So IBM's premier social business event, Lotusphere 2011, is now fully underway.

Who better to get things started than Hollywood legend Kevin Spacey: few have done a better job of capturing the zeitgeist. Whether it's a portrait of middle-aged, middle-America ennui in American Beauty or producing the Aaron Sorkin-scripted dissection of the rise and rise of Facebook ('The Social Network'), Kevin Spacey is a man with his proverbial finger on the pulse. (If you missed it, I can recommend his recent appearance on the Colbert Report). “Stay open and listen to other's points of view” is one of his takeaways.

Key themes from this year's opening:

Marketing page creation

The energetic Brian Cheng shows off some of the powerful new features of Lotus Connections 3 (LC3) for building an external web presence. Drag-and-drop functionality allows a marketer to build a web landing page on the fly - fully incorporating those social features demanded by the market today. You can even see how the experience will be for someone who is logged in to the community (eg. maybe they see their network connections and have the ability to comment on specific parts of the page) versus what a new visitor will see. Full integration with Coremetrics and SugarCRM means you have can see instantly just how well the page is performing.

Interesting development from Lotus Connections given its general perception as an intranet tool. Will we see a further crumbling of the iron curtain that separates the intranet from the external presence of an organization? 

The mobile experience

As mobile usage continues to soar, we demand more of our web applications to be accessible from our smart phones as we wait in line for our Chai Tea Latte. This morning we see multiple demonstrations of just how LC3 performs in the mobile space. Cheng shows how marketing pages created with the Customer Experience Suite can have a specific look for a specific device (in this case demonstrating how the site will appear on an iPad). We also see how presentations shared within LC3 can also be viewed via a Blackberry app. The Sametime messaging system will have mobile support, making it easier to get on the phone when your Sametime instant-messaging chat conversation goes south.

Video support

During the demo, the Lotus Connections team show new web-based video capabilities integrated with enterprise communications systems like Polycom. For instance, video conferencing a la Skype can be embedded directly into the page of a presentation, creating a more interactive experience. The team showcases web-based video so there is no need for the installation of any plugins. Not quite sure what technology underpins this but there is the announcement of a big commitment to HTML5 in the later press conference (yey!). 

Sub-communities

So you want to organize your communities by brand, function, department, etc. LC 3 now supports sub-communities so that you can group together related networks. All settings (including permissions) can be defined at the sub-community level. So, for instance, you can use one sub-community to surface part of a project for external stakeholders whilst keeping the internal workflows more private.

Integration of mail and social

Activity streams can be woven into the mail experience (regardless of mail server) so a user can see all conversation in a single interface. No doubt this will continue to grow and form the segue of modern corporate communications, especially amongst the younger workforce who relate to email the way I relate to fax technology.

So, a lot to look forward to in the next three days in Orlando as IBM's vision of social business unfolds.

Be sure to check out the live stream recording and live blogging from ReadWriteWeb.

Photo courtesy of Jacques Pavlenyi.

#LS11

Collaboration, social networking, disruptive technologies, social media… the list goes on. Lotusphere is IBM’s premier event dealing with this emerging space where technology intersects with people intersects with business.

The event takes place from Jan 30 – Feb 3 in that last vestige of sunshine at this time of year: Orlando, Florida.

As you’d expect for a conference covering all things social, there are a number of ways to connect if you can’t make it down there this year.

Definitely check out the social media aggregator pulling together relevant content from blogs, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. If you are planning on generating one iota of content around the event, register and remember to use #LS11 or #LotusKnows  in your blog posts/tweets to bask in the social glow this aggregator provides.

For the big announcements, keep an eye on the Livestream channel which will be broadcasting highlights from across the conference.

For the extended community (albeit in Twitter, YouTube, Facebook…), the developerWorks team have done an excellent job of putting together a community page.

Let’s face it, Orlando’s a fitting place for a conference on social business: this has to be one of the ‘hottest’ areas of the tech industry right now.

#LS11

Over on the IBM Software Blog, Cognos Product Marketing Manager Brendan Farnand explains just why business intelligence solutions from Cognos have a place at the Lotusphere social business event:

"Everyone involved in a decision or a solution needs to know who else is involved, what transpired before they were asked to contribute and what other ideas are out there for that decision or solution."

Business intelligence shouldn't happen in isolation. As I've pointed out before, many reports from sales figures to customer service levels have added value if key constituents can comment on the results and define follow-up actions. Pairing key functions from the Lotus suite with Cognos Business intelligence allows exactly that:

As I won't be at Lotusphere this year, I'm looking forward to following Brendan on Twitter. 

If you can't make it to Lotusphere, check out this Tech Talk webinar where Brendan highlights Cognos' built-in collaboration and social networking functionality.

In a recent article in Vertical Systems Reseller (VSR), Mike Riegel, VP IBM Developer Relations highlights the importance of mobile and cloud computing. Drawing on research in the 2010 IBM Tech Trends Survey of IT professionals, Mike points out how these technologies are critical to clients looking to optimize their IT strategies. This in turn has significant financial implications on the technology industry:

"Gartner also predicts a huge increase in both mobile and cloud computing, with $6.2 billion expected to be spent on mobile applications and $68.3 billion in cloud computing services in 2010 alone."

Amongst those capitalizing capitalizing on these growth areas are IBM business partners.

Citysourced build civic engagement by offering a platform where an individual can record an issue in a public space, such as vandalism, flooding, graffiti, broken street lighting etc., all via an update from a mobile device. Public officials can logon to the site and respond to these messages from the community. As Citysourced Founder & Chief Architect Jason A. Kiesel points out, "Mobile computing simply offers [government and businesses] something no desktop experience can – efficiency."

He likens the current growth in mobile to the emergence of the web 15 years ago: there is an inertia and cynicism in the IT industry around mobile technology, with many still questioning whether the space is being over-hyped. The difference this time is the rate of growth and user adoption:  mobile strategy is now not seen as a "nice to have, but as a must have.".

Akros TechLabs offer secure sign-in across mobile devices for applications where security is paramount, including online banking and health care. They see cloud and mobile computing as inextricably linked: "Mobile computing doesn’t work without cloud—and we’re seeing growing acceptance of both among customers across many industries." says CEO Sid Prasanna. Many apps developed for hand-held devices rely on cloud services - differing from the PC paradigm where most applications are run locally.

As our world becomes more interconnected, mobile and cloud computing applications are becoming commonplace throughout our lives. IBM business partners are playing a vital role in this evolution.

Read about more IBM partners in the Vertical Systems Reseller article.

2011 is quite a year for IBM. It marks its one hundredth year as company; as a brand.

What does this mean to me. Partly a reflection on what a brand means. Especially as I’m one of the newer entrants and wasn’t around when Big Blue was busy innovating punch card systems, typewriters, mainframes and the PC. Coming from an acquisition which only completed in the last two years, I have a much more recent relationship to the IBM eight-bar logo.

I was part of the web team that hoisted that infamous logo onto our website (before we transitioned over to the IBM.com domain for real) and from one point of view, that really was the extent of the change. Our teams remained intact and the day-to-day duties of the marketing organization remained largely unchanged: we had to continue our efforts of guiding prospects interested in our technologies. As always, we bemoaned the poor decisions of upper management and whined about the inflexibility of our business tools and processes, but now we just had a new object for our venom. So at one level I’d say the change has been superficial. A rebranding feels like little more than painting the lounge. Or a fresh application of lipstick. I had worked for a relatively large technology company. Now I work for a very large technology company.

But a brand goes beyond that.

It exists in our culture; our imagination. Hell, even my next door neighbor (an early-retired teacher) launched into an anecdote of how when he was studying at college he produced his essays on a shoestring budget by cobbling together bits of second hand IBM Selectrics typewriters he picked up at garage sales into one workable machine.

Currently IBM is driving a concerted push to create a ‘Smarter Planet’. I originally had my doubts around this campaign given my background in search marketing – we normally look to the market to find keywords to chase that fit our business objectives. This all felt a bit backwards. At the time (two years ago) ‘smarter planet’ didn’t even register as a search term. No one was talking about it.

I had yet to see the power of a major brand in exerting thought leadership.

Promotions appeared everywhere: from major newspapers to airports. But this was more than just an advertising campaign – internal business projects got on board too. This has given birth to such wonders as a machine that can compete at Jeopardy.

What has been the result? The Smarter Planet initiative is still very much a work in progress but just take a look at how search volumes have mushroomed on Google:

(click on image for more details)

The concept of a ‘smarter planet’ is now in our consciousness (or at least our Google-brain).

This level of cohesion and singularity is even more astounding given the dispersed nature of the IBM workforce. There are very few big hubs and campuses: around half of the workforce work remotely. This leaves little scope for water-cooler discussions but rather a heavy use of telecoms and social computing to bring teams together over teleconferences, screen share sessions or even ‘idea jams’ (short-term online discussion forums covering a set topic).

Internal communications also bleeds out onto the external web. As analyst Charlene Li points out in Open Leadership, “In 2005, IBM led the way… as one of the first companies to put in place blogging guidelines” and in December Mashable listed IBM as one of the top four companies to work for if you’re a social media professional. The nature of the organization has created the demand for social computing. Being one of the homeworkers, I’ll often find out about IBM initiatives through platforms such as Twitter.

So, it’s funny to think that with humble roots in the meat chopping business, IBM is now a global B2B technology force with an indelible print on our culture stretching back 100 years. And it continues to leave its mark: whether it’s easing congestion in major cities as part of the smarter planet initiative, or creating a large social media footprint. And I get to play my small part in this evolving story.

Daryl Pereira is a web and social media manager at IBM who tweets from his little corner of the B2B technology industry @cagedether. For more on the IBM Centennial, search Twitter for #ibm100

Let's start with the obvious: this is the opinion of one mere human. Someone who would fail miserably at the US quiz show Jeopardy: it's that 'start-with-the-answer' approach that just screws me up every time. Not being a native of this soil, I claim it's just not part of my DNA.

But an IBM supercomputer called Watson (which was indeed conceived on US soil) appears to be performing awfully well at the contest and as such is causing a lot of media attention, much of it centered around the whole field of artificial intelligence (AI) and IBM's involvement in this area.

As PC World reports, Watson overcame two Jeopardy all-time champs in a practice round recently. How does it do this? The silicon contestant has read countless encyclopedias and other tomes, contains natural language processing capabilities and can even determine how confident it is in its response. Couple this with industry-leading computational power and you have one efficient competitor.

IBM has a history in the development of pitting computers against humans on the cerebral battlefield. In the late 'nineties, Deep Blue defeated chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov (although Kasparov disputes that he was indeed beaten). However the team behind the Watson project are quick to point out that the level of computing required to deal with the high-level semantic reasoning they are up against is different to the logic-bound nature of chess. Chess is a game of limited moves on an 8x8 grid; Jeopardy a game of infinite words.

I can't help but think back to my Philosophy of the Mind classes where we studied the Turing test - that black box approach to measure AI proposed by Alan Turing in the 50s. Sometimes called the 'imitation game', the concept was that if someone could ask questions to a black box and not discern whether a computer or a person was inside, you could attribute intelligence to the machine on a par to that which us humans enjoy. This Stanford article does a good job of discussing the Turing Test and its objections in some detail.

One objection that stands out is that of origination: could a computer do more than just perform tasks (or deal with questions) set by humans? In the case of Watson, it was a team of people within IBM Research that came up with the idea to build a supercomputer to compete in Jeopardy. The motivations? Showcase technology. A fun work-related project. Team-building. The question is whether a computer could have had the 'wisdom' (foolhardiness) to come up with the idea of the project in the first place.

I'd suggest this level of decision-making is a quantum leap beyond the semantic analysis of IBM Watson.

Jonah Lehrer, in the provocatively-titled Proust was a Neuroscientist, uses the filter of art to illustrate what neuroscience is uncovering about the complexity of our intelligence. Within the poetry of Walt Whitman you find the idea that feelings and emotions are born in our bodies, not our minds:

"Antonio Damascio, a neuroscientist who has done extensive work on the etiology of feeling, calls this process the body loop. In his view the mind stalks the flesh; from our muscles we steal our moods."

You can't separate our thought process from our bodily existence. This could be a problem for a computer lacking flesh and bones.

I don't just bring this up in the vein of being a contrarian or mean-spirited towards what is quite an astounding piece of computing. I think there is a message here that relates to the technology at the core of Watson: business analytics.

Decision-making within the enterprise happens at different levels and business analytics doesn't necessarily apply at all of those. For instance, business analytics is ideal at helping a marketer pinpoint prospects who might be interested in a particular offer. It's less good at determining whether that same marketer should run a conference program if they've never run one before. We're still not close to being able to automate that intuitive part of the decision-making process in business.

Last year I sat in a discussion around decision management and heard from a product marketing manager that a barrier to adoption of business analytics systems is the fear from decision-makers that this technology will take away their jobs (the very same people who normally sign the check on these kinds of purchases). This would suggest we in the field of business analytics need to do a better job of explaining that there are some decisions that can be automated and others that cannot. Business analytics consists of a set of tools that us humans can use to make smarter decisions, but like all tools, it has limits.

So whilst IBM Watson shows what computers can achieve in the human realm, it's worth bearing in mind (no pun intended) that computers pose little threat to the human realm. The Jeopardy contest that is coming up on February 14 is a battle of one computer against 2 humanoids. If Watson wins, we're not talking about the dawn of a new era where Jeopardy is played out by tin robots bearing the IBM insignia. We are talking about a triumph of a technology that has applications in healthcare and customer service and beyond - a technology that remains a tool in the hands of us mere humans.

More about IBM Watson, including some wonderful videos on its construction

(Image courtesy of The Doctor Fun Archive)

The canonical view in corporate marketing is that you start high level at strategy and then work your way down onto tactics and execution. There are domains where this approach can rapidly desintigrate. Like social media.

For years I preached the message so eloquently spelled out by Forrester’s Josh Bernoff in Groundswell: work out a plan where technology doesn’t figure until right at the end, eg  the ‘POST’ approach:

P-eople
O-bjectives
S-trategy
T-echnology

I’ve sat through countless social media planning sessions where choirs of field and web marketing pros rabidly discuss social aspects to marketing campaigns or even social media programs they are looking to adopt. I’ve seen detailed strategy documents, audience demographic analysis, competitive analysis and detailed rollout schedules.

All wonderful works of fiction. An amazing number of these never turn into anything more meaningful than blogs that live no longer than fairground goldfish or Twitter accounts that stealthily limp along with monthly tweets.

Last week I sat down to talk social media strategy with a local team with trepidation: I could see myself going down a path I’d been down before.

But something out of the ordinary happened.

Within minutes we wandered into heretical geekdom and started scribbling down the relative merits of various social media platforms. We went through some of the capabilities of the blogging platform at our disposal. Other possibilities for blogging include Posterous and Tumblr which are great for mobile access. When it came to Twitter, I explained the success we’ve seen with the curation/syndication model. We talked video: we have a member of the team that is a big Justin.tv fan so we may as well leverage what he’s building there.

After about an hour we had mapped out a landscape of our social media properties, come up with a plan to link them together and were ready to talk about what kind of content we ideally should chase. Everything in me was telling me that we were putting the tactical cart way before the strategic horse. But somehow I felt we’d come closer to a workable plan in this hour than I’d ever have expected (although obviously the proof is in the proverbial pudding and I’ll report back on how this works out).

There’s an aspect of social media that doesn’t necessarily apply to other areas of marketing. That’s the principle that if you don’t have passion in your area of interest, really don’t bother. Not least because of the level of engagement required. Even though I’m in one of the most privileged places to practice social media, for most employees social media effectively needs to be a part time hobby until you can build a following and break out on your own. The gold dust lies in finding those that are already hooked and milk them for all they’re worth.

So even if you are confident that you have an audience you can engage with in the blogosphere, and a clear objective and content strategy, don’t set up a new blog until you have an individual or team with a proven track record, or who at least are chomping at the bit and can stump up some posts upfront to show they are committed.

Ditch the strategy and follow the lead of your foot soldiers instead.

There – I’ve said it. And like flatulence in a place of worship, you may find that you irk the establishment, create titters in the crowd and feel an initial embarrassment. But you’re being human. And in the social media space, that’s generally what you need to win.

Daryl Pereira is a web and social media manager at IBM and a profane Catholic who tweets from his little corner of the B2B tech universe @cagedether.

(image courtesy of Slimbolala)

Developing for a fragmented environment will always be a challenge, but few application environments are as fragmented as the mobile space. Whilst Apple's iPhone and iPad are stealing the bulk of the limelight, according to recent comScore figures, Apple has less than 10% of the total mobile market. Users are spread across Samsung, LG, Motorola, RIM, amongst other providers.

This obviously presents a major headache if you are looking to get your app into the hands of as many users as possible. For instance, if you are developing for the Android OS (the #2 smartphone in the US), you can use the generic emulator that ships with the Android SDK to roughly know what the app will look like. But do you know how the app will perform on the multitude of devices that each have their own distinct flavor - say the HTC Incredible or the Samsung Galaxy S or the Motorola Droid?

Netflix, the US video rental service, recently encountered this problem and states this as one of the reasons it is delaying its Android launch, claiming that having to work with each individual handset manufacturer "is a much slower approach and leads to a fragmented experience on Android, in which some handsets will have access to Netflix and others won't." Bottom line: there isn't just one mobile space, but literally hundreds split across multiple operating systems, devices and networks. Testing and deploying across all of these is not easy.

DeviceAnywhere offers developers a solution to run tests across every major device out there: and see exactly what the end user will experience on each device. Walmart, Target, Amazon and Disney are among some of the companies who have already jumped on board to test their mobile applications.

So how does the solution work? The DeviceAnywhere team have effectively hard-wired the input/output of every major mobile device up to a server.

Using their client software, a developer anywhere in the world can access a device and push buttons, tap touch screens, simulate open, close and flip activities, remove the battery, and have the audio and video feedback from a device, all from the comfort of their own workstation. The service doesn’t just stop at phones. DeviceAnywhere are also keeping abreast of the growth in tablet devices – for instance you can even control the Apple iPad using the software:

Given the prominence of a wide range of tablets at this year’s Computer Electronics Show (CES), expect to see increasing interest in this area.

Tests can be scripted and automated and scheduled to run at intervals, and complex interactions involving multiple devices (e.g. mobile-to-mobile chat), looping and/or branching logic, or data-driven scripts are also supported. With servers located across the globe, developers can see how their apps will perform in different locations, much to the delight of Juan Carlos Gonzálvez, Managing Director of Games at Zed:

"We can now test on more devices in more locations, where it wouldn’t have been cost-effective or practical before DeviceAnywhere. As a result, our whole Quality Assurance program is more robust and efficient than before. We are also realizing significant cost-savings because we no longer have to maintain a large bank of mobile devices for testing."

Integration with Rational Quality Manager for testing across multiple platforms

DeviceAnywhere is integrated with Rational Quality Manager (RQM), allowing developers to test their applications on real mobile devices from within the Rational environment. All results from tests on mobile devices (script steps, test pass or fail results) are tracked by RQM and available through the RQM interface. This is particularly useful if you develop across different environments – for instance if you have an app with a web and mobile interface.

Integration with Tivoli Netcool

Ensuring that wireless services are constantly available is becoming increasingly important to businesses and consumers. Whilst this is true of any deployment environment, the problem is aggravated in the mobile realm with more points of failure (eg. a network may be down, device hardware conflicts may occur or software can crash). The MonitorAnywhere service from DeviceAnywhere lets businesses monitor mobile services and applications on devices across the globe around-the-clock. Integrating this service with the Tivoli Netcool Dashboard provides real-time alerts and notifications of failures and service level agreement (SLA) violations. Using this technology, you can detect issues with the delivery of mobile applications before your users do and minimize downtime.

Summary

As more and more applications are developed in the mobile space, testing and monitoring the end-user experience across multiple devices and networks becomes increasingly important. DeviceAnywhere offer solutions to take risk out of the mobile application development process. Add on IBM technologies and you can extend these solutions further into the areas of testing on multiple platforms and monitoring availability.

CIO article: Disaster-Proof Your Mobile App Before Rollout

More on Rational/Tivoli/DeviceAnywhere solutions on PartnerWorld and in this demo