This Amazon patent lists Jeff Bezos as an inventor and is directed towards computer services for identifying and exposing associations between user communities and items in a catalog. Mr. Bezos was awarded U.S. Patent 7571121 entitled “Computer services for identifying and exposing associations between user communities and items in a catalog” on August 4, 2009. The utility patent has been cited 30 times by other U.S. patents in the field of it methods for management and in other fields.

A computer-implemented service associated with an electronic catalog analyzes purchase histories of users, and/or other types of activity data reflective of user affinities for specific items, to identify items that are significantly more popular in specific user communities than in a general user population. The communities may, for example, include email-based communities (e.g., all users with email addresses associated with a particular company), shipping address based communities (e.g., all users with shipping addresses in Seattle), and/or communities based on other types of user attributes. In one embodiment, a user of the service can select a particular community, such as by selecting the name of a corresponding organization or geographic region, to view a list of items having relatively high popularity levels therein. The results of the analysis may additionally or alternatively be used to affirmatively notify users of associations between particular items and communities, and/or to recommend items to users. Link: U.S. Patent 7571121

Amazon filed this utility patent on February 14, 2005 giving it a processing time of 1632 days (compared to an average processing time of 2086 in the field). They have a total number of 6869 patents. The first named inventor is Jeffrey P. Bezos of Seattle, WA. The patent was allowed by primary examiner James Zurita and examiner .

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