Patent ID: 7096220
Filing Date: 2006-08-22
Classification: G06F,G06Q,Y10S

Abstract:
1. A prospects harvesting system, maintained by an application service provider, for providing contact data representing information about prospective business customers of a product or service provided by a product/service provider, comprising: a web crawler process operable to locate text documents from unstructured participant-based Internet discussion sites, the sites selected from the group of: newsgroups, discussion forums, and mailing lists; an archive database for storing text documents retrieved by the crawler; a harvester process for searching the archive database for primary personal contact data for at least one prospective customer of the product/service provider; wherein the harvester process operates in response to a query from the product/service and locates at least one document in which a participant of the discussion site is discussing a specified product or service, thereby locating a prospective customer having associated primary contact data; wherein the harvester process further provides relevance data associated with each search; wherein the harvester process further provides a link to the document; a reverse lookup process for receiving the primary contact data from the harvester process and for performing a reverse lookup from the primary contact data; wherein the reverse lookup is performed by using the primary contact data to obtain ancillary contact data about the same prospective customer; wherein the reverse lookup is a cascading multi-site process that accesses Internet data sources other than the discussion sites containing the primary contact data; wherein the primary contact data and the ancillary contact data comprise at least two items of data from the following group: name, email address, telephone number, website address, geographical address, place of employment; a value-add process that accesses business profile data about the business of one or more of the prospective customers, from a data source other than the source of the contact data, and ranks each prospective customer, using a ranking algorithm based on the profile data and the relevance data from the harvester process; a validation process for validating all or part of the contact data; a staging database for storing the primary and ancillary contact data; a mailer process for scripting correspondence to prospective customers; and a web server for providing access to the staging database and the mailer process via a web browser operated by the product/service provider.