Patent ID: 7120629

Claim:
A database server system, maintained by an application service provider (ASP), for generating contact data for potential customers of a business enterprise other than the ASP, comprising: a business profile system for providing profile data associated with sales to existing customers of the business enterprise, comprising: a data acquisition process for extracting the business profile data from the enterprise's pre-existing internal data sources; wherein the data sources comprise at least the following data associated with existing customers of the enterprise: customer data, sales data, and account data; a data mart for storing the extracted business profile data; a prospects harvester system for providing contact data representing information about prospective customers of a product or service offered by the business enterprise comprising: a data acquisition process for extracting Internet text documents from unstructured Internet discussion sites selected from the group of: newsgroups, discussion forums, and mailing lists; wherein each discussion site comprises a collection of text documents generated by participants of the discussion site and received by multiple participants of the discussion site; a text archive for storing the extracted text documents; a text indexing server operable to index the text archive in accordance with both keywords contained in the text source and in accordance with contact data associated with the participants; wherein the text indexing server is operable to receive queries from the business enterprise, each query representing a request for information about participants who are discussing a specified product or service; wherein the text indexing server is further operable to access both the text archive and the business profile data mart, to use the query as a basis for extracting data from the text archive and the business profile data mart, and to provide a response that represents data about participants who conform to business profile data; wherein the text indexing server searches the text archive and the business profile database according to parameters representing keywords in the text archive, contact data in the text archive, and profile data in the profiles database; a web server for receiving queries from the enterprise, and for providing the response to the enterprise, via a web browser; wherein the business profile system, the prospects harvester system, the text indexing server, and the web server are operated by the ASP for use by multiple business enterprises.