People nowadays typically rely on various communication devices to meet their communication needs. For example, it is not uncommon for an individual to use a wired phone at home and another wired phone at work, while carrying around a wireless phone for mobile communication. While certainly facilitating communications, this reliance on various communication devices has some drawbacks.
For instance, in addition to receiving different bills for use of different communication devices (e.g., one bill for a home's wired phone and another bill for a wireless phone), it can become inconvenient and inefficient for an individual to give out different telephone numbers (e.g., a telephone number of the home's wired phone and a telephone number of the wireless phone) to friends, business contacts or other acquaintances, who must then inconveniently keep track of these different telephone numbers at which the individual can be reached.
Compounding this is that, on top of using various communication devices, different people in a household or other social unit typically have vastly different social networks. Not only can this give rise to a billing chaos, but the different people, communication devices and social networks can result in incoming calls and outgoing calls being inefficiently handled. For example, in a household with parents and children, the parents may frequently answer calls that are intended for their children, which in some cases may prove quite frustrating for the parents who may unnecessarily be distracted and/or waste time.
For these and various other reasons, there exists a need for solutions enabling more efficient processing of calls, particularly in households or other social units with multiple individuals and/or multiple communication devices.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds