A method for determining relevance to customers of an advertisement for retail grocery items offered by a retailer. The method includes the steps of, for each item contained in the advertisement, creating an item promo group including non-ad items related to the advertised item. All items of the promo groups are then compared to a customer's purchase history data. The relevance of the advertised items is then quantified based on prior purchases by the customer of items contained in the corresponding promo groups.

A system and method are disclosed for transforming catalog data from multiple supplier sources to a standardized rich content catalog either by the suppliers themselves or by a third party using the system and method of the present invention. Incoming raw catalog data content is cleansed and normalized using an extensive knowledge base of patterns and incoming schemas are appended to the cleansed and normalized data. The resulting rich content catalogs are published for user browsing and data syndication. Users are administered to form groups for purposes of shopping, product pricing, and access authorization.

A server provides a predetermined service for portable terminals (musical piece data of a musical piece to be reproduced at a time of reception of an incoming call) to a portable terminal, and supplies information about the provided service for portable terminals (purchase information) (an ID of the musical piece and the like) to a server. On the basis of the purchase information, the server transmits an electronic mail recommending a service for stationary terminals (a movie using the provided musical piece as a theme song) related to the service for portable terminals provided to a user to the portable terminal. The user can specify the service for stationary terminals to be provided using the electronic mail.

Various computer-implemented methods are disclosed for selecting content items, including but not limited to user-submitted blurbs, to present to users. One such method comprises storing user-specific item selection history data identifying particular items, such as catalog items, selected by particular users, and recording responses of a plurality of the users to a content item. The method further comprises determining whether the content item should be presented to a target user based, at least in part, on a degree to which the item selection history of the target user is similar to item selection histories of users who responded favorably to the content item.

Disclosed is an information providing system in which the information providing apparatus first receives a connection request from the first information processing apparatus. Upon receipt of the connection request, a check is made to see whether the information providing apparatus is providing any image data or sound data to the second information processing apparatus. If the information providing apparatus is judged to be providing any image data or sound data to the second information processing apparatus, then information related to a chat program is transmitted to the first and the second information processing apparatus. After transmitting the connection request to the information providing apparatus, the first information processing apparatus receives the information related to the chat program from the information providing apparatus. Upon reception of the information, the first information processing apparatus executes a process based on the received information related to the chat program. The second information processing apparatus also receives the information related to the chat program from the information providing apparatus and thereupon executes a process based on the received information related to the chat program.