Abstract: A consumer-based bill management and payment system is configured to receive, analyze, manage and pay electronic billing statements received from the biller over the Internet. The system includes a notification manager that detects when the electronic bill arrives and notifies the consumer. The bill is stored in memory with other unpaid electronic bills. According to another aspect of the invention, the system has a cashflow analyzer that enables the consumer to coordinate the unpaid electronic bills according to different payment schedules for a bill payment cycle (e.g., a month). The goal of the manipulation is to permit the consumer to analyze how the different payment schedules affect the consumer's cashflow with an aim toward minimizing overdraft during the bill payment cycle. The cashflow analyzer can automatically compute an optimized payment schedule that minimizes overdraft of the consumer's account, while maximizing the balance to generate the most interest.

Abstract: A system and method for conducting commerce over a distributed network manage merchant and product information in an electronic shopping basket, payment source information in an electronic wallet, and shipping address information in an electronic address book, all of such information being stored on a consumer computer. A commerce client running on the consumer computer is configured as a MIME handler and extends the functionality of a standard Web browser to support computer-based shopping. A merchant site Web server provides HTML-coded Web documents which describe merchant products and which host computer-based shopping options. The HTML-coded Web documents contain function-calling information by which consumer-selected options invoke shopping-related functions on either the merchant (server) computer or the consumer (client) computer.

Abstract: An extensible, bi-directional function calling protocol tunnels function call requests and responses through the HTTP (HyperText Transport Protocol) message stream of a standard Web browser and a standard Web server. In a preferred embodiment, the protocol is used to exchange information between an electronic commerce client application ("commerce client") which runs on the computer of a World Wide Web user, and an electronic commerce server application ("commerce server") which runs on a Web site. The protocol specifies a format for embedding a generic client-to-server function call within HTML (HyperText Markup Language) content such that a user can initiate the function call while viewing an HTML document via the standard Web browser. Specialized functions such as "get price," "get inventory," and "calculate tax" can thereby be placed within standard Web documents, such as electronic catalog documents used by online merchants to sell products.

Abstract: A function calling protocol and methodology allow local function calls to be embedded within HTML documents, using standard HTML (HyperText Markup Language) tags, such that a user can selectively initiate the function calls while viewing the documents with a standard World Wide Web ("Web") browser. User-invocable functions are thereby added to Web documents without modification to either existing Web browsers or HTML. In accordance with the invention, when a user initiates a local function call (by clicking on a button or other content item from within the Web browser), an HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) POST message which contains the information for making the function call is generated by the standard Web browser. This message is routed from the Web browser to an application (which runs on the same computer as the browser) using a conventional Local Host service of the computer's TCP/IP stack. The application then uses the function-calling information to make the function call on the computer.