Really Cool BlackBerry Calendar Patent

I was just taking a look at Russell Shaw’s new blog over on ZDNet and as always, Russ is on top of all of the BlackBerry patents being issued. This time he’s found a really cool one “that would enable extraction of appointment-related information from BlackBerry emails and then insert information about the appointment in a user’s BlackBerry calendar”.

Scheduling an event on an electronic communications device configured for sending and receiving electronic messages over a communications network, including extracting information from an electronic message at the communications device; displaying on a display of the communications device an event scheduling interface for scheduling an event, the event scheduling interface having a plurality of input fields for receiving information about the event; and automatically populating at least one of the input fields in dependence on the extracted information.

In plain English this means that someone can send you an regular email that says something like “Let’s meet for lunch on Thursday at 12:00” and you could export this directly into an appointment in your calendar. Like I said, pretty cool…

[Source]

BlackBerry Patent, SCHEDULING EVENTS FROM ELECTRONIC MESSAGES