Iprint.com

Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

David Hodson

Michael Rubin

Ryan Bell

Royal Farros

Karteek Patel

Igor Pozdnyakov

Nickoletta T Farros

A system and method for broadcasting data in the form of instant messages over a computer network. The broadcast systempreferably includes a messaging manager, an integration engine, a subscription manager, a scheduler, and a broadcast engine. The messaging managerinterfaces with all other components and provides a multi-threaded, run-time engine that coordinates the integration, triggering, scheduling, and message delivery activities for scalable broadcast applications. The integration engineprovides a system for 'exposing' Web services and 'consuming' external data streams. The subscription managerincludes an event watcher, which monitors the state of the external environment it interacts with, and an event dispatcher, which collects event subscriptions and ensures the instant delivery of events to all subscribers by way of the broadcast engine. The schedulerallows users to customize the systemin order to schedule outgoing messages through the broadcast engine. The broadcast engineenhances the inherent limitations of current IM technology by providing a multi-threaded broadcasting engine capable of sending volumes of messages from one server to literally thousands of IM clients concurrently over different private and public networks in one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many formats.

System and method for broadcasting data over a computer network

Integrated shopping cart functionality is provided on a first website so that products/services from different affiliated websites can be integrated into the shopping cart at the first website and the e-commerce functionality of the first website can be utilized to purchase the selected products/services. A framework for integrating this functionality enables the first website to integrate with affiliated websites so that an increased number of users may access the first website since the proprietor of the first website may offer various products/services from a multitude of different affiliated websites, for example by providing URL links to the affiliated websites that a user may access in order to select items from the affiliated websites. These items can be integrated into the shopping cart at the first website and purchased with a single transaction. Increased user traffic is expected at the first website since a user's shopping interests can be fulfilled at a single website. Additionally, affiliated websites are benefited by this integrated shopping cart functionality since the e-commerce functionality of the integrated shopping cart is performed by a server that is associated with the first website. Therefore, affiliated websites need not include their own e-commerce functionality. Instead, they may take advantage of the e-commerce functionality of the first website and still receive the benefits of the sale of their offered products/services to the user. Maintenance costs and overhead costs with respect to including an e-commerce software engine are therefore reduced and often eliminated as a result.

Integrated electronic shopping cart system and method

A user of an electronic printing system in accordance with the invention may create custom print designs locally and provide those custom print designs to a local or remote printer for printing. Upon a user creating a custom print design, the electronic printing system may store the custom design information until an order is placed by the user. Every order may have associated design files and an order file (for example, multiple items in an order). The design file(s) may describe the initial layout of a print design and may reflect updates to the initial layout based upon the custom design created by a user. An imaging engine resident on the remote server(s) of the electronic printing system may convert the information in the design file(s) into an image file for on-screen representation as well as a &ldquo;ready-to-print&rdquo; output file that may be retrieved electronically by a remote or local printer facility. The order file may contain user information and product data, such as a user's billing and shipping address, payment information and the media type desired. When an order is submitted, both the design file(s) and the order file may staged for conversion. The files may be converted into printer specific files and may be retrieved electronically by a remote or local printing facility and the user's order may be carried out by the printing facility and may be sent to the user when completed.

Electronic printing system and method

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Palo Alto, CA, United States of America

David Hodson