Appeal No. 2006-1934
Application No. 09/798,833
35 U.S.C. § 102(e).
Initially, we note that on pages 6 and 7 of the brief, appellants present arguments
directed to the examiner’s rejection of claims 1 through 6 under 35 U.S.C. § 102(e).
Appellants’ arguments do not separately argue any of the claims, accordingly we group
claims 1 through 6 and treat claim 1 as representative of the group.
Appellants state, on page 6 of the brief, that one of the critical elements of the
invention is the comparison of the customer’s Historical Customer Value (HCV) with the
customer’s Intrinsic Customer Value (ICV). Appellants argue that Lazarus does not
teach such a comparison. Appellants admit that Lazarus teaches storing customer
historical data, however, appellants argue that the historical customer data is not an HCV
as defined in appellants’ specification. On page 7 of the brief, Appellants’ argue that
even if this historical customer data were considered to be the claimed HCV there is no
teaching of comparing that value with a predicted value for the customer such as an ICV.
Appellants assert that Lazarus teaches the comparison of predicted values for a customer
with the predicted customer values for all customers, but not the historical customer
value (citing Lazarus column 9, lines 40-46). Finally, appellants assert:
present claimed invention provides information about a customer's potential to
change behavior with respect to a particular merchant, not about the customer's
alignment to various merchant segments (as is described in Lazarus).
The examiner responds to appellants’ arguments on pages 3 through 6 of the
answer. On pages 3 through 5 of the answer, the examiner provides the rationale
supporting her determination that the scope of the claim term “intrinsic customer value”
includes: determining “based on a comparison between the customer's historic value in
relation to his/her potential value as defined by an average of the historic values of other
people who are within the same segment as the customer in question.” See page 5 of the
answer. Based upon this claim interpretation, the examiner, provides, on pages 5 and 6
of the answer, an explanation of how Lazarus’ teaching of placing a customer in various
merchant segments, which are determined based upon historic data of the customer and
other customers, meets this limitation.
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