Forget Deep Blue; IBM Labs does mashups, wikis, Second Lives

Computerworld - SAN JOSE -- IBM's research achievements are legendary: the hard drive; DRAM; the relational database; DES data encryption; Deep Blue, the chess-playing supercomputer; Blue Gene, its DNA-simulating descendant; and two Nobel Prizes. It also holds the most patents of any company worldwide for the 14th straight year.

Still, IBM's reputation as a research powerhouse was starting to slip ever so slightly. While the company had twice as many IT-related patents last year as Microsoft Corp., according to independent research firm The Patent Board, Microsoft's patents were judged to have more industry impact.

More importantly, all the action seemed to be shifting to Web 2.0, where younger, more nimble companies, including Google Inc., were leading the way. One IBM scientist recalled going to a research conference last year and standing by bemusedly while Google researchers were peppered with post-lecture questions and swarmed by eager job-seeking graduate students.

Dan Wardman, vice president of information management and mainframe software and manager at IBM's Silicon Valley Lab in San Jose, said he doesn't keep track of what Google researchers are up to. But the longtime IBM veteran, who manages about 2,200 researchers and engineers, said IBM has made deep changes to its research culture in the last several years.

The fruits of those changes were on display Wednesday at an event for journalists and analysts called "Made in IBM Labs Day" that showcased several dozen research projects cooking in the research lab.

While some of the projects are in areas more traditional to IBM, such as content management, data mining or storage management, most were newfangled, sexier applications that would not look out of place in the portfolio of a Sand Hill Road-based venture capitalist.

Min Yin, a researcher at IBM's Almaden Research Center, also in San Jose, showed off software called FonePal that hopes to solve the problem of callers seeking customer service getting lost in "touch-tone hell." Callers who register their phone number with an instant messaging ID can view a Web page-like version of the phone menu on their computer screen while they are on the phone. That allows them to quickly skim all of the choices and navigate through a phone or PC keyboard. That cuts down on routing time and errors, Yin said, and improves customer satisfaction.

Steve Watt, a researcher based at IBM's facility in Austin, demonstrated a "mashup" or custom, Web-based application called QEDWiki, which stands for quick, easily developed wiki. It allows a nontechnical employee -- think a business analyst -- to quickly combine various data sources, such as RSS feeds, sales results, weather forecasts, and generate Excel-like results that can be graphically represented on a Google map.