Los Angeles, CA – Nizza Group has announced that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office awarded it a patent (U.S. Patent No. 6,671,714) for a method and system of assigning identical URL and E-Mail addresses to members of a group. For example, if Jane is a member of a group called “Group,” the patent covers assigning Jane the URL www.jane.group.com and the E-mail address jane@group.com.
“We are particularly excited about the future uses of this naming patent,” says co-inventor, Troy Javaher. “There is real value in having URL’s and E-Mail addresses match, and diverse groups ranging from individual families to large professional organizations will benefit from such a convenient, intuitive naming system.”
Mr. Javaher and Frank Weyer, the patent’s other co-inventor and a practicing intellectual property attorney, were part of the original group that launched the “.md” domain in the United States. With the “.md” domain, physicians could register URL’s ending in “.md,” such as www.janesmith.md.
While involved in the “.md” venture, Mr. Weyer and Mr. Javaher founded EveryMD, Inc.(www.everymd.com). Using a proprietary database, EveryMD created unique URL and E-Mail addresses for 250,000 US doctors, allowing patients to e-mail those doctors to schedule appointments and request prescription refills via an online interface.
Each doctor, in turn, can request to directly use their free EveryMD.com e-mail address, have itredirected to an existing one, or simply have all patient online messages sent offline to the doctors’ fax machines. "Our idea is simple: Make it easy for patients to communicate online with their doctors, even if the doctor isn’t online yet,” says Mr. Weyer. “In addition, we limit the type of e-mails that patients can send to their doctor to prevent the doctor from being overwhelmed with masses of patient e-mails.
”The newly issued patent is the first of a series of patent applications the Nizza Group is pursuing covering a number of novel internet addressing and communications technologies Javaher and Weyer developed over the last six years. "Although the inspiration for these inventions came from our work with .md and EveryMD," says Javaher, "the technologies that we are patenting are applicable to a wide variety of internet businesses." Adds Weyer, "We expect that our patents will be of interest to some major internet players."