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Are you a Connector? Patenting Influence at the USPTO

By Andis Kaulins

1201tuesday.com has a posting at Claiming Under the Influence (of Bilski) referring to a "System and method of identifying individuals of influence" which was issued as U.S. Patent No. 7653568 and which is abstracted as follows:

"This invention relates to a system and method for identifying target individuals who possess certain characteristics statistically indicative of their ability to influence others in their decision making regarding consumer goods, consumer products, political issues or candidates, financial matters, investments, real estate, insurance, travel and leisure, by non-limiting example. The subject invention encompasses not only the identification of a key group of individuals in a population more likely to affect the decision making of others in the population ("Influentials" as discussed below), but also includes the identification of additional ("non-Influential") informational data common to Influential individuals, as well as the application of this additional informational data to other populations. The advantage of employing this additional informational data to ascertain Influentials is that this data can be publicly available data (such as, for example, from the U.S. Census Bureau), thus facilitating the identification of Influentials without the necessity of undertaking any surveys to identify Influentials per se instead relying on pre-existing public demographic information."

Full post as published by LawPundit on March 07, 2010 (boomark / email).