Using data collected from millions of cell-phone users, Ivory Coast in West Africa optimized its urban transportation system. An IBM model prescribed route changes around Abidjam, the nation’s largest city based on cell phone records analyzing people’s movements. Data was cleansed to prevent identification of phone users.
(via African Bus Routes Redrawn Using Cell-Phone Data | MIT Technology Review)
With its new European Data Center, IBM will help meet each customer’s unique deployment needs through flexible delivery models, including either public or private cloud or a mix of cloud and on premises.
Once live, companies can tap into IBM’s integrated social experience that includes one-click access to tools such as online meetings, email, calendaring, instant messaging and more. To further empower customers, IBM lets businesses invite external partners, clients, suppliers and more to take part in these interactions, all while meeting legal and regulatory requirements for data privacy.
For example, to improve the speed of marketing and sales execution, employees can build collaborative networks in real time, both internally and externally. With one click, employees can tap into the power of presence awareness capabilities to see if colleagues are online to chat about the plan, review the document, and engage in collaborative and concurrent real-time editing. When questions require outside input, the team can quickly invite partners, suppliers, clients and others into the community to review project work as well as other related items.
The story behind the story. In Bolzano, Italy, social services uses IBM technology to keep the elderly living independently. Producers of a short documentary explain their approach to filming.
Via Ogilvy’s Short Film Shows IBM’s Technology in Action | Adweek
… brought to you by IBM Services and Research
CTO Telecom Research Paul Bloom
GBS Digital Front Office Leader Peter Korsten
March 14. Last week, IBM CEO Ginni Rometty announced the company’s vision for what will differentiate enterprises from their competitors in the new “Era of Smart.” One of the major shifts she described is that in order to create value, organizations need to serve their customers not as a mass audience, but as individuals with personalized needs.
As the proliferation of mobile and social technologies continue to change the way we create, consume and share information, CEOs, CMOs and heads of sales are recognizing the data generated from these same applications can help them transform their organizations and interactions with their customers.
To address these opportunities, IBM Research and IBM Global Business Services have opened the IBM Customer Experience Lab that brings together the brightest and best minds from both organizations to help our clients capitalize on the proliferation of „, Continued on page 2
“Understand the social network not as your new water cooler, but as your new production line.”
Imagine this scenario: A dinner guest to The Cheesecake Factory in Louisville, Ky. informs his waiter about some funky tasting ketchup. Simultaneously, across the country in Palo Alto, Calif., a customer complains about the color and consistency of the ketchup on his burger.
Are these two scenarios related and potentially linked back to a bad batch from a supplier? And if so, will The Cheesecake Factory be able to prevent such incidences from occurring?
“You need to take structured data like a restaurant’s location and combine it with unstructured data like the color of the mustard or taste of the ketchup,” said Paul Chang, a program director for the consumer products team at IBM.
For restaurant chains with dozens of locations and hundreds of suppliers, it’s a near impossible task to maintain the consistency of ingredients. One screw up from a supplier and they risk unhappy customers, or worse still, a rogue meatball infected with horse meat.
via IBM uses ‘big data’ tech to keep horse out of your meatballs | VentureBeat
Wisdom illustrated.
Less than a year after its launch, more than 25,000 CEMEX employees use Shift, its social, internal collaboration platform, to communicate and collaborate with their colleagues around the globe. There are more than 700 blogs written by employees, including CEO Lorenzo Zambrano and the presidents of several international CEMEX divisions. In addition, Shift has spawned the creation of more than 500 work- and project-based communities.
Why did it catch on? An immediate sense of purpose in the form of five initiatives and global leadership to seed a new culture.
The most effective way to integrate external social media with a social intranet is to treat the intranet as your main hub for both. For example, IBM Connections allows you to add Twitter search widgets, integrate directly with iTunes or look up addresses via Google Maps. With the Twitter widget, users can specify hashtags they want to monitor, and it updates in real-time. Teams can use this information to help with anything from research on a specific topic or monitoring conversations around a product launch.
— Larry Bowden, IBM VP portals and web experienced, interviewed in Beta News
IBM 2012 Global Student Study: almost half find social voice through social media
Social media is exposing students to alternative ideas, philosophies and life experiences. It is also giving them an opportunity to exert influence in a much more interconnected world.
