IBM Look Into The Big Blue Skies

Remember that once technology giant IBM? There was a saying once, ‘you never get the sack for buying IBM,’ but those heady days of mainframe and mid range computing have long gone and IBM is now more into services than computing technology.

Today they have gazed into their crystal ball surveyed its 3,000 researchers and come up with their predictions of what will take hold in the next 5 years.

1. Holographic conversations, projected from mobile phones. We question not the prediction but the application.

2. Air- breathing batteries, which will ditch the current lithium-ion technology and could rely on energy-dense metals that only need to interact with the air to recharge. Alternatively some electronic devices may simple adopt kinetic energy. We believe that it would be great to dump the current environmental unfriendly but unless driven by a strong environmental lobby and statute this may take time to gain adoption.

3. Computer programs that will use algorithms and real-time traffic information to predict which roads will have jams, and inform you how to avoid getting stuck. We believe that this would be every drivers dream but question whether it will merely shift the problem or spread the throughput.

4. Environmental information generated by sensors in cars and phones. This probably has legs as we move into the crowd-sourcing world.

5. Cities powered by the heat thrown off by computer servers. Initially this seems very half-baked but it is based on the fact that some 50% of the power consumed by data centres is expended in keeping the computers cool. It’s a pity IBM don’t start to tackle it themselves but the question remains, what will cool the machines not how with we use the expended hot air.

IBM is currently investing some $5.8 billion, or 6% of it revenue, into research and development and although their track record on previous predictions is not encouraging, its always good to hear their thinking.

Big Blue to Buy Sun?

Not many ears ago the news that IBM was reported in have an interest in buying Sun Microsystems would have been mind-blowing and as strategically equivalent today of Facebook , Google and Microsoft coming together as one, but although still significant it’s a sign of the times that this news is just view as another corporate merger.

According to a Wall Street Journal report Big Blue (IBM) is willing to pay at least US$6.5 billion for Sun.

But some view this not as two giants of yesterday coming to a late marriage but rather as a threat to Java World. Obviously there is significant overlay and duplication of offer which could result in big cuts in tools and software. Choose between Eclipse or Netbeans and GlassFish or WebShere and MySQL or DB/2.

The interesting difference between the two companies in their sales approach shows that that are probably poles apart in many strategic ways even though their products may offer the same result. Big Blue has always sold to the executive not the developers and Sun to the developers not the executive.

The potential marriage will certainly not be the wedding of the year it would have once been.

Blackberry Appeal

News that RIM the makers of the email addicts BlackBerry now plans to launch a touch-screen version later this year was reported in the Wall Street Journal. The new touchy device, is named the Thunder and is to be sold exclusively through Verizon Wireless in the U.S. and Vodafone PLC elsewhere.

Also this week, RIM announced its BlackBerry Bold, a sleek smartphone with a keyboard aimed at its core base of business users and on Wednesday IBM said that it has started selling software allowing Blackberry customers to access its Cognos business intelligence software allowing customers to view real-time analytics on the state of their business on their BlackBerrys. IBM has also introduced programs to allow BlackBerry users to quickly locate and communicate with colleagues with expertise in specific business areas and also to access personalized content from their corporate websites.

Is the Blackberry coming out of the pockets of the business community with its touchy feely iPhone response or merely entrenching itself further into it with its alliance with business information and IBM? We think that we are seeing a device fighting to keep pace with those all around it and desperately seeking to pamper to its core base. It will be interesting to see a touch screen being used on a Blackberry but again maybe not.

The World just got Smaller and Faster

IBM researchers have demonstrated a prototype optical transceiver chipset that will potentially open up all content to be downloaded. The technology is claimed to be eight times faster than current and uses light pulses instead of electrons. They also claim it could be embedded within applications by 2010.

IBM will build the new chipset by combining standard CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor) technology, and optical components made from materials such as indium phosphide and gallium arsenide. The resulting package is just small enough to be integrated onto a printed circuit board.

They claim that it could reduce the download time of a typical high-definition feature-length movie from 30 minutes to one second. This demand for bandwidth has also others. In September, Intel and the University of California at Santa Barbara said they had discovered how to build low-cost ‘laser chips’ that move data faster than copper wire.

The full name of the new chipset is the "160Gb/s, 16-channel, full-duplex, single-chip CMOS optical transceiver" and it will presented at the Optical Fibre Conference later this month in California.

What is clear is that computing power is getting, faster, more efficient and smaller.