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Earlier this month IBM CEO Sam Palmisano gave a speech in London, in which he discussed IBM's products and services in the Internet of Things. He also outlined what IBM sees as emerging opportunities for "smart systems" over the coming decade. It was a significant speech, given that IBM has been probably the leading large tech company promoting the Internet of Things up till now.

When you consider that trillions of sensors will be deployed worldwide in the coming decade and the interest in Internet of Things from such high-ranking officials as China's Premier, IBM's use cases so far and its evolving strategy is definitely worth taking note of.

IBM has launched a new product called Returnable Container Management, which uses the Internet of Things to track and measure the usage of shipping containers. These containers are a large, dull but essential part of the supply chain for manufacturers - they are used to hold automobile parts, meat, pharmaceuticals and anything else that needs to be shipped from one place to another. Often the containers are not returned or returned late, which can cost a lot of money for manufacturers.

Today at the IBM Information on Demand event, IBM will demo a new app that will bring the Internet of Things to the iPhone. The as yet unreleased iPhone app is called Breadcrumbs and it will give consumers access to information about grocery food items. The app will be able to scan barcodes and deliver a summary of the ingredients in a food item, along with when it was manufactured. That data is usually on the food label, but Breadcrumbs goes a step further - it can provide extra information such as product recall data. If a product has been recalled in the past, this app will tell the consumer all of the relevant details.

Looking for a more affordable and more stable hosted email service than Gmail? According to Lotus, that's exactly what their new hosted email system called iNotes can provide. The company isn't being subtle about their desire to compete head-on with the Internet giant, either. Says Sean Poulley, an IBM executive overseeing the new service, "Google has shown itself to be weak. There is a world of difference between supporting a consumer-grade service and a business-grade service."

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

We've all seen photos of ourselves in locations we can't quite remember. Often they're from exotic travels or from days long past. Regardless of the reason for your memory loss, IBM is working on a tool that can help. In collaboration with the European Union consortium, the company is testing SAPIR (Search in Audio-Visual Content Using Peer-to-peer Information Retrieval). The image matching search technology allows users to pull results from large collections of audio-visual content without using tags for search. Instead, users can upload images and match them to similar ones - perhaps even ones with signage and labels. The system analyzes everything from digital photographs, to sound files to video. From here it automatically indexes and ranks the media for retrieval.

After having both knees replaced, my father has earned the nickname "the titanium bear". For months he sulked in front of the TV thinking only of his rising golf handicap. Implanet, a manufacturer of implantable medical devices hopes to keep my dad's knees intact by using IBM RFID solutions to alert him to recalls. According to a recent press release, the company will embed the tags into knee and hip replacements and use them to alert patients to any product-related concerns.

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup - our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week - we analyze why Amazon spent nearly a billion dollars to purchase online shoe shop Zappos, explain why IBM is an early leader in the Internet of Things, investigate whether the Google Chrome OS will finally deliver us the mythical GDrive, look at why Barnes & Noble is a worthy challenger to Amazon's eBook empire, and more. We also check in on our two new channels: ReadWriteEnterprise (devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' trends and products) and ReadWriteStart (dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs).

Note: this week ReadWriteWeb released our second premium report: our Q2 2009 VC Funding Report. Full details below...

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. It was a good couple of years before they were spotted at the Web 2.0 conference, for example. However in the case of Internet of Things, IBM is proving itself to be an unusually early adopter.

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.

Today, IBM is launching PartnerWorld Communities, a new social net for the hardware/software giant's partners to identify skills, resources, and new business opportunities with one another.

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.

Today, IBM will announce its plans to target Vietnam as a key market for new investments and partnerships with venture capital firms and affiliated startups in Southeast Asia. The hardware/software giant will open a new facility in Vietnam and will start joint research and curriculum programs with local universities.

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.

CoScripter is a Firefox plug-in created by IBM Research, with the aim of automating web processes. CoScripter is described as a "system for recording, automating, and sharing processes performed in a web browser such as printing photos online, requesting a vacation hold for postal mail, or checking flight arrival times." In effect it is a plug-in that automates the browsing process for certain tasks, through the use of scripts. You don't need to be a programmer to create scripts - just go through the normal browsing processes and CoScripter records it for you. Alternatively you can simply select and use a script that someone else has built.

Many a neutech hipster looked askance at the huge IBM-plex situated front and center at this year's Web 2.0 conference.

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?"

IBM has announced an online "radiology theatre" product, currently at the prototype stage, which allows teams of medical experts to "simultaneously discuss and review patients' medical test data using a Web browser." The project is being run in collaboration with the Brigham and Women's Hospital of Boston and is built on IBM's next-generation browser platform Blue Spruce, which ReadWriteWeb reviewed when it was first announced back in November. IBM also used the WebKit Open Source Browser Engine. The app runs on the Linux or MacOS X operating systems and the browser may be Safari or Internet Explorer.

IBM's research scientists in India have developed a technology that will offer users the ability to talk to the Web and create 'voice' sites using mobile phones according to a news article in the Economic Times today.

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.

IBM, Google Health and a consortium of medical device makers and other companies announced today that they have created a software platform that will allow medical data from at-home devices like glucose meters and blood pressure monitors to be sent automatically to Google Health or other Personal Health Records systems online. It's a broad reaching software platform that will bring data portability and medical records interoperability in direct conflict with a huge industry entrenched in siloed data.

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.

IBM is about to commit itself heavily to browser-based applications. The giant IT company is quietly working on a project called Blue Spruce, which aims to create a fully browser-based application development platform. ReadWriteWeb was given an exclusive first look at Blue Spruce at the Web 2.0 Summit, where we sat down with IBM's VP of Emerging Internet Technologies, Rod Smith, for a "show and tell" of what IBM claims will be the next evolution of the browser. What's more, it's fully open standards based - so it is squarely aimed at challenging the proprietary-rich Internet platforms of Microsoft's Silverlight and Adobe's Flash.

The word on the street this month is speech. (Which makes it the spoken word on the street.) Speech-based iPhone apps are just a throat-clearing for the stream of oratory that IBM says we can expect from computer users within the next five years.

It may finally be time I did something about that compulsive swearing issue, unless I want some seriously skewed search results. But that may only be the beginning.

Every year IBM releases a "Next Five in Five" list, a list of innovations that "have the potential to change the way people work, live and play over the next five years". This is the third such list, and it mentions a "Talking Web" among the 5 items. You will talk to the Web and the Web will talk back, according to IBM. In the future "you will be able to surf the Internet, hands-free, by using your voice - therefore eliminating the need for visuals or keypads."

In fact this is already starting to happen, as recent iPhone releases from Google and Say Where show.

It's time for our weekly summary of Web Technology news, products and trends. On the trends side, we analyzed the significance of MySpace's new profiles, looked at how Google is tracking flu trends, explored a partnership between an online finance tool and a newspaper, and more. On the product side, we brought you an exclusive first look at a new IBM browser technology, reported on the latest big release of Windows Live, checked out a major update for Gmail, and more. We also have highlights from the Enterprise Channel and our new product, Jobwire. Finally, we have the recording from this week's RWW Live about online job tools.

IBM is about to commit itself heavily to browser-based applications. The giant IT company is quietly working on a project called Blue Spruce, which aims to create a fully browser-based application development platform. ReadWriteWeb was given an exclusive first look at Blue Spruce. Last week at Web 2.0 Summit we sat down with IBM's VP of Emerging Internet Technologies, Rod Smith, for a "show and tell" of what IBM claims will be the next evolution of the browser. What's more, it's fully open standards based - so it is squarely aimed at challenging the proprietary rich internet platforms of Microsoft's Silverlight and Adobe's Flash.