IBM

IBM patenting the fine art of patent trolling?

IBM is perhaps the most aggressive patent machine on the planet. In a move reported by The Register today, IBM has now taken a step beyond the pale (again) and sought to patent the art of squeezing profits from patent portfolios, otherwise known as patent trolling.

A filing at the U.S. Patent Office, entitled "system and method for extracting value from a portfolio of assets" stages a landgrab on the thoroughly original idea of letting other people use your ideas.

IBM's intellectual property carpet baggers describe the invention as "obtaining an interest in selected assets from the portfolio to a client who lacks the resources to accumulate and maintain such a portfolio, in return for an annuity stream to the portfolio owner." Or, en Anglais, patent licensing.… Read more

More than 100 times faster than Wi-Fi?

Radio scientists at IBM Research and MediaTek are teaming up to develop a wireless transmission protocol that will deliver files more than 100 times faster than Wi-Fi.

The idea is to take advantage of the 60GHz spectrum, according to Mehmet Soyuer, the lead researcher on the project, who is based in IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. These chips will be able to transfer files at around 2.5 gigabits per second, compared with the 11 to 54 megabits of Wi-Fi. Hence the 100 times faster calculation, Soyuer said.

Put another way, these chips … Read more

Cool Web front-end for multiple virtual world entry

SAN JOSE, Calif.--I was walking around the Virtual Worlds conference here this afternoon when I ran into Jerry Paffendorf, the co-author of the Metaverse Roadmap report and the current co-founder of a stealth start-up called Wello Horld.

Paffendorf knows all, and so I eagerly asked him what was the best thing he'd seen at the show.

Without hesitating, he pointed me over to a small corner of the expo floor and to the little booth of a skunkworks project called inDuality developed by a company called Pelican Crossing and another known as IBM.

Well, when I finally found … Read more

IBM updates mash-up builder for businesspeople

IBM released on Tuesday a tool that it says will let businesspeople, rather than professional programmers, build their own Web applications.

Called the the Mashup Starter Kit, it is an updated version of QEDWiki tool. The starter kit lets people view and access Web information and company databases in order to build mash-ups--applications that combine information from different sources in a single screen.

IBM, which sells to corporate customers, sees a lot of potential in giving businesspeople the ability to build their own applications via tapping into various information sources.

For example, an insurance agent could combine internal rate information … Read more

IBM, Google detail joint initiative

IBM and Google on Monday released details on their "academic cluster computing initiative" to provide data centers for remote computer programming.

The centers would allow a larger number of students and programmers to have access and processing power for writing software code involving massive amounts of data over the Internet, a practice known as "cloud computing."

The program, which is already under way at the University of Washington, will also be rolled out at Carnegie-Mellon University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Maryland. IBM and … Read more

VMware and the mainframe

Enterprise Strategy Group's resident expert on all things server virtualization, Mark Bowker, tells me that there were 15,000 people at VMworld a few weeks ago. Not a surprise, the industry is gaga over server virtualization as more users look to turn physical servers into consolidated virtual partitions.

The irony here is that while the server virtualization chatter focuses on VMware, Xen, Citrix, and Microsoft, the venerable IBM zSeries (i.e. mainframe) will likely be one of the biggest beneficiaries of this virtualization frenzy.

The reason for this is fairly simple. Server virtualization is all about rationalizing IT assets … Read more

Open source, the US military, and fighting off open-source threats

I've long been a reader of The Atlantic, and found this article highly interesting. The article talks about how the US military can defeat an open-source insurgency, and actually has direct implications for proprietary software vendors who are trying to stave off threats from open-source software vendors.

John Robb (not the Zimbra John Robb, alas :-) writes:

After four painful years, the US military has stumbled upon...the only model for fighting a mature open source insurgency: a decentralized model of security that forgoes centralized defense/police forces in favor of a plethora of independent militias. The success of this model in reducing violence (at least in the short term) in Anbar province, has led to its replication in other provinces.… Read more

IBM seeks to patent...offshoring (???)

Oh, my. Sometimes the cheek of the proprietary world just becomes a tad too much. That's what I thought when I read this on CIO.com about IBM attempting to patent offshoring. You know, that practice that requires hefty innovation and a large investment of time and R&D dollars?

At times it's depressing to live in the United States when such buffoonery is commonplace.

Stephanie Overby at CIO.com writes:

Those new to the world of IT services might be taken aback by a vendor bold enough to propose that it had invented this unique process called "offshoring." Those familiar with IBM know it?s just another day at the office.… Read more

Out-Googling Google, a la Krugle

Krugle has been silent for the past year. I was actually worried that the company had fizzled out, but--as I learned from Laura Merling today--nothing could be further from the truth:

We released the Enterprise product as GA, with 16 substantial companies (most are Fortune 100 or Fortune 500) that are now using it. No one will give us our evaluation search appliance back! Even those who are just evaluating our product refuse to drop Krugle once they've started using it. They've been providing their use cases to us to help us improve our services.

Krugle is doing well, in part, because it's done a good job of figuring out how to profit from open source, even when it, in itself, is not open source:… Read more

How to implement SEO at a mega-corporation

Oftentimes, SEO is much easier to accomplish within a small company. It's hard to be nimble when working at a behemoth.

When I talk about items like title tags, URL structures, meta descriptions and canonical URLs, it sounds all quite logical and seems prudent to implement, doesn't it? Well imagine, what it must take for a company like IBM--whose myriad divisions and business units span 90 countries and over 30 languages--to make even the slightest SEO enhancement.

It's a big deal.

To find out more about what it's like to chip away at SEO (search engine … Read more