Building a Smarter Planet. A Smarter Planet Blog.

This Friday November 27th, the 2nd edition of the ‘Email Free Friday‘ will happen in Belgium and the Netherlands.

On this Friday (private and business) users are asked to avoid using email. The idea is that your mailbox should not grab all your attention.
We all know that email is a very common communication channel in today’s life, as it’s free, fast, convenient to send an email.
We also know that reading emails can be a time consuming operation, and that sometimes (often) we have too many emails to read.

No emails on Friday, does this mean that we shouldn’t work ?
Of course no, but this is a good opportunity to change our work habits and try alternatives.

Here are a few ideas of things we can do instead of sending an email :

• use phone : really … I’m not kidding. Sometimes we send an email because it’s fast and easy, but in some case asking the question and/or answering to it would be much better by phone.
• use instant messaging : not available and allowed in all companies, but this is a good solution for quick and interactive discussions. At IBM we make an heavy use of Lotus Sametime, but MSN, Skype, Jabber might be valid alternatives (most of these tools are not appropriate to chat about confidential topics)
• get a coffee break : make a break and get a coffee with the person with whom you need to talk. This is a good and informal way of communicating
• use a RSS reader : try to replace newsletters by a RSS reader. This way you will avoid filling up your inbox with mails that very often we do not read. RSS readers should also be used to get updates / alerts from websites / blogs.
• blogs : instead of sending an email to many people asking them for ideas / feedback use Social softwares tools like blogs or wikis
• file sharing solutions : instead of sending a file via email, use a file sharing solution like Files from Lotus Connections

I’m sure some of you are curious about this, can we really use the tools and techniques listed above in a corporate environment ?
My answer is yes, these are some of the solutions that are used every day inside IBM to work and collaborate.

One of my colleague at IBM even pushed it further and decided that every day should be an ‘Email Free Day’.
About 2 years ago Luis Suarez found that dealing with his emails was taking too much time so he decided to change his way of working and collaborating.
Since the beginning of 2009 he has received an average of 21 emails a week, yes twenty-one and most of them are calendar/meeting invitations.
I’m sure a lot of people would like to have only 21 emails a week. How did he achieve that result ? He used the tools and techniques I listed above.
If you want to know more on how he did it you can listen to his interview by CBC’s host Nora Young in September this year.

Have a good Email Free Friday and feel free to share your experiences.

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image by http://www.flickr.com/photos/restlessglobetrotter/ / CC BY 2.0

In today’s economic environment, IT security is a big challenge that every company has to face. IBM Internet Security Systems (IBM ISS) products have always followed a simple philosophy : Keeping you “Ahead of the Threat”. From intrusion prevention and detection, to email security and data protection, server and desktop protection, and eventually web content filtering, IBM ISS products have proven their efficiency, providing smarter and sustainable security solutions.

In fact, contrary to other products available on the market, IBM ISS Proventia has taken the challenge to be tested on a monthly basis and has been gold certified by NSS Labs. Just have a look at http://nsslabs.com/SUM where you can see the latest tests.

For further information, you can visit http://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/index.wss/offerfamily/iss/a1029097 or just have a look at the short videos below :

Interested in a smarter organization? What if you begin with a smarter information security system ?

Put yourself in a time machine and choose your destination: Ancient Egypt or the Ming Dynasty

Man has always explored the past with passion and curiosity. Thanks to IBM’s know-how (virtual worlds, 3D simulation, information architecture…) and the treasures of local museums, the greatest civilizations are now only a click away, making the time journey more vivid than ever.  Anyone with access to the internet is now able to enter a three-dimensional reconstruction of Tutankhamun’s tomb, as it was when Howard Carter and his colleagues discovered it and wiped the dust of a grave of 3000 years of age, or visits Bejings Forbidden city as if you were walking next to the Chinese emperor. 

Explore Ancient Egypt in no time !

For the past three years, the Egyptian Center for Documentation of Cultural and Natural Heritage (CultNat) and IBM have been working to bring the awe-inspiring experience of Egypt to the world through a project known as the Eternal Egypt. With the help of a $2.5 million grant of technology and expertise from IBM, the Eternal Egypt represents a unique partnership to use innovative IBM technologies and services to create an interactive, multimedia experience of Egyptian cultural artifacts, places and history for a global audience.
The Eternal Egypt web site includes an unprecedented experience of high-resolution images, three-dimensional reconstructions of Egyptian monuments and antiquities, as well as virtually-reconstructed environments, panoramic images, and panoramic views of present-day Egypt captured by robotic cameras located from the top of Karnak Temple to the streets of Old Cairo. An innovative, interactive map and timeline will guide Eternal Egypt visitors through Egypt’s cultural heritage, while a “context navigator” presents the complex relationships between objects, places and personalities of Egypt’s past in a unique, web-like display.

Get inside the Forbidden City

The Forbidden City: Beyond Space and Time is a partnership between IBM and the Palace Museum in Beijing, China. For more than five hundred years, the Ming and Qing emperors ruled China from the palaces of the Forbidden City. The art and architectural treasures from this period are the cultural heart of modern China.  It is the world’s first online virtual world dedicated to a country’s cultural heritage. It is presented as a three-dimensional replica of the square-kilometer palace grounds called The Virtual Forbidden City. The project partners’ goal was to create an experience that is as authentic as possible by being true to important Chinese principles of balance and harmony.
Rather than being an isolating virtual experience, the Virtual Forbidden City allows visitors to see and interact with each other and with a wide range of volunteers, staff, and automated characters. To welcome the broadest range of visitors, a simple, easy to use interface guides interactions with the Virtual Forbidden City. As they explore the Virtual Forbidden City, visitors can choose to simply observe the buzz of activity, participate in activities that provide insights into important aspects of the Qing dynasty, or even take guided tours that uncover new insights into the stories of the Forbidden City.

So, fasten your seat belt and take off for a long long trip to the past!

This is a smart illustration of Information on Demand.

Source : BBC

IBM Research today announced the public availability of Milepost GCC, the world’s first open source machine learning compiler. The compiler can intelligently analyze how to optimize applications, which translates directly into shorter development times and performance gains. Initial Research experiments conducted on IBM System p achieved an average 18%  performance improvement on embedded application benchmarks.

In many organizations, software developers are fast becoming the nucleus of innovation, crucial to all business processes. They build the services and capabilities that will underlie future revenue and generate business opportunity. In fact, developers drive so much business value that the average enterprise devotes 30 to 50 percent of its entire technology infrastructure to the development and testing of software.

The new compiler, a result of collaboration between IBM and its partners in the European Union funded Milepost consortium, is expected to dramatically reduce time-to-market for new software designs.  Applications can now be more quickly tuned for the targeted architecture, shortening the development cycle. For example, when a company wants to develop a new mobile phone, it normally takes application developers many months to get their software running at an acceptable level of performance. Milepost GCC can reduce the amount of time it takes to reach that level by a factor of 10.

“Our technology automatically learns how to get the best performance from the hardware - whether mobile phones, desktops, or entire systems - the software will run faster and use less energy,” noted Dr. Bilha Mendelson, Manager of Code Optimization Technologies at IBM Research - Haifa. “We opened the compiler environment so it can access artificial intelligence and machine learning guidance to automatically determine exactly what specific optimizations should be used and when to apply them to ramp-up performance.”

“We’ve developed a more cost effective development process where you can choose to integrate additional functionality or use less power in your  current system,” explained Mike O’Boyle, Professor of Computer Science at the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh and Project Coordinator for Milepost. “Previously, the same devices could only support a limited list of features while still maintaining a high level of performance. Significantly boosting an application’s performance means there’s now more room for added functionality while maintaining high performance.”

As a by-product of the Milepost technology, the consortium has launched  a code-tuning web site available to the development community. Developers can upload their software code to the site and automatically get input on how to tune their code so it works faster.

The Milepost GCC compiler is available to everyone from the consortium’s website http://www.milepost.eu. The project consortium includes the IBM Haifa Research Lab, Israel; the University of Edinburgh, UK; ARC International Ltd., UK; CAPS Enterprise, France; and INRIA, France.

For more information about IBM Research, please visit http://www.research.ibm.com/.

On Thursday, a first prototype for the so-called On Board Unit was installed in a number of cars to be driven by employees of IBM and NXP. The prototype is the first of its kind for road user charging. This prototype demonstrates for the first time a technique that assigns price based on road type, time period and the environmental characteristics of the routes driven in the vehicle. Moreover, the road use fee can be displayed to the motorist in a clear and comprehensible manner. This technique makes it possible to charge each individual vehicle an ‘equitable’ fee for use of the highway network, both on main highways and secondary roads as part of a road user charging solution.

NXP and IBM have asked 50 employees who work at the High Tech Campus in Eindhoven to test the system for 6 months. Each participant will have an On Board Unit in his or her car that registers all trips and assigns a price for each trip. Using a secured web site, participants can see what route they have taken, how much this route costs them and whether their choice of route has led to lower costs or not. During the second phase of the test, the driver can travel outside rush hours or use a cheaper route between his residence and work site, which results in a lower price. A competitive aspect is introduced by rewarding those employees who change their driving habits most effectively. The trial is intended to demonstrate the practical application of the technique and to make employees aware that different driving habits will lead to considerable differences in driving expenses in the future.

In Belgium discussions have begun with the city of Leuven for a potential test. In Stockholm, a similar road user charging system is already in place

The All England Lawn Tennis Club (AELTC) and IBM today unveiled smart mobile applications designed to transform how fans access information and keep up with the action at Wimbledon 2009.  

The Seer Android Beta is an innovative application being trialled at Wimbledon 2009, that takes a live video feed from the handset’s camera, and superimposes content and data associated with various points of interest into that video stream.

From tennis to food courts, points of interest throughout the Wimbledon grounds have been plotted using GPS.  By making use of the T-Mobile G1’s digital compass and precise GPS coordinates, the application offers a ‘heads up display’ to show the user what they are looking at. It augments this with other live data from the scoring systems and IBM scouts reporting from around the grounds, to give the user a comprehensive and dynamic insight into their surroundings. For instance, pointing the camera lens towards a court will not only identify the court number, but also display details about the current and subsequent matches.

Seer Android Beta users can also use the phones’ Map view, which pinpoints their location on a detailed map of the grounds, and can be used as a way finder. The Timeline view is an aggregation of news feeds and updates from IBM scouts, and allows users to see in real-time what is happening around the site.  And a handy ‘Radar’ function indicates the user’s current position and nearby points of interest within range.

The Seer Aggregator is a Twitter application that aggregates all Wimbledon based content into one channel.  It’s a straightforward but intuitive way for fans to make sense of all the action taking place during the two weeks of the tournament.  With its easy-to-use filtering menu system, fans onsite at Wimbledon and around the world can tune into the information that interests them the most.

IBM scouts will be onsite throughout the duration of the tournament providing firsthand accounts and real-time updates regarding queues, seat availability, taxis, general travel information, live match updates and order of play.

The Twitter Aggregator will work with most Java-enabled mobile handsets and is available for download from www.wimbledon.org/ibm from 22 June, 2009.  These tweets will also be available to all Twitter users at www.twitter.com/IBMScout.