Method and apparatus for communicating information about a called party to a calling party
AssigneeSBC Properties, L.P.
InventorArnold M. Lund
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
A method and apparatus is provided for automatically retrieving and displaying supplemental information about a called party on the CPE of a calling party. When a caller places a call, the number called is used to look up and return to the caller the Universal Resource Locator (URL) of the called party. Application software resident in the caller's CPE uses the URL to retrieve the home page of the called party from the Internet.
Claims11
A method of communicating information about a called party to a calling party comprising a sequence of the following steps:
- collecting the number of the party called by the calling party;
- accessing a database to retrieve the address for locating a customized file of the called party;
- transmitting the address to a device at the calling party's premises,
- retrieving the customized file for use by the calling party's device;
- and
- connecting the called party with the calling party over a telephone network using the number of the party called.
A method of communicating information about a called party to a calling party comprising a sequence of the following steps:
- placing a telephone call to a party through a network interconnecting customer premise equipment (CPE) of the called and calling parties;
- accessing a database storing a Universal Resource Locator (URL) associated with the telephone number of the called party and retrieving the URL;
- transmitting the URL associated with the telephone number of the called party, through said network to the calling party's CPE,
- retrieving and displaying the World Wide Web page associated with the URL on the calling party's CPE;
- and
- connecting the called party's CPE to the calling party's CPE over the network to permit voice communication between the parties.
Apparatus for communicating information about a called party to a calling party comprising:
- a calling party CPE for placing a telephone call to a called party;
- a called party CPE for receiving a telephone call from a calling party;
- a network interconnecting the called and calling party CPE's;
- said network including storage means for storing customized information associated with the telephone number of the called party;
- said network further including means for retrieving and transmitting said information to said calling party CPE;
- said calling party CPE including means for displaying said information.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.