The Greater IBM Connection Blog

A Smarter Planet — The Social Traffic Conundrum: An IBM vPanel...

2010-09-21T12:39:14-04:00

The Social Traffic Conundrum: An IBM vPanel Interactive Dialogue

Date: Wednesday, September 22, 4pm ET

Location: The IBM New Intelligence Video Studio, http://www.livestream.com/newintelligence

Description: For Social Media Week 2010 — taking place simultaneously across five cities — IBM is bringing together four thought leaders from around the globe via a webcam-based virtual panel to discuss the challenge of urban traffic and how human behavior and social media can help remedy it.

Panelists:

Shaun Abrahamson, Founder and CEO, Mutopo
Naveen Lamba, Industry Leader, Smart Transportation, IBM
Sarah Goodyear, Cities Editor, Grist.org
Richard MacManus, Founder of ReadWriteWeb

STAYING OUT IN FRONT: How to Build COMMUNITY Wherever You Land

2010-05-16T22:01:21-04:00

In today's marketplace and workplace, regardless of where you may be playing, we're all learning similar lessons. We need to be flexible, adaptable, willing, able, and agile to ensure a place out in front in an turbulent, ever-changing world. We're also learning that an essential skill goes with those qualities: Becoming a master of building COMMUNITY wherever you land --- being remarkable at moving in and out and through communities in ways that are authentic, making meaningful connections with people and organizations that may be totally different than you are.

Recently, I've read a number of articles on "building community" and they all seem to make things seem quite complicated --- like it's hard to do.

In contrast...once in a while, someone comes along --- sometimes it is someone we don't expect to learn from --- who shows us, by their example, in just a minute or two, the basics of all we need to know.

This little guy in "penguin suit" did just that...

4 TIPS from an UNEXPECTED TEACHER WATCH!

Move with speed and agility to stay out front.
When you land in a new place, act like you belong.
Be friendly to everyone you meet.
Feel the love come back at you.

What would you add?

Debbe

Debbe Kennedy
Contributing author
Greater IBM Connection Blog

Founder, President & CEO
Global Dialogue Center and
Leadership Solutions Companies
BOOK: author, Putting Our Differences to Work
The Fastest Way to Innovation, Leadership, and High Performance
IBMer 1970 - 1991 L.A.; Anchorage; Seattle; San Francisco
Twitter:@debbekennedy @onlinedialogues
Why to SMART people say NO to great ideas?
INNOVATION TIP #5

Smarter Cities (Tagwhat Leaves Read-Only Augmented Reality...)

2010-05-08T08:10:40-04:00

Mining the Collaboration with Advanced Analytics
Using some of IBM's expertise in deep data mining and analysis, we will crunch all the content to help develop a SmarterCities Open Model, which cities and groups around the world can build on to start SmarterCities grassroots projects. The data will remain free and open, under Creative Commons license, so that it can grow and be improved over time. This creative output will also flow into and inform work at IBM's new network of Analytics Centers launching around the globe: in Berlin, Tokyo, Beijing, New York, London and Washington, D.C.

SmarterCities is an outgrowth of IBM's Smarter Planet initiative, which is focused on how all the systems in the world -- including food production, healthcare delivery, energy use, traffic and water management -- can become more instrumented, interconnected and, as a result, intelligent.

Cities are the crossroads of these networks. They are also where human populations are increasingly concentrated, with more than 66% of humanity projected to live in major metropolitan areas by 2050.

That's where you come in: building on the Smarter Cities Summit in New York City October 1-2, this Smarter Cities Scan is your opportunity to share ideas, propose projects and learn about the innovations that can help us become a planet of smarter cities. If anything cries out for "crowd sourcing" and collective intelligence, the city as a "system of systems" does.

Smarter Cities Homepage

Get Inspired and Informed
"A vision of smarter cities," by IBMer Susanne Dirks, Manager, Global Centre for Economic Development.

IBM Institute for Business Value study (380KB)

First of a few recaps from #ITSA10: A systems approach for transportation (IBM CEO speech) http://bit.ly/bbbk4w (w/ picture of @raylahood )

@smarterplanet

Smarter Planet Blog Smarter Cities News Smarter Planet | Tumblr: Cities Smarter Planet | Friendfeed Media Library Help / FAQ

Tagwhat Leaves Read-Only Augmented Reality Browsers Behind | ReadWriteWeb

Tagwhat, an augmented reality creation and distribution system, publicly launched this week bringing the world of augmented reality into the realm of Web 2.0. While other augmented realtiy browsers, such as Wikitude and Layar, provide the user with information overlays over live video, Tagwhat allows users to create these overlays. According to the company, its mobile and web application represents a paradigm-shift in augmented reality. Tagwhat also marks an important milestone in the evolutionary path of AR technology, representing a shift from the static Web 1.0 world of AR browsers to the participatory interaction of Web 2.0. Tagwhat is ‘create-and-share’ mobile AR, and is the first mobile augmented reality distribution system where anyone, not just developers, can create their own AR content and share with their friends anywhere in the world, in seconds, for free.

(And see the Smarter Cities AIR — Augmented Intelligent Reality — pilot at http://www.tagwhat.com/smartercities or if you’re in New York City, experience the pilot yourself right in Madison Square Park, just outside IBM’s Global Business Services headquarters.)

The Analytics Virtual Center

2010-03-30T10:06:29-04:00

The Analytics Virtual Center.

Over the course of 2009, IBM opened centers in Berlin, Beijing, London, New York, Tokyo and Washington D.C. to advance the frontier of analytics: namely turning big data into new intelligence, predictive capabilities and insight.

To support those physical solution centers we launched the Analytics Virtual Center (AVC) at the start of 2010, and welcome you to visit it, especially as we come up on the one year anniversary of the launch of our business analytics initiative.

The AVC underscores a central tenet of Smarter Planet — how digital and physical worlds — databases and drydocks, petabytes and powerplants — are weaving themselves together. Through it, people can extend their physical presence, voice and ideas to a new digital dimension that isn’t constrained by geography.

Simply Easy

The AVC is a web-based and voice-enabled collaboration complex that we built on the web.alive platform, which is now part of IBM partner Avaya’s portfolio. It features a simple set of intuitive controls, quick avatar customization and 3D spatial audio. Many of the hundreds of visitors have found the environment easier to use than other virtual worlds. In fact, most people find themselves “in world” and talking naturally with others within minutes.

While the environment’s navigation and architecture are purposefully minimalist, the facility supports some sophisticated tools, including a full-function “web surface” that can display any web content, including video, animation and Web-based services such as writeboards. Additional wall surfaces can display presentations, documents, photos and graphics.

In addition to an auditorium and six meeting rooms that can be made private for confidential discussions, the AVC includes a rooftop “garden” with six kiosks for different displays, projects or topics. We’re also using the rooftop for an “innovator in residence” program that is open to analytics-related projects or initiatives from academia, startups, NGOs and other organizations seeking to innovate around analytics.

Of course, the AVC is also available for business development and client meetings. And we expect to also put it work as a vehicle for recruiting new talent to IBM, especially for people with expertise in various areas of analytics, simulation, predictive modeling and other aspects of “big data” innovation in areas including energy, smarter cities, healthcare and transportation.

To discuss or schedule a tour, meeting, event, the innovators-in-residence program or how you might like to work with us via the Analytics Virtual Center, we’ve set up a tool with the new Tungle.me appointment service.

You can also leave us a voicemail via Skype.

2010-03-16T10:36:30-04:00

Video featuring, from IBM: Mike Wing, Andy Stanford-Clark and John Tolva.

Over the past century but accelerating over the past couple of decades, we have seen the emergence of a kind of global data field. The planet itself - natural systems, human systems, physical objects - have always generated an enormous amount of data, but we didnt used to be able to hear it, to see it, to capture it. Now we can because all of this stuff is now instrumented. And its all interconnected, so now we can actually have access to it. So, in effect, the planet has grown a central nervous system.

Look at that complex set of relationships among all of these complex systems. If we can actually begin to see the patterns in the data, then we have a much better chance of getting our arms around this. Thats where societies become more efficient, thats where more innovation is sparked.

When we talk about a smarter planet, you can say that it has two dimensions. One is to be more efficient, be less destructive, to connect different aspects of life which do affect each other in more conscience and deliberate and intelligent ways. But the other is also to generate fundamentally new insights, new activity, new forms of social relations. So you could look at the planet as an information, creation and transmission system, and the universe was hearing its information but we werent. But increasingly now we can, early days, baby steps days, but we can actually begin to hear the planet talking to us.