Posts Tagged: "Yahoo patents"

We were very intrigued to see a large number of patent applications related to goal achievement technologies, and we closely examined three of these which we felt were worth sharing. Methods for creating an impetus to achieve a goal, whether for money or for social benefit, would be protected by U.S. Patent Application No. 20140272849, entitled System and Method Providing Positive Social and Economic Motivators for Goal Achievement. The filing discloses a method of defining a list of goals through a computing device, each goal comprised of a progression plan with a set of milestones, and assigning goals to a group of users. For progressing towards goals and hitting milestones, users may be rewarded with a monetary award from an advertiser, or may win a social bet with terms set among friends.

We start today’s check into Yahoo!’s innovations with an in-depth look at one patent application describing an online marketplace for advertising services which can be bought for business purposes. This marketplace enables advertising services to bid for rates and can analyze consumer interactions with a business website to suggest effecting online marketing tools. Other patent applications describe various other software tools for business purposes, including one system for providing advertisements which are optimized for mobile device screens. Yahoo!’s recently patented technologies cover a wide variety of novel Internet technologies. One patent we discuss establishes a new method of ranking search engine results based on how interesting some content may be for a user. A sidebar for community updates within online networks comprising many members, and a method for recommending e-mails for others to read, are also discussed below.

What we found were plenty of interesting inventions regarding consumer Internet technologies that will interest plenty of our readers, so we’ve gathered some of the best patent applications and issued patents assigned to Yahoo! by the USPTO. We start our tour today with a look at a novel system of providing map information to a mobile device user. Using spatial metadata collected from a plurality of smart and “dumb” devices, users can access this system to pull contextual map information about individual buildings. We also discuss a couple of patent applications directed towards systems of collecting contact information for a user’s profile as well as a couple of systems for mood analysis. Communication technologies are protected in a number of Yahoo! patents that we decided to look at today. These include a messaging service that incorporates online gaming activity as well as a system of better prioritizing and organizing received digital messages. We were also impressed by a couple of issued patents that protect better image recognition and news authority ranking systems.

We’re going in-depth to explore a patent application that would notify mobile device users of nearby events. These events would be collected from social media applications and filtered based on a user’s interest and proximity to the user, helping that person find interesting events that they were unaware of. Also, a couple of patent applications describe improvements to social networks available through Yahoo!, both on an individual and a group basis. The patent holdings of Yahoo! encompass a wide array of web services, especially those that are related to the website’s search engine. One recently issued patent protects a system of removing spam websites from search engine results, while another discusses a method of improving the accuracy of color-based searches. Collaboration on eBook documents and better notification systems for fantasy sports players are also on focus in a few other issued patents we’re exploring here.