This Amazon patent lists Jeff Bezos as an inventor and is directed towards computer services for assisting users in locating and evaluating items in an electronic catalog based on actions performed by members of specific user communities. Mr. Bezos was awarded U.S. Patent 6963850 entitled “Computer services for assisting users in locating and evaluating items in an electronic catalog based on actions performed by members of specific user communities” on November 8, 2005. The utility patent has been cited 264 times by other U.S. patents in the field of it methods for management and in other fields.

A Web based system provides informational services for assisting customers in selecting products or other types of items from an electronic catalog of a merchant. Users of the system can create and join user communities, such as communities based on user hobbies, localities, professions, and organizations. The system also supports implicit membership communities that are based on email addresses (e.g., all users having a “nasa.com” email address), shipping/billing addresses, and other known user information. Using purchase history data collected for online users, the system automatically identifies and generates lists of the most popular items (and/or items that are becoming popular) within particular communities, and makes such information available to users for viewing. For example, in the context of an online book store users of the nasa.com community may automatically be presented a Web page which lists the bestselling book titles among nasa.com users, or may be sent email notifications of purchase events or hotselling books within the community. Another feature involves automatically notifying users interested in particular products of other users (preferably other members of the same community) that have purchased the same or similar products. For example, in one embodiment, when a user accesses a book detail page, the detail page is customized to include the names and email addresses of other members of the user’s community that recently purchased the same book. Link: U.S. Patent 6963850

Amazon filed this utility patent on August 19, 1999 giving it a processing time of 2273 days (compared to an average processing time of 1974 in the field). They have a total number of 158 patents. The first named inventor is Jeffrey P. Bezos of Seattle, WA. The patent was allowed by primary examiner Wynn W. Cogg and assistant examiner Jaime E. Zurita.

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