ALEXANDRIA, Va., March 17 -- United States Patent no. 12,579,556, issued on March 17, was assigned to GOOGLE LLC (Mountain View, Calif.).

"Systems and methods for providing content items via a push marketing auction" was invented by Amit Agarwal (Mountain View, Calif.), Surojit Chatterjee (Los Altos, Calif.), Gaurav Bhaya (Mountain View, Calif.), Anshul Kothari (Mountain View, Calif.) and Vibhor Nanavati (Santa Clara, Calif.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "The present disclosure is directed to systems and methods of providing content. A server can generate a request for a push content item for an account identifier linked with a computing device. The server can establish a push auction for the...