Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Amazon Technologies, Inc.

Ritu Varma

Jeroen Vanturennout

Ranjib Singh Badh

Alton Kwok

Yosef Firstenberg

Smita Joshi

Eyal Axelrod

Vipul Bansal

Sumit Dhawan

Gautham Shankar Katta

Derek Joseph Simeone

Aravindhan Thanigachalam

Patrick Luke Mealey

Described herein are systems and techniques for implementing a third-party item tracking and payment system that enables a user to walk out without a manual checkout process. The techniques include receiving user identifying information associated with a payment account and conveying an identifier of the account to a management system of the retailer. Items, as selected by the user, are added to a virtual cart that is checked out automatically when the user exits the store and the third party system communicates the cart contents to the retailer for cost calculation and then instructs payment using the stored payment information without disrupting existing inventory and account management systems.

Third-party retailer delegation for automated-checkout retail environments

One or more techniques and/or systems are disclosed for providing awareness of user availability. A user may activate a device, and a request to manage an availability status can be sent from the device to a communication service. The communication service may resultantly set up monitoring of the user status, and the availability status of the user can be set to available. If an active status update is not received from the user device, the availability status of the user can be changed from available to away. If an active status update for the user continues not to be received (e.g., for a few hours) and/or device connectivity seems lost, the availability status of the user can be changed from away to offline. This can be done in a resource/power efficient manner by not requiring continual execution of an associated application and/or continual network connectivity of the device.

User availability awareness

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Redmond, WA, United States of America

Ritu Varma