I first heard about IBM’s challenge to build a computer system which could compete at the game of Jeopardy. Knowing the types of questions, the many ways the clues are hidden in the questions, and the enormous breadth of categories, I was definitely curious to see the path of the work. It’s here. It’s called Watson. And it’s VERY COOL.

The producers of “Jeopardy!” have agreed to pit Watson against some of the game’s best former players as early as this fall. To test Watson’s capabilities against actual humans, I.B.M.’s scientists began holding live matches last winter. They mocked up a conference room to resemble the actual “Jeopardy!” set, including buzzers and stations for the human contestants, brought in former contestants from the show and even hired a host for the occasion.

Technically speaking, Watson wasn’t in the room. It was one floor up and consisted of a roomful of servers working at speeds thousands of times faster than most ordinary desktops. Over its three-year life, Watson stored the content of tens of millions of documents, which it now accessed to answer questions about almost anything. (Watson is not connected to the Internet; like all “Jeopardy!” competitors, it knows only what is already in its “brain.”)

source: New York Times article

How Watson works is a great read. Watson is not infallible. As noted in the NYT article, one day it won four of six games and another day it won only three of seven games and in one case, had no winnings at all.

When Watson is playing a game, Ferrucci lets the audience peek into the computer’s analysis. A monitor shows Watson’s top five answers to a question, with a bar graph beside each indicating its confidence. Ferrucci’s team has programmed Watson generally not to buzz until it arrives at an answer with a high confidence level.

source: New York Times article

I have no desire to play Jeopardy against Watson … because I’m not very good at Jeopardy. But I am looking forward to watching the game!

I’ve been told that in the broadcast media, there are contract clauses that stipulate what ads can run side by side. For instance, if you are Honda, you probably don’t want the TV network running a Toyota Prius ad right next to your Civic Hybrid spot.

I’m guessing the same rules do not apply to web advertising. I don’t think it was coincidence that sitting right next to the article about IBM/Lotus Sametime telephony integration was a video ad spot for Microsoft VoIP. Something tells me the marketing guys are both sides will get an earful – The blue team may want to call in sick while the red team is probably getting high-fives.

Here is what my desktop looks like …

I am running Lotus Notes 8.01 (basic) with a little template tweaking to give me my 7 day calendar on the left. I then have places Sametime 8 *and* Sametime 8.0.1 on the right – each with different plug-ins and logged into different communities.

Eventually I’ll switch everything to Sametime 8.0.1 once our company enables support for it.

BuddyPress – A Wordpress MU Based Social Network Platform – will transform a vanilla installation of WordPress MU into a social network platform, something that represents more of a community building tool, or niche social network.

BuddyPress removes the main focus of WordPress MU away from blogs, moving it more towards the actual member themselves. A BuddyPress installation consists of a main community home page, which could either be an actual blog, or a syndication of all the activity of the community members.

BuddyPress contains all the features you�d expect from WordPress but aims to let members socially interact. The standard features of BuddyPress include: Extended Profiles,Personal Blog,Private Messaging, Friends, Groups, The Wire, Status Updates, and Albums. As each one is a separate plugin, admins can�t pick and choose which components they want and don�t want (or add new plugins).

The idea of an open source extensible social network solution has a lot of potential. I don’t think it would replace a Facebook or a MySpace service primarily because of scale. But it could be very applicable to groups or companies wanting to deploy their own social networking solution.

Editorial: Personally, I’m not sure why one of the big enterprise software companies has not done an open source social software offering. The basic features of social software are pretty boring so why try to sell those. The interesting bits are the multitude of directions the software can expand. And software companies are all about the 80% base not the 20% uniqueness. Plus, the meat and potatoes is the database and the application server and all that other IT gobbly gook. Open source the social software and sell scalable databases, storage, etc. At least that’s my take of things.

Anyway, with the combination of the very stable and tested WordPress codebase anchoring BuddyPress, I expect we’ll see a number of plugins developed to extend the feature set.

I’ve been curious when MySQL would be acquired. I have read a number of accounts that it would not happen and MySQL AB would rather go public. I bought most of the arguments in favor of those rumors and had a few arguments of my own. First, I could not see MySQL being bought by one of the large database providers. There would be too much risk that the openness of MySQL would be lost or at the very least not as trusted. Next, none of the large database companies truly get open source and the necessary business model behind it. So, the Sun announcement was very interesting to me because it addresses both of those concerns. Sun is not a big database company so MySQL is not likely to be subsumed and lost. Further, Sun has proven it can make a business with open source technology. It’s Linux platform is a good example (and hopefully Java will be too one day).

More interesting is what a Solaris + MySQL package could mean. In the WebOS ecosystem, this union bumps Sun further up the evolutionary tree. Late last year, Red Hat announced the inclusion of virtualization technology into the core. At the same time, Red Hat and Amazon announced its intent to use Red Hat for “Amazon Web Services” and its elastic computer (or cloud computing or CPUs for hire, however you like to look at it). the Amazon+RedHat alliance moved that partnership up the evolutionary tree.

So that begs the question, where does this leave the other big players like Google, Facebook, and [Sales]Force.com not to forget the current generation giants. That could well be the billion dollar question (or as Carl Sagan might say, “billions and billions”).

In a word – “Yes”.

It turns out it only takes a mild obsession to figure out how to get IBM’s Mobility Connect client (aka Lotus Mobile Connect) to run on an OLPC XO. the steps – as best as I can remember are:

1. copy all of the IBMwc*.rpm files to a USB stick
2. insert the stick in one of the OLPC USB ports (we will call this location ‘/media/USBSTICK’)
3. open the terminal activity
4. >su

   

5. #yum install perl.i386
6. #yum stdc++.so.5
7. #cd /media/USBSTICK
8. #rpm -vi gsk7bas-7.0-3.18.i386.rpm
9. #rpm -vi IBMwc-nls-6.1-1.0.i386.rpm
10. #rpm -vi IBMwc-ppp-6.1-1.0.i386.rpm
11. #rpm -vi IBMwc-https-6.1-1.0.i386.rpm
12. #rpm -vi IBMwc-6.1-1.0.i386.rpm

When you are ready to connect to the corporate network:

1. open the terminal activity
2. >su
3. #wclient

The use of “su” may not be necessary

I should note, Domino Web Access 8 is not totally happy with the OLPC Browser. I’m not sure if it is too much JavaScript, too much behind-the-scenes XML transfers and processing or what. With DWA8 ‘lite’ I was able to read mail, compose a message (but the rich text widget had a hiccup), and save the email. the “send” button did not work. Some day, while sitting on hold I’ll have to figure this out further.

The emergence of Amazon S2 & AWS , Force.com, Facebook, and Google Apps & Gmail demonstrate the viability of software applications – corporate and personal – being served via the world wide web. Before I continue, I acknowledge the evolution of software from local installations to web based services assumed high speed internet and that is not a ubiquitous fact today.

These technologies have replaced personal computer software with web versions and provide the large data center infrastructure for building the complex custom applications traditionally relegated to corporate mainframes.

So, what does this mean for the personal computer and for the corporate software vendors ? I think there are currently two answers and they divide along the lines eluded to above – “corporate applications” and “consumer software”. Let’s look at these in reverse order.

Consumer software will evolve to take advantage of web applications. While Gmail, Microsoft Live, and Google Apps can function completely from a web browser, consumers have pushed for integration rather than replacement of their existing applications. The most anticipated features of 2007 were IMAP support for GMail and mobile sync for Calendars. The web solutions for spreadsheets and word processors were integrated with Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org. The evolution of desktop applications as “front ends” to web applications is likely to be with us for a number of years with the separation of the two becoming harder and harder to distinguish.

I expect the PC software evolution to take on a “mergers and acquisitions” model for the next few years where the lines are drawn along four primary lines – communicating with (1) words, (2) numbers, (3) images, and music/video. “Mashups” will provide for the the areas between these. An example of what I mean can bee seen in the “words” category. There is little difference between the high priority features of a word processor, email client, and web page design tool. There is little reason for them to be separate solutions, rather, they just have separate “inputs” and “outputs”.

Corporate applications are another story. The human resource applications, payroll, compliance, and sales applications have long been heavily biased toward the server with very light – end users would say too lite – client experiences. This is a good characteristic for evolving to web solutions. The challenge to these systems has been dealing with growth, administration, and the fact they are “necessary evils” of business rather than the purpose of it. Every company – whether it be building and selling cars or books or ideas – needs the basic tools for managing the business. The only exception is the business that is “in business” to provide HR tools, or Sale trackign tools, or inventory and supply line tools. These companies are becoming the suppliers of the web solutions or they are partnering with those who are already web solution suppliers. Rather than let the business management necessities be a drag on the corporation, pushing them out to the web makes good sense.

In the “dot com” era, it is easy for startups to use web solutions because they had no legacy data or processes to contend with. They wanted to hit the ground running in their respective “hot markets” and not be bogged down by infrastructure. The old iron horses were not as nimble. But eventually all tools wear out and need to be replaced or upgraded and when they do, they are prime candidates for moving to the web. The “iron horses” are learning where and when to change.

This post is in some ways my “prediction” for 2008. I look forward to seeing how much of it comes true and how quickly. In thinking through some of the players in the “web applications” space I hit upon an interesting question of a statistical nature.

Which company uses more computer processing power every single second of each day on behalf of it’s customers – Microsoft, Amazon, eBay, Google, IBM, Apply, Sun, Facebook, or someone else ? For extra credit, what is the ordering – from most MIPS to least MIPS -for this group ?

So it was a big (and welcome) surprise to find not one but two groups within the company putting together distributions of the IBM desktop products for Ubuntu. One version has everything an IBMer needs and loads it is a single easy (walk away till it’s done) package. The other let’s you pick and choose – Lotus Notes 8, Sametime 7.5.1, the Lotus Mobile Connect client, Tivoli Storage Manager, and a whole lot more. There’s even a cool corporate theme. (Typically, I’m not one to use a branded theme but for all the work these groups have done, I’ll give it a try and give them some well deserved credit.)

I know what I’ll be doing one evening this weekend !