Appeal No. 2004-1484
Application 09/438,396
memory and a processor is used to store point balances and allows
the stored point balances to be incremented responsive to a POS
transaction (col. 1, lines 22-31). Based on the combined
teachings of Fernandez and Walker ‘573, the examiner concludes
that it would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the
art at the time appellant’s invention was made to use a smart
card like that of Walker ‘573 in the system of Fernandez so that
the smart card can interact with the POS system of Fernandez to
increment/decrement card balances.
As for Dorf, the examiner contends that this patent teaches
a card-based loyalty system where points are accumulated for
various qualifying purchases and suggests awarding points for
both product/manufacturer-specific purchases and/or retailer-
specific purchases and also the purchase of a single product type
(col. 9, line 34, et. seq.). Again recognizing that Fernandez
does not teach or suggest managing and influencing customer
purchasing habits based on profit margin categories, the examiner
then makes the following assertions:
[h}owever, these differences are only found in the
nonfunctional descriptive material and are not functionally
involved in the method (or structurally programmed) steps
recited. The steps would be preformed the same regardless
of data content - read balances, associate purchased
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