Source: adapted from http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/awss.nsf/screenshots/05AD13271D1DD49C88257369006A5436/$FILE/imsk01.jpg, accessed 9 October 2007

IBM is begins to reinvent itself in the Web 2.0 sphere. I just recalled an expression that elephant can always dance. The two mashup tools that released by IBM today may appealed to some non-technical users that want to access Web information and company’s database for the purpose of mashup the information or data in order to build a decent Web application. What is mashup, it mean mix content from the host server with feeds from the API (application programming interface). As stated in the IBM’s alphaWorks site, the IBM Mashup Starter Kit contains two key technologies and they are critical for users looking to take advantage of the IBM solution for creating Web 2.0 initiatives. The aforesaid two technologies, one is the IBM Mashup Hub that served to stores information feeds, the lightweight components in developing Web applications. The other one is the updated version of QEDWiki tool, the visual front-end for accessing the information and developing the mashup. Nevertheless, to build this type of mashup by customize the aforesaid feeds, one must at least have some knowledge in PHP, the most popular programming language nowadays.

Currently, this mashup starter kit is available in preview mode, and it is slated for release in the first quarter of 2008. However, we should not expect the disruption that IBM brought to the market, as more and more software giants are releasing the tools that helped designers or non-programmers to develop Web applications without having to write code. Examples included Microsoft’s Popfly and Adobe’s Flex Builder.

This week the Big Blue IBM has released an open source software, more specifically, an office suite that carry the name of Lotus Symphony. The program file is big, weighs in at approx. 133MB, and registration is required for the users to proceed with this download. This Lotus Symphony is a free software that allowed us to create and share documents, spreadsheets and presentations on Windows and Linux platform. It is built based on the OpenOffice, another well-known open source office suite and Eclipse, an open source development framework and is meant to straddle the fence by keeping not only its existing IBM customers happy, but with a grander ambition to rival the Microsoft Office. Besides, this Lotus Symphony promotes the use of Open Document for XML (ODF), an XML-based standard for documents approved by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). While, it is relatively new in the market since it has just been launched in a week, the response for this free software is too good, and I was told that the Lotus Symphony was downloaded 100,000 times in the first week of release.

No doubt, IBM was busying improve the features of this Lotus Symphony but the ongoing challenges for this software is big on another front. People nowadays see Microsoft Office as a standard in performing office productivity tasks. For Apple lovers, Lotus Symphony currently did not support the Macintosh environment, this product won’t come close to Microsoft Office in this coming one or two years.

An interesting article from Israel stated that IBM Israel’s Haifa laboratory are seeking new technologies for use in smart cars, which will help reduce congestion and increase safety. This news discusses the rationale for IBM’s transformation and the substance of its new market-driven strategy. I heard many times that IBM is promoting SOA, may be the trend of SOA and IBM’s other existing businesses, i.e. hardware leave IBM in a relatively low growth industry, and they need to develop a breakthrough technology in these one-two years.

I recently did a post, entitled “Lotus Notes 8 Coming in 2007,” and now IBM had announced the public beta for its Lotus Notes and Domino 8. According to IBM, there have been more than 12,000 downloads of this Lotus Notes and Domino 8 for a variety of platforms following the released announcement. It seems that the management of IBM have optimistic about the receptive of the corporate world towards this product. “Lotus Notes and Domino 8 delivers a high-performance work environment that natively links to other Lotus software components such as social software, collaborative content management, and unified communications and collaboration. This version allows developers to build a new class of Web 2.0 solutions and taps into the latest technologies from IBM Research.” Said Ken Bisconti, vice president of Lotus messaging and collaboration.

You can download the Lotus Notes and Domino 8 beta version by clicking here.

However, the final version of this product that proposed by IBM for release would due in the middle of this year.

I came across a news that the Lotus Notes 8 would be released by IBM in this year. The Lotus Notes 8 is about to launch in the market as As I read an official page of IBM’s Lotus Notes, IBM has improved several core capabilities of Lotus Notes in certain areas such email, calendar, contact management, Lotus Notes database, composite application editor as well as a set of office productivity tools have been included which support the Open Document Format (ODF) standard. To know further, you also can click here for the overview and the white paper of this product (in ftp, pdf; about 3.7MB).

In this Lotus Notes 8, IBM has introduced an exciting new innovation called activity-centric collaboration to Lotus Notes users. A concept direct from IBM Research, activity-centric collaboration lets users organize, navigate, manage and share information through the core capabilities found in Lotus Notes 8 for a particular activity or project. However, the beta version would be released in next month and pricing of this Lotus Notes 8 is yet to confirmed by IBM, and I’ve been noticed that the each release of Lotus Notes, IBM is applying a brand new, and fresh UI (user interface) in their product strategy. One interesting idea I fascinating about this Lotus Notes 8 is its new programming model in such a way that it allowed components from other applications, or components created with J2EE or other development tools to run within the Lotus Notes client, i.e. the functionality of composite application as I mentioned in the above.

IBM and Yahoo! released software that search corporate computer network, this software is known as IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition. According to IBM’s press release, this software is a no-cost and entry level product developed to help eliminate financial and technology barriers to intranet and Web search. Unlike other enterprise search solutions that can cost thousands of dollars to purchase and implement, the new offering from IBM with Web search services powered by Yahoo! can be downloaded for free and is simple to install and use with existing hardware.

In term of functionality, this software support up to 500,000 documents per server, more than 200 file types and documents in more than 30 languages. It provides live search, and also cross-platform full text indexing by using the open source Lucene indexing library.

The bottom line is this new software offering would help in expanding the market shares of IBM and Yahoo! in the search industry respectively. It is a win-win game for them. For IBM, they have the high resolution softwares such as OmniFind Enterprise Edition that price at US562.50 to US18,750 annually and OmniFind Discovery Edition that range from US4,000 to US75,000 annually. I believed the back-end technology for these Enterprise and Discovery Editions is the Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA). On the other hand, the OmniFind Yahoo! Edition is the software that cater for the mass market. That’s why it offered in no-cost. I believed IBM has turned some features off in order to make this software for the lower-end markets. IBM’s strategy is simply this: they designed the high-end softwares first, such as OmniFind Enterprise Edition and OmniFind Discovery Edition, and then now they diffused down to the lower-end software like this one, i.e. OmniFind Yahoo! Edition as competitive upgrade. For most of the demanding customers, they would likely to try this OmniFind Yahoo! Edition and later upgrade to OmniFind Enterprise or Discovery Edition depending which one meet their needs. In short, IBM is pursuing the versioning in their product strategy.

On the other hand, Yahoo! also benefited from this software launched. As the above picture showed, the interface is Yahoo! The search results listed in the same layout as the usual Yahoo! web search but without advertisements appear on the screen. However, the search results will fully integrated with Yahoo! Search, providing one-click access to send queries to Yahoo! web, image, video, audio, directory, local and news search services. Thus, it would eventually help in increase Yahoo! search engine traffic.

This is a win-win strategic alliance for IBM and Yahoo! IBM seems to be strengthening its brand name in enterprise search and Yahoo! is gaining popularity in web search amongst the corporate users.

I just came across an interesting article from MIT’s Technology Review entitled, “Personalized Weather Forecasts: An IBM supercomputer forecasts weather down to a one-kilometer resolution“. This article talked about a new weather service called Deep Thunder developed by IBM that can predict the rain, the wind, and temperature conditions down to a one-kilometer resolution. This article goes on discuss how this breakthrough technology enabled government, private and public sector to accurately forecast the weather in every 30 minutes, thus enhance the operations and save huge money.

I really impressed about this particular research done by IBM. The above picture shown is one snapshot of an animated display in Miami with predictions at 30-minute intervals. In fact, this is a service developed by IBM’s alphaWorks. I wonder when IBM would launch this service to the commercial sector, how the pricing this service would be in the market, and most important, when will it be available especially in some emerging countries such as Asia, Latin America, and etc?

Kudos to IBM.

I just come across an article from China Supply Chain Council stated that IBM was transferring its chief purchasing operations to China, a move that highlights China’s growing importance in the field of global supply chain. This is the first time the headquarter of a IBM division has been relocated. No doubt Shenzhen has emerged as the global logistics hub, and thus China anchored its status as a global supply chain hub by harnessing the Information Technology.

My view: The cheap labor, the availability of software and services skills in China with the set up of Pudong technology Park of Shanghai has indeed helped China in building the competitiveness of this supply chain hub.