Patent application number | Description | Published |
20080208713 | Virtual catalog - Records, including data for a virtual catalog, may be received from a number of sources. Each of the received records may be validated and a determination may be made as to whether one or more previously-received records matches the received record. When two or more records are determined to be matching records, a composite object may be created and information from the two or more records may be included in the composite object. If the matching records include conflicting information, then previously-defined rules may be applied to determine which items of the conflicting information have precedence over other items of the conflicting information. A virtual catalog may be created from the received records and the created composite object based on customized attributes. | 08-28-2008 |
20090254482 | TIME-BASED LICENSES - A method and a system are provided for issuing a number of different types of time-based licenses associated with software products. The system may include an activation server, which may maintain licensing information in a licensing database, and a licensing platform, which may request issuance and renewal of time-based licenses. Each of the time-based licenses may be associated with respective product keys and may have a number of configurable parameters, which may make the time-based licenses suitable for a number of different licensing business models. The licensing business models may include, but not be limited to, a non-renewable evaluation license, a renewable trial license, a one-time promotion license, and a subscription license. In some embodiments, a configurable parameter may indicate an amount of time for a grace period after a time-based license would have normally expired. | 10-08-2009 |
20100293103 | INTERACTION MODEL TO MIGRATE STATES AND DATA - A party associated with a digital license is identified from a digital license bound to a user's user ID. This digital license identifies a set of rights for a software product. A determination is made as to when an additional sale associated with the software license is made, and an indication that the party is recognized in association with this sale is generated. Additionally, a license management service can determine, independent of whether the user is currently logged in to an online service with the user ID, when the digital license is to be renewed. The digital license is automatically renewed and automatically billed for (if authorized by the user), resulting in a new expiration date for the digital license. The digital license with the new expiration date is stored and subsequently sent to a device via which the user logs in to the online service with the user ID. | 11-18-2010 |
20100293536 | ENHANCED PRODUCT FUNCTIONALITY BASED ON USER IDENTIFICATION - A product key for a software product is obtained and an activation service is accessed by a device to activate the software product with the product key. A digital license associated with the software product is received from the activation service, and the digital license is bound to a set of user-identifying credentials of a user of the device. This application of the digital license can take various forms, such as enabling use of a software product altogether or enabling/disabling of a certain set of features. The digital license and an indication of an association of the digital license to the user ID is saved to a remote license management service, may be cached locally, and may expire and become unusable in the system. The license management service receives and saves this digital license, and can remove expired time-limited licenses. | 11-18-2010 |
20100293622 | AVAILABILITY OF PERMISSION MODELS IN ROAMING ENVIRONMENTS - A request for a digital license associated with a software product is received from a device. The request includes a user ID of a user of the device, with the digital license having been generated in response to a request to activate the software product with a product key. A check is made as to whether a digital license bound to the user ID is available, and also whether the digital license can be returned to the device in accordance with the terms of the digital license. The digital license is returned if the digital license can be returned to the device in accordance with the terms (regardless of whether the device is a same device from which the product key was activated), and otherwise is not returned. The digital license can be removed from the device in accordance with the terms of the digital license. | 11-18-2010 |
20110040776 | Semantic Trading Floor - Review and filtering of search results is facilitated by providing additional types of results beyond links to existing documents can be provided in addition to or in place of links to existing documents. These additional results can facilitate modifying a search request to filter out unwanted documents. The additional results, when in the form of content display objects and/or application display objects, can also provide the user with varying levels of information detail. In some preferred embodiments, an ontology based knowledge base can be leveraged in order to facilitate providing and filtering the results. | 02-17-2011 |
20110302149 | IDENTIFYING DOMINANT CONCEPTS ACROSS MULTIPLE SOURCES - Systems, methods, and computer-storage media for identifying dominant concepts are provided. The system includes a search engine connected to various sources, an entity extraction component, a metabase, and a ranking component. The search engine receives a contextual query and provides results in response to the contextual query. The entity extraction component parses the results and identifies entities included in the results. The metabase provides a distance between the entities included in the results and the query terms included in the contextual query. The ranking component ranks the entities based on the provided distance and selects dominant concepts within the results based on the ranks assigned to entities. | 12-08-2011 |
20120072312 | Curated Application Store - A curated application store is a virtual storefront that includes applications provisioned from one or more application databases. For example, a curator may browse through an application database to find notable applications based on his or her expertise in a certain area and then provision the notable applications from the application database for inclusion in an application store curated by the curator. Accordingly, users browsing for applications pertaining to the area of expertise of the curator may shop for the applications from within a virtual application mall which includes a collection of curated application stores such as the application store curated by the curator. In return, the curator of the store may receive a revenue share from the purchases made within his or her application store. | 03-22-2012 |
20120109999 | Application store concierge - An application sequence may be composed in response to a user query. The application sequence may be based upon user data accessed by the application concierge service. Each application within the personalized chain of applications may request and receive data from the application concierge service about the other applications within the chain. | 05-03-2012 |
20120124028 | Unified Application Discovery across Application Stores - Techniques for discovery of applications across a plurality of application stores are described herein. The discovery may be in response to a query and intent process, which may be initiated by a search query. The search query may reveal user intent to discover an application by operation of a search engine. The user intent may be matched with indexed application content. The application content may be obtained by operation of a discovery and indexing process. A crawler may discover and crawl a plurality of application stores. Additionally or alternatively, a feed store may receive direct feeds of application information and links to download locations from a plurality of application stores. Both the discovered data and direct feeds may be sent to an indexer, to create and maintain an index. Search results pages may be returned to provide users with information, links to developer websites and links to download pages from a plurality of application stores. | 05-17-2012 |
20120143898 | Meta-Application Framework - The present disclosure describes a meta-application framework that enables data to be associated with a class of applications called a meta-application. A meta-application entity may store attributes in common across multiple platforms. A platform entity may store attributes in common across multiple devices and/or operating systems. A device entity may be comprised by a particular set of hardware features and an operating system entity may be comprised of a particular set of software feature. Data associated with the meta-application framework may be accessed directly via data manipulation operations or alternatively by application operations via an application programming interface or via the aforementioned data manipulation operations. Applications may then identify application specific behavior at the appropriate level of detail. | 06-07-2012 |
20130110830 | RANKING OF ENTITY PROPERTIES AND RELATIONSHIPS | 05-02-2013 |
20130117204 | INFERRING PROCEDURAL KNOWLEDGE FROM DATA SOURCES - A procedural inference system is described herein that infers procedural knowledge from various data sources to help a user complete one or more tasks for which the data sources provide information. The system understands users' queries, identifies a task at hand, provides recommendations on the steps to take and the agents to use based on a knowledge base of tasks and agents, and provides the fabric to determine which different agents can work together to help the user accomplish a task. Tasks can be started on one device and completed on another seamlessly. Users are able to finish complex, multi-step tasks efficiently, without trial and error or data reentry. Thus, the procedural inference system provides a generalized framework that helps users to complete tasks using already available data and does not ask each data provider to invest in infrastructure to build dedicated task information systems. | 05-09-2013 |
20140379686 | GENERATING AND PRESENTING LATERAL CONCEPTS - Systems, methods, and computer-storage media for generating lateral concepts are provided. The system includes a search engine to receive user queries, a storage to store content and its associated categories, and a lateral concept generator. The lateral concept generator is connected to both the search engine and storage. The lateral concept generator selects lateral concepts from categories associated with the content based on similarity scores for the stored content. | 12-25-2014 |