Appeal No. 96-0125 Application 07/878,100 related to any of these products. In Humble, product identification and message information occur at the point where the customer is checking out from the store. The examiner relies on Vela for teaching the invention of claim 1 except for the failure to teach the selection of competing or complementary products. The examiner relies on Humble for providing the motivation to promote other products and asserts that the modification of Vela to incorporate Humble’s product promotion ideas would have been obvious to the artisan to increase flexibility and effectiveness [answer, pages 4-5]. The examiner also finds the rule-based selection process of claim 1 to be inherent in any computer run by a sequence of instructions. Appellants argue that Vela does not suggest selecting the promoted product based upon the products actually selected by the customer. With respect to Humble, appellants argue that it is simply a checkout add-on system which provides information too late to affect the customer’s purchases. Appellants insist that “[a]bsent the teachings of the Appellants’ disclosure, there is no suggestion or teaching provided in the references to combine the references. Even if they were combined, neither teaches a rule-based system to present messages at the point of selection 7Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 NextLast modified: November 3, 2007