computers. After a subscriber enrolls, the service receives stock quote information sent from a data source to the transmission server. The server filters the stock quote information based upon the subscriber preference information that is stored in memory on the server. That is, the server compares the received stock quote information to the stored stocks of interest and stock price threshold preferences to determine which stock quotes to drop and which to further process. Next, a stock quote alert is built containing the filtered stocks’ name and price information and a universal resource locator (URL) to a web page at the data source which contains further information on the stock quote. The alert is then formatted into data blocks based upon the alert format preference information. Subsequently, the formatted data blocks are transmitted to the subscriber’s wireless device in accordance with the transmission schedule. After receiving the alert, the subscriber can connect the wireless device to the subscriber’s computer. The alert causes the subscriber’s computer to auto‐launch the stock viewer application provided by the service to display the alert. When connected to the Internet, the subscriber may then click on the URL in the alert to use the stock viewer application to access more detailed information about the stock quote from the data source.
» II. CLAIM 1 (noted claim 1 is identical to claim 1 in “Example 21”)
