Patent application number | Description | Published |
20100125904 | COMBINING A MOBILE DEVICE AND COMPUTER TO CREATE A SECURE PERSONALIZED ENVIRONMENT - A mobile device, such as a mobile phone, smart phone, personal music player, handheld game device, and the like, when operatively combined with a PC, creates a secure and personalized computing platform through configuration of the mobile device's CPU (central processing unit) and OS (operating system) to function as an immutable trusted core. The trusted core in the mobile device verifies the integrity of the PC including, for example, that its drivers, applications, and other software are trusted and unmodified, and thus safe to use without presenting a threat to the integrity of the combined computing platform. The mobile device can further optionally store and transport the user's personalization data—including, for example, the user's desktop, applications, data, certificates, settings, and preferences—which can be accessed by the PC when the devices are combined to thus create a personalized computing environment. | 05-20-2010 |
20100162174 | Flat Navigation of Information and Content Presented on User Monitor - A method of presenting information on a display monitor within a computing environment includes accessing a website containing a related collection of electronic pages, crawling the website to obtain raw image data for at least some of each of the pages, porting the raw image data into a template so that each of the crawled pages is converted into a corresponding information panel containing a mapping of the content of its respective corresponding page, and displaying each of the information panels on a respective display monitor so all of the panels are viewable to a user in a single screen shot. Related methods, apparatus, and systems are further provided. | 06-24-2010 |
20100169331 | ONLINE RELEVANCE ENGINE - Information is automatically located which is relevant to source content that a user is viewing on a user interface without requiring the user to perform an additional search or navigate links of the source content. The source content can be, e.g., a web page or a document from a word processing or email application. The relevant information can include images, videos, web pages, maps or other location-based information, people-based information and special services which aggregate different types of information. Related content is located by analyzing textual content, user behavior and connectivity relative to the source. The related content is scored for similarity to the source. Content which is sufficiently similar but not too similar is selected. Similar related content is grouped to select representative results. The selected content is filtering in multiple stages based on attribute priorities to avoid unnecessary processing of content which is filtered out an early stage. | 07-01-2010 |
20100223498 | OPERATING SYSTEM-BASED APPLICATION RECOVERY - Methods, systems, and computer-readable media are disclosed for operating system-based application recovery. A particular method saves an application state of an application executing at a computer. When a failure of the application is detected, the operating system provides an option to initiate recovery of the application by reverting to the saved application state. When the option to initiate recovery is selected by a user of the computer, the operating system recovers the application by reverting to the saved application state. | 09-02-2010 |
20120295639 | DISCOVERING NEARBY PLACES BASED ON AUTOMATIC QUERY - Architecture that enables a user to define areas of interest in advance, and while in motion (e.g., driving, walking, riding, etc.), the architecture automatically notifies the user and/or user device based on notification criteria such as when the user (user device) is near a specific point of interest which matches a category of points of interest (e.g., museum, restaurants, concerts, police radar, etc.), is heading in the direction of the point of interest, anticipates time of arrival to the point of interest, etc. The architecture enables the discovery of points of interest that did not exist when the user defined the location query for the category of points of interest. Moreover, points of interest that change in location and/or time can also be discovered. Implicit location queries can be processed based on a product of interest or service of interest as well. | 11-22-2012 |
20120323347 | PROMOTING EXPLORATION - Exploration outside of a person's normal area may be detected and rewarded. In one example, a game (or other type of application) may be built around such exploration. A device carried by a user (pursuant to appropriate permission obtained from the user) may report the user's location to a presence detector. The presence detector may use this information to build a heat map, indicating the user's areas of common presence. When the location information received from the device indicates that the user has ventured outside of the user's area of common presence, this exploration event may be rewarded with an increase in the user's score. The user's score may be published on social media. | 12-20-2012 |
20130031169 | CONDITIONAL LOCATION-BASED REMINDERS - Architecture that enables conditional location-based notifications. One or multiple factors (filter criteria) can be considered, and triggering of a notification can be based on some or all of the factors. Those factors can be static (e.g., time based) or dynamic (e.g., a previous user location) and extend the ability to filter unnecessary notifications, and thus, increase user satisfaction. The filter criteria can include checking user back balance, and calendar as prerequisites to sending a notification. | 01-31-2013 |
20130263127 | PERSISTENT AND RESILIENT WORKER PROCESSES - In the field of computing, many scenarios involve the execution of an application within a virtual environment (e.g., web applications executing within a web browser). In order to perform background processing, such applications may invoke worker processes within the virtual environment; however, this configuration couples the life cycle of worker processes to the life cycle of the application and/or virtual environment. Presented herein are techniques for executing worker processes outside of the virtual environment and independently of the life cycle of the application, such that background computation may persist after the application and/or virtual environment are terminated and even after a computing environment restart, and for notifying the application upon the worker process achieving an execution event (e.g., detecting device events even while the application is not executing). Such techniques may heighten the resiliency and persistence of worker processes and expand the capabilities of applications executing within virtual environments. | 10-03-2013 |
20140173592 | INVERSION-OF-CONTROL COMPONENT SERVICE MODELS FOR VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS - In the field of computing, many scenarios involve the execution of an application within a virtual environment of a device (e.g., web applications executing within a web browser). Interactions between applications and device components are often enabled through hardware abstractions or component application programming interfaces (API), but such interactions may provide more limited and/or inconsistent access to component capabilities for virtually executing applications than for native applications. Instead, the device may provide hardware interaction as a service to the virtual environment utilizing a callback model, wherein applications within the virtual environment initiate component request specifying a callback, and the device initiates the component requests with the components and invokes associated callbacks upon completion of a component request. This model may enable the applications to interact with the full capability set of the components, and may reduce blocked execution of the application within the virtual application in furtherance of application performance. | 06-19-2014 |
20140181715 | DYNAMIC USER INTERFACES ADAPTED TO INFERRED USER CONTEXTS - A device comprising a set of environment detectors may detect various environmental properties (e.g., location, velocity, and vibration), and may infer from these environmental properties a current context of the user (e.g., the user's attention availability, privacy, and accessible input and output modalities). Based on the current context, the device may adjust the presentation of various user interface elements of an application. For example, the velocity and vibration level detected by the device may enable an inference of the mode of transport of the user (e.g., stationary, walking, jogging, driving a car, or riding on a bus), and each mode of transport may suggest the user's available input modality (e.g., text, touch, speech, or gaze tracking) and/or output modality (e.g., high-detail visual, simplified visual, or audible), and the application may select and present corresponding element presentations for input and output user interface elements, and/or the detail of presented content. | 06-26-2014 |
20140282984 | SERVICE RELATIONSHIP AND COMMUNICATION MANAGEMENT - Communication between a user and various services (e.g., websites) often involves creating a user profile comprising contact information (e.g., a personal email address) that the service uses to contact the user. However, managing communication may be burdensome and ineffective; the user's privacy may be diminished; and revocation of previously issued permission may be unachievable. Presented herein are techniques for providing a communication manager that establishes relationships with services on behalf of users, and that issues tokens to the services representing such relationships. In order to communicate with the user, the service presents the token to the communication manager, which conditions the authorization of the communication on verification of the current permission of user in the relationship represented by the token, optionally including the communication channel of the user requested by the service. This architecture enables more consistent, convenient, privacy-preserving, and revocable user control of communication permissions with the services. | 09-18-2014 |
20140379521 | ACTIVITY-BASED PERSONAL PROFILE INFERENCE - The aggregation of facts from various sources about an individual may produce an individual profile that may inform personalized services. However, a compilation of facts may be supplemented by monitoring activities of the individual and formulating inferences regarding the individual's individual details, and the confidence of such inferences. Accordingly, a device may compare the detected activities with a behavioral rule set indicating correlations between activities and inferred individual details (e.g., frequently spent weekday evenings and morning departures from a residence imply that the residence is the individual's home; frequent bicycling to work, chosen over other available modes of transportation, implies that the individual is a bicycling enthusiast) to add inferred individual details to the individual profile. Continued monitoring may enable updating based on changes to the individual details. Multiple profiles may be synchronized while respecting the individual's privacy, obtaining the individual's consent to share information, and automatically resolving information conflicts. | 12-25-2014 |