Abstract: Techniques which allow potential customers that may be travelling near a vendor to propose a discounted group purchase offer to the vendor. A group of one or more potential customers travelling in a predetermined direction within a predetermined distance from a vendor's geographic location may be detected substantially in real time. The group may then be connected into a virtual social network and allowed to communicate with one another to collaborate on a discounted group purchase offer. The group may propose the discounted group purchase offer to the vendor.

Abstract: Techniques are provided for use in targeting potential customers that may be travelling near a vendor. A set of one or more potential customers travelling in a predetermined direction within a predetermined distance from a vendor's geographic location may be detected substantially in real time. The vendor may specify one or more criteria to target the potential customers. The set of potential customers may be reduced based at least in part on the one or more criteria to create a subset of potential customers. One or more advertisements may be transmitted to the subset of potential customers such that the advertisements may be viewed or displayed or played back on the vehicle's sound system and/or on the occupants' smartphones.

Abstract: Methods and apparatus are described for a horizontally scalable high performance object storage architecture. Metadata are completely decoupled from object storage. Instead of file names, users are given a locator when the object is uploaded and committed. Users can store the locator along with their own metadata or embed it directly in the static content. Clients can choose which storage nodes to store data on based on dynamic measures of node performance. Since there is no coupling among storage servers, performance can scale horizontally by adding more nodes. The decoupling also allows the front end services and storage to scale independently. High service availability is achieved by object-level synchronous replication and having no single point of failure. Failed nodes are rebuilt using copies of data in other nodes without taking the cluster offline. In addition to the replication, the ability to add or remove nodes on-line reduces maintenance-related service downtime.

Abstract: Methods and apparatus are described for a horizontally scalable high performance object storage architecture. Metadata are completely decoupled from object storage. Instead of file names, users are given a locator when the object is uploaded and committed. Users can store the locator along with their own metadata or embed it directly in the static content. Clients can choose which storage nodes to store data on based on dynamic measures of node performance. Since there is no coupling among storage servers, performance can scale horizontally by adding more nodes. The decoupling also allows the front end services and storage to scale independently. High service availability is achieved by object-level synchronous replication and having no single point of failure. Failed nodes are rebuilt using copies of data in other nodes without taking the cluster offline. In addition to the replication, the ability to add or remove nodes on-line reduces maintenance-related service downtime.

Abstract: Methods and apparatus are described for a horizontally scalable high performance object storage architecture. Metadata are completely decoupled from object storage. Instead of file names, users are given a locator when the object is uploaded and committed. Users can store the locator along with their own metadata or embed it directly in the static content. Clients can choose which storage nodes to store data on based on dynamic measures of node performance. Since there is no coupling among storage servers, performance can scale horizontally by adding more nodes. The decoupling also allows the front end services and storage to scale independently. High service availability is achieved by object-level synchronous replication and having no single point of failure. Failed nodes are rebuilt using copies of data in other nodes without taking the cluster offline. In addition to the replication, the ability to add or remove nodes on-line reduces maintenance-related service downtime.