×

Web-based customer prospects harvester system

  • US 7,096,220 B1
  • Filed: 05/21/2001
  • Issued: 08/22/2006
  • Est. Priority Date: 05/24/2000
  • Status: Expired due to Term
First Claim
Patent Images

1. A prospects harvesting system, maintained by an application service provider, for providing contact data representing information about prospective business customers of a product or service provided by a product/service provider, comprising:

  • a web crawler process operable to locate text documents from unstructured participant-based Internet discussion sites, the sites selected from the group of;

    newsgroups, discussion forums, and mailing lists;

    an archive database for storing text documents retrieved by the crawler;

    a harvester process for searching the archive database for primary personal contact data for at least one prospective customer of the product/service provider;

    wherein the harvester process operates in response to a query from the product/service and locates at least one document in which a participant of the discussion site is discussing a specified product or service, thereby locating a prospective customer having associated primary contact data;

    wherein the harvester process further provides relevance data associated with each search;

    wherein the harvester process further provides a link to the document;

    a reverse lookup process for receiving the primary contact data from the harvester process and for performing a reverse lookup from the primary contact data;

    wherein the reverse lookup is performed by using the primary contact data to obtain ancillary contact data about the same prospective customer;

    wherein the reverse lookup is a cascading multi-site process that accesses Internet data sources other than the discussion sites containing the primary contact data;

    wherein the primary contact data and the ancillary contact data comprise at least two items of data from the following group;

    name, email address, telephone number, website address, geographical address, place of employment;

    a value-add process that accesses business profile data about the business of one or more of the prospective customers, from a data source other than the source of the contact data, and ranks each prospective customer, using a ranking algorithm based on the profile data and the relevance data from the harvester process;

    a validation process for validating all or part of the contact data;

    a staging database for storing the primary and ancillary contact data;

    a mailer process for scripting correspondence to prospective customers; and

    a web server for providing access to the staging database and the mailer process via a web browser operated by the product/service provider.

View all claims
  • 18 Assignments
Timeline View
Assignment View
    ×
    ×