Services for spontaneous collaboration

摘要

An apparatus for providing spontaneous collaboration between a shopper and consultants concerning a shopping goal derives information about the shopper's physical or logical proximity to a particular product category, combined with the current contents of his or her shopping cart is used to determine one or more shopping goals; as well as information about each potential consultant, including physical proximity, willingness to consult, areas of expertise and recent experience is used to rank each consultant in terms of relevance to one or more shopping goal.

主权项

1. Ai apparatus for characterization of areas of consultant expertise, said
apparatus comprising: A) a processor device executing machine-executable instructions; B) a program storage device operably coupled with the processor device and comprising the machine-executable instructions for: automatically determining shopping goals of a shopper, without said shopper having to explicitly supply the shopping goals as input, by: analyzing contents of the shopper's shopping cart; and performing a location operation to determine the shopper's location in the store; wherein said shopping goals comprise a first list of candidate products that the shopper desires to acquire in a store; listing the contents of the shopper's shopping cart in a second list; for each candidate product in the first list of candidate products, automatically: querying a database comprising a third list of potential shopping collaborators correlated to the candidate product for which the potential shopping collaborators have experience and knowledge; retrieving from the database the third list of the potential shopping collaborators with experience and knowledge of the candidate product; determining which of the potential shopping collaborators are currently online, therefore available; and ranking the available shopping collaborators by assigning a high ranking to those collaborators with attributes of: close physical proximity between the shopper and the collaborators; a positive rating of the shopper's past experience with the collaborators as stored in the database; experience in multiple product sets associated with the candidate product; recent purchase of the candidate product; and frequent purchases of the candidate product; merging the third lists of ranked, available shopping collaborators for each candidate product into a final list to eliminate duplicates of shopping collaborators relevant to more than one candidate product; and transmitting to a user interface associated with the shopper the final list of ranked available shopping collaborators; and C) the user interface for: presenting the final list of ranked available shopping collaborators to the shopper; and receiving a rating of the shopper's interaction with the shopping collaborators.