A wide variety of means exist for communication between users. For example, a user may conduct phone calls via a home phone, work phone, and mobile phone. In addition, users may also communicate using devices such as PCs, PDAs, pagers, etc., using various means of communicating such as voice, email, short text messaging, and instant messaging.
Unfortunately, sending messages and communicating with devices using such a wide variety of communication means can be difficult. In particular, when a user wishes to send a broadcast message or set up a conference session with a group of users, communication with each user in the group may vary. For example, a group list may be established for each user subscribing to email communication services. However, users subscribing to different communication means (e.g., users who receive messages by phone, short text messaging, or instant messaging) must be contacted separately.
Further, a user in an intended group of broadcast message recipients may have multiple communication devices. Depending on which communication device the broadcast message is sent to, the user may not receive the broadcast message in a timely fashion. Further problems result when the sender of a broadcast message does not automatically receive feedback from the recipients of the message. For example, a sender may request confirmation of receipt from each recipient of a message but some users may forget to respond or may ignore the request.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds