The automotive industry has been an early user of this track and trace technology in shipping containers. According to IBM, many automotive manufacturers carry container inventories in excess of 100 million dollars. One use case is suppliers of car parts, who fill the containers with components and sub-assemblies. These are then sent to the manufacturer. A sensor with a unique serial number is attached to each container, so that manufacturers and their trading partners can track them as they move along the supply chain.

Networks of Sensors Gaining Momentum

Networks of sensors are becoming increasingly used to monitor and track things. The term Internet of Things refers to when real-world objects are connected to the Internet, for example goods in a shipping container.

It's early in the evolution of sensors, but they're already being used for a variety of tasks - such as management of water infrastructure, levee oversight management and flood control, monitoring highway traffic conditions, sensing changes in seismic activity and air quality, and more.

As IBM noted in its press release today, RFID tags (Radio Frequency Identification sensors) are becoming particularly popular for the purpose of item tracking and authentication. By 2010, IBM estimates that approximately six billion of these tags will be in circulation.

Who's Using Sensors?

Other than automobile manufacturers, IBM told us that about 7-8 other industries are using this kind of sensor technology to track and trace goods. An example is the medical industry, where InfoSphere Traceability Server is used by hospitals and doctors to keep track of the medical devices implanted in individual patients.

A specific example cited by IBM is a company called Implanet, which sells medical implants such as hips and knees. It attaches RFID tags to the device packaging, allowing hospitals to scan a tag and store information about an implant with the patient's records.

As well as tracking and trace use cases, IBM's software is used by pharmaceutical distributors and manufacturers to combat counterfeiting.

Image credits: runner310; jdnx

IBM told ReadWriteWeb that when 4G becomes common place in mobile phones, then apps such as Breadcrumbs will become more powerful and be readily used on-the-fly by consumers when grocery shopping.

The larger trend here is the convergence of smart phones with the Internet of Things (i.e. Internet-connected real world objects). Devices such as the iPhone essentially become sensor and RFID readers, which allow consumers to interact with real world objects in a much more detailed manner.

Breadcrumbs is a glimpse of what we'll see in the near future, when information will literally - finally - be at the consumer's fingertips when they're shopping for groceries or any other goods where data is plentiful. Up till now, data such as product recall information has largely been inaccessible to consumers - at least when at the grocery store.

In the long term expect to see apps like Breadcrumbs provide data on where and when food items get consumed, together with how long they were on the shelf before being consumed. Apps like Breadcrumbs may even be able to tell who consumed the items (privacy advocates, start your engines!). These apps will also be useful in determining counterfeit items, for example when buying an expensive luxury good.

The date that Breadcrumbs will be launched on iPhone has not yet been announced by IBM.

Should Google be worried? Some analysts think so. "This is trouble for Google," said Matthew Cain of Gartner. Google of course, disagrees.

Google, whose online suite of applications is collectively known as Google Apps, has been making steady inroads in the business world with offerings tailored to schools, nonprofits, SMBs, and the enterprise. The company currently touts 15 million Apps users in nearly 2 million companies worldwide. Marketed as a less expensive and easier-to-manage alternative to on-site systems like Microsoft Exchange, the suite has encouraged many companies to switch to their hosted solution, mainly due to ever-decreasing IT budgets which have left penny-pinching companies scrambling to find ways to cut costs.

However, pitting iNotes against Google Apps isn't exactly a fair "apples to apples" comparison. That's because iNotes' focus is just email, calendaring, and contact management. Google Apps, on the other hand, is a more comprehensive suite that includes Google Docs, an online office suite, an intranet-building tool called Google Sites, and much more. Also, iNotes only provides 1 GB of storage for their product - if you want extra, you'll have to pay. Google, however, starts you off with a 25 GB inbox.

Still, since Lotus is the lower-priced solution, that alone may be enough for them to compete. Google Apps currently charges $50 per user per year but iNotes will be only $36. Those cost savings combined with the brand recognition of the IBM name will help iNotes quickly get in the game.

IBM: iNotes Delivers More Than Cost Savings, it Offers Stability

In addition to IBM's primary focus on price, the company is also taking advantage of some very public recent Gmail outages, including one which locked out corporate customers from their email for 2 hours last month, to prop up their solution as the more stable alternative. According to Poulley, IBM has a long-standing record of running "the world's mission-critical systems for banks, telcos, and utilities...We're bringing business class services and support with mission critical reliability at a price lower than the competition."

Google Responds: iNotes is No Google Apps

Google isn't taking all this lying down, though. Dave Girouard, President of Google's Enterprise division, said that Google will learn the business of selling software more quickly than IBM will adapt to cloud computing.

Andrew Kovacs, a Google spokesperson, also noted that IBM's positioning of their iNotes product seemed to be more of a complement to their on-site solutions than it was a replacement for them. With iNotes, it appears that IBM wants to supplement their current install base of Lotus Notes servers to deliver email to both deskless workers and those who didn't have email accounts already. Google Apps, on the other hand, is designed to be a complete "rip and replace" solution allowing businesses to do away with their on-site systems entirely in favor of a fully hosted cloud product.

He also pointed out that IBM's claims of reliability when it came to their iNotes product were unproven at this point. iNotes, which is based on IBM's acquisition of a Hong Kong company called Outblaze, does not appear to offer any service level agreements (SLAs)... at least it doesn't mention any on its website. IBM confirms that's the case, saying the company "has not made any specific promises regarding uptime" but that the company has a solid history of reliability. Still, without an SLA documented in black-and-white, companies, especially those in the enterprise space, are bound to be wary.

Finally, Kovacs spoke of the various ways in which Google products interoperate with other technologies used by large companies. The Google Apps system works with Microsoft Outlook, mobile phones including iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile, and Blackberry. It even integrates with Blackberry Enterprise Server and directory systems like Microsoft's Active Directory.

In the end, though, Google says they're excited about the iNotes launch as it serves as "further validation that the future of computing is in the cloud." Having a well-respected and trusted organization like IBM offer something like this will bring more visibility to cloud computing and that is something that will be good for everyone.

Two such "divining" projects include CoPhIR (Content-based Photo Image Retrieval) Test-Collection and IBM's MUFIN (Multi-Feature Indexing Network). These projects tie into SAPIR's back end by extracting data from the Flickr archive and indexing features such as scalable color, color structure, color layout, shape edges and texture.

As shown in the video of Madrid's Plaza de España, SAPIR identifies matching media in the same way that humans derive intrinsic value from visual and sensory clues. Users can also choose to combine search terms with additional text to further drill down in search results. As is the case with regular search, if you already know the city where your image was taken, you're one step closer to finding your result. Additionally, SAPIR also has the ability to index sound and video files.

While the catalogue of media is still very limited, theoretically we may one day be able to search for almost anything using this technique. If Ashton Kutcher wears a pair of sunglasses we like, we can scan the image and search for the storefronts stocking them. If we're looking for the name of a town square, we can find it in the tags of similar images. And finally, if we're looking to self-diagnose we can compare photos of ourselves against jaundice or malaria patients.

The advantage of this tool is that we may one day have a chance to collect up the disparate bits in the digital ether and identify them as useful points of information. To test SAPIR in its early research stage, visit the homepage. You may also want to test out MUFIN to compare results.

In the past ReadWriteWeb covered RFID and its rocky road to consumer adoption. Nevertheless, the enterprise market continues to find new uses for RFID. In fact, this is not the first time where RFID tags have appeared in hospitals. Companies like Wavemark have been working with health institutions to track cardiology machines and other inventory. In this particular case, because the indexing process does not require speed or long distance accuracy, Implanet makes use of IBM's RFID technologies.

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Web Trends

Getting the Goods: The New Amazon/Zappos Supply Chain Story

Beloved online shoe retailer Zappos this week announced it will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amazon, in exchange for almost a billion dollars worth of Amazon stock. Both of these companies are interesting because they have mastered making the connection between a quality online experience and physical delivery of tangible goods offline. Is this just a story of a big online shopping mall buying up a hot little online shoe store? Taking a closer look at the offline supply chain of each company indicates that there may be more to this deal.

The Wearable Internet Will Blow Mobile Phones Away

Earlier this year at the TED conference, Pattie Maes from the MIT Media Lab's Fluid Interfaces Group showcased a wearable computing system that allows users to display and interact with the Web on any surface - including the human body. The video shows the system's main developer, Pranav Mistry, taking photographs with his hand, summoning up Amazon review data onto the cover of a physical book, and more. Look out mobile phones, because in a decade's time wearable systems may be the primary means of accessing the Web.

IBM and The Internet of Things

In the Web world, you know that a trend has major traction when IBM is all over it. Like any large Internet company, Big Blue is careful about which trends it latches onto. However in the case of Internet of Things, IBM is proving itself to be an unusually early adopter. We recently spoke to Andy Stanford-Clark, a Master Inventor and Distinguished Engineer at IBM, who has hooked his house up to Twitter and is driving other Internet of Things initiatives at IBM.

New Study Finds Correlation Between Social Media and Financial Success

A new study released by enterprise wiki provider Wetpaint and the Altimeter Group shows that the brands most engaged in social media are also experiencing higher financial success rates than those of their non-engaged peers. To determine this relationship, the study focused on 100 companies from the 2008 BusinessWeek/Interbrand Best Global Brands survey and the various social media platforms they used like Facebook, Twitter, blogs, wikis, and forums.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

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New Zoho CRM Aims to Undercut Salesforce.com

With improvements to email integration and a new marketing campaign, SaaS productivity vendor Zoho is aiming its sights openly at Salesforce.com, the dominant Web-based CRM today. The "Zwitch to Zoho" name might be cheesy marketing, but the cheaper subscription price is no joke. If you want more than 5 users, Salesforce.com will cost you $65/user/month. As of this week, Zoho is offering an unlimited use CRM subscription for just $12.

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Three Steps to Building an Online Brand

This is one post/chapter in a serialized book called Startup 101. For the introduction and table of contents, please click here.

The three steps to building an online brand are:

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In the long run, only the last one matters. Enron's logo was just fine, and it got noticed, but on that last count, well...

SEE MORE STARTUPS COVERAGE IN OUR READWRITESTART CHANNEL

Web Products

How One iPhone App Could Save Public Radio

Some newspapers scrambling to survive the internet condemn websites like Google News and the Huffington Post. Aggregators, they say, need to pay for the right to point to a newspaper's site. Public radio stations, on the other hand, face competition from the internet as well and are just as competitive between themselves as they are collaborative. Somehow, they've responded differently to new media. There may be no better example of that than an iPhone application built by several large public radio organizations and called Public Radio Player.

Will Google Chrome OS Bring Us the Mythical GDrive?

Last week, Google announced some interface changes to their Google Docs service that are designed to make finding your files easier. The changes are relatively minor - the "shared with" list has gone away, there's a new "Sharing" menu, and you now have the ability to save your searches - but that hasn't stopped some bloggers from theorizing that the shiny new UI is bringing us one step closer to the often theorized, yet never realized, "Google Drive" service, aka "your hard drive in the cloud."

Can Barnes & Noble Challenge Amazon's eBook Empire?

Barnes & Noble, the beleaguered online bookstore, opened its eBook store this week. It also announced that it has partnered with Plastic Logic, which is expected to release a highly anticipated Kindle competitor soon. Given that B&N seems to have all of the necessary pieces in place, we think that the the company can challenge Amazon - especially given that it offers a larger selection of books and plans to offer a device that is more open than Amazon's Kindle.

Free Alternatives to Photoshop With All the Bells, Whistles, Filters, & Layers

Let's face it: If cropping was all you needed to do, you'd just use MS Paint. Photoshop, Adobe's industry standard for image editing, costs a whopping $600. But when you need tools such as layers, filters, and other effects, 101-level apps such as Picnik and Picasa just don't cut it. So we've rounded up and road-tested seven free resources that pack the punch of Photoshop's bells and whistles without the price.

Seven e-Learning and Teaching Resources

While the down economy continues to hurt funding to our schools, more and more teachers are looking to web-based services to help educate their students. Whether it's through open resource projects like CK-12, virtual classrooms like those in Second Life, or through the repurposing of tools like Twitter, millions of teachers are finding innovative resources to engage their students. If you're a teacher, here are seven great tools to get you started.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

I recently spoke to Andy Stanford-Clark, a Master Inventor and Distinguished Engineer at IBM. Yesterday we wrote about how Stanford-Clark has hooked his house up to Twitter. Today we delve more into what his employer, IBM, is doing with the Internet of Things.

IBM has a whole set of RFID and sensor technology solutions. But more importantly it has been busy working with various manufacturers and goods suppliers in recent months, to introduce those solutions to the world.

This month IBM made an agreement with Matiq, an IT subsidiary of Norway's largest food supplier Nortura. The project involves using RFID (radio frequency identification) technology to track and trace poultry and meat products "from the farm, through the supply chain, to supermarket shelves." This food tracking solution will help ensure that meat and chicken are "kept in optimal condition throughout the supply chain." The system uses IBM's WebSphere RFID Information Center, together with IBM's sensor and actuator solutions.

A similar project is one that IBM announced at the end of June with Danish transportation company Container Centralen. By February 2010, Container Centralen undertakes to use IBM sensor technology "to allow participants in the horticultural supply chain to track the progress of shipments as they move from growers to wholesalers and retailers across 40 countries in Europe." Specifically this refers to transportation of things like flowers and pot plants, which are very sensitive to the environment they travel in. Having sensors as part of the entire travel chain will allow participants to monitor conditions and climate during travel. Essentially it makes the travel process very transparent.

As Andy Stanford-Clark explained to ReadWriteWeb, using RFID technology to monitor temparature when transporting flowers ensures that no short cuts are taken by some in the supply chain (e.g. turning off the climate control for a while to save money). It gives more data to make decisions, for example it may enable a retailer to refuse to accept a shipment if the sensor data suggests the flowers are close to wilting.

IBM is also working with German car manufacturer Volkswagen to add sensor technology to its operations. The aim is to improve Volkswagen's material logistics operations through the use of sensor technology. For example, shipping containers carrying auto parts for Volkswagen will be fitted with RFID tags. So far about 3,000 shipping containers have been fitted with RFID tags.

These are all exciting developments in the Internet of Things, because they impact real-world processes. It's great to see a large technology company like IBM at the forefront of this trend. It's a very smart move (pardon the pun), because in 2009 we're only at the very start of connecting almost any object in the world to the Internet.

Imagine a world with millions, perhaps trillions, of sensors that use IBM technology - because that's what Big Blue is imagining.

Partners will be able to develop online communities that make their skills visible to other partners, connect with them on tech innovations, and develop and deliver products through interactive forums before beta testing. IBM is concurrently launching their Business Partner Development Series, an educational tool for partners who need insight on creating dynamic infrastructures, selling to the midmarket, and selling to the CFO.

In a recent online brainstorming session with 1,100 global partners, one of the leading ideas was a call for a more social-web approach to help the partners improve collaboration with each other and establish new relationships across global markets.

The new network will allow members to discover one another and collaborate through a project-oriented framework that will include blogs, forums, private teaming spaces, social bookmarking, and RSS feeds.

The new Business Partner Development Series will moreover give the company's partners 60 no-cost online classes and 25 global in-person education and networking events to help them build and sell better products for clients.

According to our source at IBM, the company's network of 100,000 partner entities is "critical to the success and growth of our company. Today, partners from across 158 countries drive about 30 percent of IBM's revenue each year. IBM invests in its partners' success because our success depends on it. At a time when our competitors are cutting back on resources for partners to the tune of $2.5 billion this year... this investment includes sales, marketing, and technical resources to help partners go to market faster, find new market opportunities, connect with other partners to create new ecosystems, and drive revenue."

While the network undoubtedly helps IBM keep business development and innovations - and revenue - "in the family," the value of the resources they provide is huge, both in geographical scale and in terms of the content itself.

Specific areas of interest for IBM investment include analytics, clean tech, cloud computing, smart grids, electronic health care, and green data centers. The company's expansion into Vietnam is a response to what they see as accelerated IT growth in that area.

"The country's IT sector is growing over 20 percent annually, fueled by massive Internet expansion and a younger population that's driving consumer demand for infrastructure improvements."

The first IBM Innovation Center in Vietnam is the sixth such site to open since 2007 and the forty-third in the past decade. The center will be based in Ho Chi Minh City and will focus on the development and marketing of new tech across banking, telecom, energy, and government industries. Here, local developers and others will find training and access to open standards-based tech.

The company will also be collaborating with local VCs to support the development of emerging technology products. Similar partnerships now account for nearly a third of IBM's revenue and have doubled since 2008, when IBM partnered with around 8,500 companies.

IBM is also turning its attention and earmarking funds to develop relationships with the University of Technology in Ho Chi Minh City and the College of Technology in Hanoi. Their goal is to create a curriculum in cloud computing at the former institution and service sciences at the latter. Computing labs and new departments will be created as a result.

IBM is also debuting the first local-language version of developerWorks, its online resource and social network for developers.

As for IBM's strategy of investment in growth sectors outside the U.S. and Western Europe, Freeman wrote, "The strategy is paying off.

"For example, in Brazil, more than half of the country's estimated 2,000 independent software vendors (ISVs) have become IBM partners. In China, IBM continues to recruit partners at record rates, with more than 11,000 registered so far this year. In India, IBM has over 2,500 business partners across 200 cities, ranging from small resellers to global systems integrators and ISVs - business partners now drive 35 percent of revenue for IBM in India."

Certainly, this smacks of global domination; after all, is not IBM the Starbucks of IT? The company's unrelenting expansion in areas that can least refuse its injections of tech and capital has been making headlines for years. It likely wouldn't hurt IBM to create dependent tech ecosystems in these areas, and we cannot overlook the fact that IT labor is cheaper in many of these parts of the world.

Some have also begun to question IBM's role in South Africa, an area that Freeman specifically mentioned as a growth area ripe for strong investments. The company has a rough history there; a U.S. federal court recently ruled that IBM can be held responsible for enabling apartheid by providing regime leaders with IT infrastructure used to disenfranchise and harm black citizens.

When IBM declared its lack of responsibility for how clients would use its products, the judge countered, "That level of willful blindness in the face of crimes in violation of the law of nations cannot defeat an otherwise clear showing of knowledge that the assistance IBM provided would directly and substantially support apartheid."

IBM is not UNICEF. Historically, like almost any multinational corporation, they have followed profit amorally, whether the revenue streams led to their helping oppress or enlighten the citizens of any geographical area. These partnerships in developing areas are highly profitable for the company. And let us not imagine that their desire to invest in green tech or healthcare-related tech comes from any kind of altruism: These are hot, bankable areas right now.

Still, sometimes capitalism does work for the best for all parties involved. Let's hope that Vietnamese techies benefit as much from IBM's expansion into their country as the company itself doubtless will.

First let's look at how CoScripter works. Handily, there's a "Getting started with CoScripter" script. It shows that to execute a script, you can run it in an automated function (by clicking "Run") and/or execute it in a step-by-step process (by clicking "Step") -- typically a combination of both, as many web processes require human input (e.g. in forms). CoScripter works by popping up a sidebar in your browser, in which you can see the steps as they execute. In addition to the script, there is a step-by-step textual explanation of the process.

As of now CoScripter has around 4000 scripts. A script which shows the potential usefulness of CoScripter in real-life scenarios is one for adding your phone number to the U.S. national do not call list. This is an example of a multi-step process which to many people is a pain to carry out. Using this script, the user is taken through the first couple of Web pages automatically, then it stops at the point where the user needs to enter their area code. Then the user is guided step-by-step through the rest of the process.

Granted, well-designed websites will make it easy for their users to work through processes. But we all know that not all websites are easy to navigate, so CoScripter comes in handy in those circumstances. Not to mention that some processes are just very long and tiresome - e.g. the request a vacation hold for postal mail script is 14 steps long.

For all its usefulness, there's a sense that CoScripter is still too geeky for mainstream people. We found that using the 'Run' and 'Step' links wasn't entirely intuitive.

However we can certainly see the potential for automating web processes. One of the trends of the current era of the Web is for computers to do more of the 'heavy lifting' of our daily tasks - whether that be aggregating content, filtering it, or automating it. CoScripter clearly aims to do the latter. With a bit more spit and polish, CoScripter could eventually become a handy tool to help your everyday web browsing.

We asked IBM's Stefan Nusser what kind of uses he foresees for CoScripter. He mentioned that it will be useful within enterprises, where there are typically many processes that would benefit from automation. He also mentioned a beta product called Play-by-Play, a product built on top of CoScripter and which uses instant messaging for collaborative browsing tasks such as customer support and search.

CoScripter comes from the same team behind IBM's next-generation browser platform Blue Spruce, which was used to create an online "radiology theater" product. IBM is focusing a lot on extending the browser these days - and CoScripter is another example of that. Check it out and let us know what you think in the comments. For the geekier inclined, you can also incorporate CoScripter into your own products.

No one could deny the hardware/software/services giant's place in tech history (their first plant is now almost 100 years old), but what does it have to do with the glassy, streamy, widgety world that tech had become? IBM staff on-site had many answers for that oft-repeated question, which was usually phrased, roughly, "What the hell are you guys doing here?"

So, what is IBM really doing in the social space?

Enter developerWorks, reportedly the largest online technical resource for software developers in the world. Today, half of the world's developers use it; that's around 8 million members.

And today, IBM is launching a social network just for them.

And before you rush to make comparisons, it's nothing like Facebook, LinkedIn, or any of the better known social nets we all know.

The functions of the site are remarkably task-focused. IBM's demo video sets a stage of goal-oriented techies seeking a specific knowledge or skill set and using My developerWorks' groups, discussion threads, and profiles to determine who has experience or expertise in a particular field. Warning: Demo video works better if you ignore the business stock photography. We know most dude developers don't really have frosted tips.

The most exciting prospect is the possibility for ongoing collaboration. All IBM needs now is to show profiles in other disciplines so that the biz dev, marketing, design, executive, and VC types can get in on the action and boom, you've got a never-ending Startup Weekend.

An IBM rep said via email Wednesday night, "IBM's goal with My developerWorks is to connect the global community of software developers and make it easier for them to create new technologies based on open standards such as Java, Linux and XML. With $4 trillion in global economic stimulus investments on the way for projects such as healthcare modernization, smart grids, and public infrastructure improvements - all of it technology-driven - IBM wants to give developers a seat at the table and help them build skills in hot technology areas including analytics, clean tech, and cloud computing."

And what does IBM stand to gain from a web of millions of registered software developers sharing information, compiling data, building teams, brainstorming ideas, critiquing and refining their work, and creating products on and through their proprietary network?

We didn't receive a comment on that point and have journalistic standards of objectivity to maintain; however, we're sure that the My developerWorks will profit both the individuals and the organizations involved.

A reminder that Blue Spruce is a fully browser-based application development platform, currently in development, which is being built on open Web standards. The main feature of Blue Spruce is that it allows for a combination of different Web components - data mashups, high-definition video, audio and graphics - to run simultaneously on the same browser page. It's important to note that the Radiology Theatre app only requires a standard Web browser (as long as it's Safari or IE!) - so there's nothing to download for the end user, in this case doctors.

The radiology theatre is the latest in a series of prototypes for Blue Spruce. The current prototypes are focused on 3 main areas: finance, health and "heavy industry" (which it previously defined as utilities, rail, steel, etc).

This is how IBM described how the new online radiology theatre will work:

"A group of doctors can log into a secure Web site at the same time to review and analyze a patient's recent battery of tests. For instance, a radiologist could use her mouse to circle an area on the CT scan of a lung that needs a closer look. Then using the mouse she could zoom into that scan to enlarge the view for all to see. An expert on lung cancer could use his mouse to show how the spot had changed from the last scan. And then, a pathologist could talk about patient treatments based on spots of that size depending on age and prior health history, paging through clinical data accessible on the site.

The theatre allows all these experts to discuss, tag and share information simultaneously, rather than paging through stacks of papers, calling physicians to discuss scan results and then charting the results. This collaborative consultation brings together the personal data, the experts and the clinical data in one physical, visual theatre."

Perhaps the biggest potential benefit of the online radiology theatre is that it will enable experts from all over the world to consult on cases. The ability for multiple users to "cobrowse" (as IBM has termed it) means they can interact in the browser in real-time and see each other's changes.

Of course, since this is medical data, there are significant privacy implications involved in using the Internet to collaborate. But we're pleased to see that IBM's Blue Spruce is being put to such a worthy use and we look forward to seeing other applications this year and beyond.

Hyperspeech Transfer Protocol (HSTP), a protocol designed to seamlessly connect telephony voice applications, will enable users to browse across voice applications by navigating the Hyperspeech (the voice hyperlink) content in a voice application.

In a 2007 paper describing the technology (PDF), IBM scientists explain the concepts of Hyperspeech using this scenario:

Jonathan is a busy salesman who travels frequently. His work typically requires him to stay in a place for a few days. Once he is in a new place, he has to go around looking for grocery stores in his locality for his daily needs. He prefers taking phone numbers of the identified stores and places orders on the phone subsequently. Home delivery services deliver the goods to his home. However, often the home delivery boys don't accept credit cards and even if some do, Jonathan tries paying by cash since he doesn't want to share his credit card information with untrusted home delivery agents. This often causes problems since he often runs out of cash.

The delivery boy comes within half-hour and delivers the goods to Jonathan.

Given India's position as the fastest growing mobile phone market in the world, this new protocol may be particularly useful in India, where mobile phone sales are booming despite our current economic crisis.

If you're interested in reading the entire paper, HSTP : Hyperspeech Transfer Protocol, you can download it here (PDF).

If you think that "data portability" and standards for an open web hold a lot of promise to fuel innovation in social networking, just imagine what a secure, standards-based, data landscape could enable in health care.

The Continua Alliance, made up of companies like Nokia, Intel and Panasonic, along with IBM and Google, highlighted a handful of factors in the announcement. The technology will be useful in a wide variety of case types ("including chronic disease management, health and wellness, and elderly care"), in the US and around the world. By leveraging online services, the platform will enable healthcare providers to leverage scale in ways that otherwise isolated medical monitoring can not. And by putting the software into widespread use, the group hopes to make significant headway in supporting open standards and "interoperable healthcare products and solutions." That's on top of all the standard consumer benefits of online health records. (See coverage at Medgadget for more details and a link to the press release.) The companies don't yet have any name for the platform but say it's tested and ready to deploy.

The group also said that supporting the development of Google Health was one of its goals, but we hope that the technology will support the development of an entire ecosystem of complimentary, competing and interoperable health data services.

That kind of language is both similar to what advocates of social networking "data portability" use and represents the kind of steps we'd love to see more of from big vendors in all kinds of technology sectors.

Open, standardized data, backed up by certified security measures and serving as the foundation of a new era of innovation is a fantastic vision. If you think that big players in social networking have a financial interest in data lock-in, though, just imagine the resistance that "data portability" could face in the multi-trillion dollar medical industry.

The companies collaborating on this platform believe that consumer demand for informed care, combined with the vendor participation already gathered, will force the rest of the industry to open, down to every medical practitioner challenged by patients to use portable data in treatment. That seems like a sound strategy to us.

Blue Spruce is a project within IBM that is only about 5 months old. Up till now it hasn't been shown publicly. Blue Spruce isn't yet complete, but conceptually it is two different things:

• Project Blue Spruce Client Toolkit
• Project Blue Spruce Co-Web Server

Here's a summary of what we know so far about the Blue Spruce platform:

- Uses the WebKit Open Source Browser Engine (in the demo we saw, Safari was the browser being used)
- Uses the following Open standards: HTML, JavaScript, CSS, (All Ajax), XMPP, H.264
- Server runs on Linux, MacOS X
- Utilized OpenAjax Metadata Specification, so it can utilize any widgets
- It's being ported to IE 6+ and Firefox

NOT a Web Browser, But is a Platform

To be clear, IBM is not developing another browser. The client part of this project is based on a set of browser-based open standards technologies. They will in time (2010 timeframe) be integrated into existing browsers such as Safari, Firefox and IE.

The grand plan for IBM, we think, is that it wants the browser to become the platform for applications - thus putting pressure on companies like Microsoft and Adobe, which still rely heavily on desktop applications (albeit these days connected to the web).

It's also worth noting that this isn't (yet) an open source project. Rod Smith described it to us as a "community-sourced" project, meaning that it's built on open standards and so others in the developer community can contribute. Smith said it "may" become an open source project in future, but it's too early to say.

Why is IBM Heading to the Browser?

We asked IBM VP of Emerging Internet Technologies, Rod Smith, why IBM is moving to browser-based applications. He replied that customers have been consistently telling them for 1-1.5 years now that they don't want to do installs anymore. Their customers want the rich experience that desktop apps have traditionally provided, but they want to have it in the browser. Collaboration and sharing data is also a trend that IBM is tapping into with Blue Spruce.

Proof of Concept Applications

At this time, Blue Spruce is in a closed beta period. IBM is creating applications for a number of customers, including Reuters and hospitals in Boston and New Zealand. They're focusing on 3 main areas right now: finance, health and "heavy industry" (defined as utilities, rail, steel, etc). As the project matures, we can expect to see IBM stepping up its application development efforts - services are after all a key part of IBM's business.

ReadWriteWeb was shown a number of 'proof of concept' demos. The functionality included Ajax-based mashups being used simultaneously by users in different locations (one in San Francisco, the other in Boston), audio and live streaming video (VGA currently, but HD is on the way) integrated with mashups, IM and feeds on the one browser page, and more rich functionality.

In other words, there were many different components (mashups, video, audio, etc.) all happening on the same browser page. Multiple users can interact with these components in real-time and see each others changes. As IBM explained it, all of the components are live and all participants can cause change that will be propagated. This will enable customers to have 'live meetings' and collaborate on applications - all within the browser.

It's unusual to see this level of functionality in a browser currently, so we think Blue Spruce could potentially be a big deal. It certainly will make big Internet companies like Microsoft, Adobe and probably even Google sit up and take notice of Big Blue.