Internet-based system for enabling a time-constrained competition among a plurality of participants over the internet

An Internet-based competition-promoting system for fairly and securely enabling one or more time-constrained competitions among a plurality of competitors simultaneously presented with the same set of data, comprising:

• a first subsystem for transmitting an Invitation-to-Respond, or ITR, to each of the competitors participating in the competition promoted by said system in a regulated manner;
• and
• a second subsystem for responding to each ITR presented to said competitors, by submitting an appropriate response or undertaking a particular action;
• wherein the plurality of competitors are simultaneously presented with the same set of data, and further wherein each competitor's response is timed to ensure fairness in the competitive activity, and thus precisely measured, securely recorded and analyzed.

An Internet-based competition-promoting system having system components comprising:

• a primary server for providing a source of Invitations-to-Respond and other competition related data;
• providing a master clock for the system;
• and performing functions or operations involving data received from multiple client machines connected to the system;
• a login server for accepting login requests from each competitor's client machine and assigning an appropriate competition-promoting server to that client machine, providing a single address for each client machine to use to contact the assigned competition-promoting server when initializing a session in the competition, and intelligently distributing the processing and communications load among the competition-promoting servers;
• a competitor database for recording information about each competitor for the proper operation of the competition;
• an Invitation-To-Respond/Response (ITR/Response) database for storing or generating Invitations-To-Respond (ITRs) appropriate to the particular competition being promoted, and transmitting those ITR's to said client machines, through the other servers in the system;
• one or more competition-promoting servers;
• and
• a plurality of client machine for use by a plurality of competitors, each including a local clock, wherein each said competitor interacts with said competition-promoting system through one said client machine, further wherein an idealized universal clock time is derived as a function of a local clock value of the local clock and a master clock time from the master clock, and
• wherein said system components are interconnected through the infrastructure of the Internet.

An Internet-based contest-promoting system for enabling a plurality of contestants to participate in a multi-player internetworked time-constrained contest that is regulated in a secure and fundamentally fair manner, comprising:

• an information server for supporting a contest process over the Internet and producing invitations to respond (ITR) for response to said contestant in a time-constrained manner;
• a plurality of client machines, each said client machine for use by one said contestant to interface with the contest process, receive an ITR displayed in a globally time-synchronized manner, receive a response to the ITR from the contestant in a time-constrained manner, time-stamping said response at the client machine, and transmitting the response and corresponding time-stamp to said information server;
• said information server including means for evaluating and ranking said contestants are according to their responses and corresponding time-stamps;
• means for registering contestants participating in the contest;
• means for controlling and measuring certain time-based elements of the contest including the precise instant at which an ITR is presented to the contestants on all or some subset of the client machines,
• wherein said time-based elements shall include the “start-time” which is the same for each contestant,
• wherein the contest-promoting system includes means for precisely determining the length of time between the start-time and the instant each contestant submits its response which provides the finish-time of the particular contestant,
• wherein the length of time, measured between said start-time and said finish-time, provides the response-time of the particular contestant or competitor.