Abstract: An apparatus for providing spontaneous collaboration between a shopper and consultants concerning a shopping goal derives information about the shopper's physical or logical proximity to a particular product category, combined with the current contents of his or her shopping cart is used to determine one or more shopping goals; as well as information about each potential consultant, including physical proximity, willingness to consult, areas of expertise and recent experience is used to rank each consultant in terms of relevance to one or more shopping goal.

Abstract: Servicing and/or providing spontaneous collaboration between a shopper and consultants concerning a shopping goal includes deriving information about the shopper's physical or logical proximity to a particular product category, combined with the current contents of his or her shopping cart is used to determine one or more shopping goals; as well as information about each potential consultant, including physical proximity, willingness to consult, areas of expertise and recent experience is used to rank each consultant in terms of relevance to one or more shopping goal.

Abstract: Methods, systems, and computer programs for servicing and/or providing spontaneous collaboration between a shopper and consultants concerning a shopping goal. Information about the shopper's physical or logical proximity to a particular product category, combined with the current contents of his or her shopping cart is used to determine one or more shopping goals. Information about each potential consultant, including physical proximity, willingness to consult, areas of expertise and recent experience is used to rank each consultant in terms of relevance to one or more shopping goal. Communication is established between the shopper and one or more consultants in order that consulting services be provided. Consultants' evaluations are maintained persistently for use in future ranking. In some cases collaboration is coordinated by a service bureau.

Abstract: Servicing and/or providing spontaneous collaboration between a shopper and consultants concerning a shopping goal includes deriving information about the shopper's physical or logical proximity to a particular product category, combined with the current contents of his or her shopping cart is used to determine one or more shopping goals; as well as information about each potential consultant, including physical proximity, willingness to consult, areas of expertise and recent experience is used to rank each consultant in terms of relevance to one or more shopping goal.

Abstract: Methods, systems, and computer program for interacting with simulacrum members of a buyer simulacrum. Persistent storage is configured to store collective qualifications of the simulacrum based on the individual qualifications of the simulacrum members, while a simulacrum broker is configured to present the collective qualifications to third parties. Thus, the broker provides a dynamic representation of the collective financial information, credit, insurance, trustworthiness, knowledge, skills and experience of a simulacrum or virtual buyer. The broker further enables an entity, such as a simulacrum employer or seller, to interact with the simulacrum as if that simulacrum were a single entity, rather than a collection of individual members.

Abstract: Servicing and/or providing spontaneous collaboration between a shopper and consultants concerning a shopping goal includes deriving information about the shopper's physical or logical proximity to a particular product category, combined with the current contents of his or her shopping cart is used to determine one or more shopping goals; as well as information about each potential consultant, including physical proximity, willingness to consult, areas of expertise and recent experience is used to rank each consultant in terms of relevance to one or more shopping goal.

Abstract: An apparatus for providing spontaneous collaboration between a shopper and consultants concerning a shopping goal derives information about the shopper's physical or logical proximity to a particular product category, combined with the current contents of his or her shopping cart is used to determine one or more shopping goals; as well as information about each potential consultant, including physical proximity, willingness to consult, areas of expertise and recent experience is used to rank each consultant in terms of relevance to one or more shopping goal.

Abstract: Servicing and/or providing spontaneous collaboration between a shopper and consultants concerning a shopping goal includes deriving information about the shopper's physical or logical proximity to a particular product category, combined with the current contents of his or her shopping cart is used to determine one or more shopping goals; as well as information about each potential consultant, including physical proximity, willingness to consult, areas of expertise and recent experience is used to rank each consultant in terms of relevance to one or more shopping goal.

Abstract: A computer implemented method, apparatus, and computer usable program code for managing computers. The computers are deployed on a network for use by users in response to forming a contractual agreement to provide outsourcing management of the computers. The computers include virtual machines. A computing environment of a user is accessible on a first computer using a virtual machine located on the first computer. The virtual machines are maintained on the computers. The virtual machine state may be transferred from the first computer to the second computer. The second computer runs the virtual machine. The computing environment is accessible to the user on the second computer.

Abstract: An apparatus, system and method for providing speech recognition assist in call handover are provided. With the apparatus, system and method, spoken utterances of the call taker, not the caller, are captured using speech recognition technology and transcribed. The call taker can use a noise-canceling microphone placed optimally to receive voice input from the call taker. The speech recognition system can be trained to the specific speech patterns of the call taker and the vocabulary of the speech recognition system can be limited to the specific domain of discourse related to the job scope of the call taker. The transcription of the spoken utterances of the call taker may be stored in a record associated with the call. This record, and the corresponding transcription, may be transferred to another call taker upon handover of the call to the other call taker.

Abstract: Apparatus and methods for providing an estimated time of arrival based marketplace are provided. The apparatus and methods solicit bids from one or more service providers for a requested service. The service providers may respond with bids that may include a price for providing the requested service along with an estimated time to perform the requested service in a location associated with the service provider. The bids are used, along with travel data obtained from a travel data provider, to generate service search results that are provided to a client device. The service search results include the price charged by the service provider as well as estimated times of completion (ETAs) for obtaining the service from the service provider. The ETA may be a combination of travel time determined from the travel data and time of performance determined from the bid submitted by the service provider.

Abstract: The disclosed methods provide a reliable and secure method of automatically backing up a client's data on a personal computer by using excess storage capacity on a set of one or more predetermined computers, without the need for dedicated servers, server disks, removable storage media, or intervention by a user to assist with the storage devices. The methods of the present invention permit a user, be it an individual or a large company, to inexpensively and securely back up information without the need to acquire additional expensive hardware.

Abstract: An apparatus, system and method for subscription computing using spare resources of subscriber computing platforms are provided. In the apparatus, system, method, computation and storage, intensive tasks of subscription computing are performed with subscriber resources in a peer-to-peer model rather than with centralized resources owned by a service provider. Resources may be allocated on unused workstations, workstations not currently in active use, or on workstations elsewhere in the enterprise or in other subscriber enterprises. Moreover, workstations in the enterprise may be equipped with extra resources for use in providing the subscription computing services of the present invention.

Abstract: In a network of workstations implementing a grid for sharing workstation resources while maintaining local workstation workloads, grid workloads are assigned to workstations depending on how busy they are with the local workload. CPU utilization is monitored at each workstation and grid workload is only accepted if it can be handled without impacting the interactive performance of the workstation and in alignment with the workstation user's preferences. Also, grid workloads may be categorized by the extent to which they tie up workstation resources and this categorization used as further input to the grid workload assignment process.

Abstract: A method, system, and computer program product for determining the location of a portable data processing system is provided. In one embodiment, the portable data processing system determines resources that are geographically proximate to the portable computer and generates a location syndrome. The location syndrome is then compared to a set of location profiles, wherein at least some of the location profiles correspond to different geographic locations. Responsive to sufficiently matching the location syndrome to one of the set of location profiles, a label corresponding to the matched one of the set of location profiles is returned as the current location of the portable data processing system.

Abstract: Methods and systems for efficient and effective distribution of system management messages between customer and service provider sites are provided. Customer sites each recognize characteristics of the content of messages distributed by the system and receive only messages relevant to the customer site. System dynamic changes are adapted to such as inter-site communication link interruption or congestion and providing seamless automated information technologies operations during these system dynamic changes. Automated management services are only postponed until such communication link can be restored. Two illustrative embodiments are provided. In one embodiment, system management resides at the service provider site with local system management backup at the customer site. In a second embodiment, system management resides at both the service provider site and customer site.

Abstract: A method, apparatus, and computer implemented instructions for managing rights to a service in a data processing system. A request is received from a user for the service. The rights to the service are identified. Content for the service is received. The content is selectively modified based on the rights identified. The content is sent to the user.

Abstract: The system disclosed uses policy directives to establish and regulate connectivity on a computer system. A policy profile is applied to the computer system that determines how and when connections can be made, and the devices on which the connections can be made.

Abstract: A method, apparatus, and system for automatically configuring a user's portable device, include a module for inferring a current location of the user, and a module for configuring the portable device based on information contained in a configuration of the current location.

Abstract: In a network of workstations implementing a grid for sharing workstation resources while maintaining local workstation workloads, grid workloads are assigned to workstations depending on how busy they are with the local workload. CPU utilization is monitored at each workstation and grid workload is only accepted if it can be handled without impacting the interactive performance of the workstation and in alignment with the workstation user's preferences. Also, grid workloads may be categorized by the extent to which they tie up workstation resources and this categorization used as further input to the grid workload assignment process.