Appeal No. 2004-1484
Application 09/438,396
articulated by appellant and the examiner. As a consequence of
our review, we have made the determinations which follow.
In rejecting claims 1 through 18 under 35 U.S.C. § 103(a)
based on the collective teachings of Fernandez, Dorf and Walker
‘573, the examiner has determined that Fernandez teaches a
customer loyalty program that uses smart cards to store
accumulated loyalty points earned for different purchases, and
comprises merchant POS stations (e.g., 103A-103D of Fig. 1)
having read/write units (104A-104D) with processors to read
stored balances from an EEPROM on a smart card, receive POS
purchase data, calculate an appropriate amount of purchase award
points to be credited, add those award points to the previous
balance read from the smart card, and write the updated point
balance to the card (col. 4, lines 2-13). What the examiner
finds lacking in Fernandez is 1) any disclosure or teaching
concerning managing and influencing customer purchasing habits
based on profit margin categories, and 2) an express indication
that the smart card mentioned therein includes both a memory and
a processor. To account for these differences, the examiner
looks to Dorf and Walker ‘573, urging that Walker ‘573 teaches
another card-based loyalty system where a smart card having a
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