Defendant
1 case as defendant.
CouponSurfer.com Inc. is a private, independent online coupon company founded in 1998 and headquartered at 1 DeAngelo Drive, Suite H, Bedford, Massachusetts. It was co-founded by CEO Adam Schwartz and began operations in 1998. Ownership, revenue and headcount are not publicly disclosed; the company is not publicly traded and no parent or acquirer is identified in public sources. Contemporary reporting (Boston Business Journal, 1999) put headcount at roughly 10, and third-party business-data aggregators (Kona Equity) estimate about 7 employees and revenue near $1.2 million, though those figures are unverified estimates rather than audited disclosures.
Products / operations. CouponSurfer operates an advertising-supported consumer savings site, couponsurfer.com. Its offerings include free printable grocery coupons from major packaged-goods brands, online coupon codes and promotions from national retailers, coupon "links" that route members to merchant sites, and a cash-back rewards program in which members link debit/credit cards or submit receipts for offers. Revenue derives primarily from advertising, affiliate/referral commissions on purchases made through its coupon links, and advertiser placements. This is a real operating business, not a patent-assertion entity.
Litigation posture. The company appears in the database solely as a defendant in one case, with zero cases as plaintiff, which is consistent with an operating company targeted by a competitor's patent-enforcement campaign rather than an NPE. The single tracked matter is CoolSavings.com, Inc. (a/k/a Interactive Coupon Marketing Group, Inc., d/b/a CoolSavings) v. CouponSurfer.com, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois (Chicago) — CoolSavings' home venue, not a plaintiff-friendly Texas district.
Notable case context. CoolSavings asserted its web-based electronic coupon distribution patent (U.S. Patent No. 5,761,648) against roughly nine online coupon competitors, including CouponSurfer. The CouponSurfer suit settled in mid-2000 on confidential terms; a side agreement permitted CouponSurfer to "employ a limited form of" the patented technology. This case reflects the late-1990s wave of business-method patent litigation in the emerging online-coupon market.
CoolSavings sued CouponSurfer.com over the '648 patent in 1998. The case settled in May 1999 with a paid license; CouponSurfer was permitted a limited form of the patented technology.