System and method for processing electronic documents

Abstract

A system and method for online marketing, comprises reading, by an electronic device, a machine-readable code corresponding to an object of interest or interpreting one or more characteristics of the object of interest itself in order to identify it; generating a request to a designated computer server for content related to the object of interest in response to processing a decoded address on the machine-readable code or the value of the one or more characteristics of the object of interest; and outputting a link to the content or outputting the content itself to a device in response to a receipt of the request.

What is claimed is: 
     
         1 . An online marketing system for processing electronic documents, comprising:
 a machine-readable code that is encoded with an identifier; and   a special purpose computer that is identified by the identifier of the machine-readable code, the special purpose computer executing a process comprising:
 receiving by the special purpose computer, in response to a first electronic device electronically reading the machine-readable code, an electronic request for content associated with an object of interest; 
 outputting by the special purpose computer to the first electronic device a request in a display for a user of the first electronic device to identify an address that allows a second electronic device to access the content; and 
 outputting, by an out-of-band asynchronous electronic communication between the special purpose computer and the second electronic device, in response to an electronic communication between the special purpose computer and the first electronic device including the electronic request, and further in response to the request for identifying the address of the second electronic device, a link to the content or the content itself to the second electronic device, wherein the second electronic device is configured to process the content independently and regardless of whether the first electronic device is capable of processing the content, and 
 wherein the first electronic device is an originating device capable of both requesting the content and receiving the content asynchronously by executing another program different than the program sending the first request, wherein the other program in response retrieves the content.