Patent Application
20080201197
Business people, and in particular sales people, often must entertain customers or other people with important business relationships. They often have an entertainment budget given to them by their company, but in trying to stay within a budget, they run the risk of using the same events and facilities so frequently as to be counter-productive and a waste of resources. Such people could find it very helpful to compare notes with other people with similar needs and resources, if possible, allowing the business person to discover new events and venues.
What is clearly needed is a system and method that allows a user to find out about new activities done by similar peers—both customer peers and business peers—based on position and standing in a company, company size, available budget, and other such criteria.
A system and method for peer person and/or situation-based recommendations are described here. Some embodiments of the present invention are summarized in this section.
In one embodiment, the method, which may be implemented on a system, comprises receiving a request for a set of entertainment events, the requesting comprising at least one of an identity of an inviter and an identify of an invitee; selecting a first set of entertainment events from a database by comparing information in the request to one or more units of data in the database, comprising peers of the inviter, peers of the invitee; and, providing to be viewed the first set of entertainment events selected from the database. In an alternative embodiment, the selecting the set of entertainment events from the database, further comprises comparing information in the request to one or more units of data in the database, comprising peer companies of the invitee, peer companies of the inviter.
The present disclosure includes methods and apparatuses which perform these methods, including processing systems which perform these methods, and computer readable media which when executed on processing systems cause the systems to perform these methods.
Other features of the present invention will be apparent from the accompanying drawings and from the detailed description which follows.
In the following detailed description of embodiments of the invention, reference is made to the accompanying drawings in which like references indicate similar elements, and in which is shown by way of illustration specific embodiments in which the invention may be practiced. These embodiments are described in sufficient detail to enable those skilled in the art to practice the invention, and it is to be understood that other embodiments may be utilized and that logical, mechanical, electrical, functional, and other changes may be made without departing from the scope of the present invention. The following detailed description is, therefore, not to be taken in a limiting sense, and the scope of the present invention is defined only by the appended claims.
It is clear that many modifications and variations of this embodiment may be made by one skilled in the art without departing from the spirit of the novel art of this disclosure.
The processes described above can be stored in a memory of a computer system as a set of instructions to be executed. In addition, the instructions to perform the processes described above could alternatively be stored on other forms of machine-readable media, including magnetic and optical disks. For example, the processes described could be stored on machine-readable media, such as magnetic disks or optical disks, which are accessible via a disk drive (or computer-readable medium drive). Further, the instructions can be downloaded into a computing device over a data network in a form of compiled and linked version.
Alternatively, the logic to perform the processes as discussed above could be implemented in additional computer and/or machine readable media, such as discrete hardware components as large-scale integrated circuits (LSI's), application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC's), firmware such as electrically erasable programmable read-only memory (EEPROM's); and electrical, optical, acoustical and other forms of propagated signals (e.g., carrier waves, infrared signals, digital signals, etc.).
