Tech giant IBM believes that the socialization of business presents a big opportunity to train people to do it really well. The company announced this week a major new services initiative in social business. This kind of news makes me think it's time to put the whole question of whether engaging with social technology at all has a potential for meaningful ROI to bed.

If doubts about the ROI of social technology began sometime recently, we might as well pick 2006 as the date, when that silly distraction turned mega-platform Twitter was founded.

In 2012, things have now come far enough that it makes sense for one of the world's leading technology services companies to jump into that market. Discoure about social and business used to be dominated by doubt of the Return on Investment. IBM may be resolving those doubts with its new campaign.

The web's leading enterprise news blogger Larry Dignan summarized the initiative last night on ZDNet as follows:

IBM is planning to offer services to help customers develop skills and technical support for social networking. Naturally, there's a heavy services angle here. IBM will offer live support, online courses and meetings with social business experts.

Among the key social enterprise items from IBM:

• Consulting services to develop internal and external processes and figure out social businesses.


• Education and mentor programs for business partners.
  
• Technical certification programs to cultivate skills and assess resources.


• Workshops that will revolve around becoming a social business. Some workshops will be conducted in partnership with The Dachis Group, which is a boutique consulting firm focused on social business.

Four-year old Austin-based Dachis Group has between 200 and 500 employees according to LinkedIn and has acquired a number of other hot social business startups. That company unveiled a new Social Performance Monitor yesterday, a web application Dachis says "combines big data and social analytics to meaningfully measure performance of social marketing."

Is all of this really an effective subject of measurement and optimization? Cynics may disagree, but the socialization of business, specifically with regard to collaboration and marketing, seems of sufficient sophistication that optimization is a clear competitive opportunity. The new offering from Dachis appears to be a big effort to quantitatively resolve the question of social media ROI once and for all.

That which can be measured can be improved, too. IBM says that "the world now spends more than 110 billion minutes on social networks and blog sites per month."

When that time spent being social is spent while at work, failure to measure and optimize it would be a big lost opportunity and potentially a competitive mistake.

The IBM initiative page reports, "McKinsey & Company observed that 9 out of every 10 businesses using Web 2.0 technology are seeing measurable business benefits from its use."

Social business opens whole new worlds of efficiency,collaboration, productivity and innovation.

It also challenges top-down, command-and-control systems of working. Those aren't worth saving on principle, so their adherents will have to compete in the marketplace to see whether they can really beat social businesses or not.

Now, let's get down to business, together online.

In collaboration with Bristol-Myers Squibb, DuPont and Pfizer, IBM is providing a database of more than 2.4 million chemical compounds extracted from about 4.7 million patents and 11 million biomedical journal abstracts from 1976 to 2000. IBM Research developed it in collaboration with these private companies over the past six years. It includes patents from a variety of sources outside of the US. The data will be incorporated into the PubChem archive at the National Center for Biotechnology Information of the National Institutes of Health.

Before the Web, patent searches were long, tedious, and expensive, and province of a select group of private entities. Finding "prior art" (as it is called) was a very specialized field. This started changing, when back in January 1994 Carl Malamud began a project to put patents and other government data online. Malamud has been a tireless advocate for posting more data online by various private and public entities and has been rewarded for his efforts by various awards and funding from Google and numerous foundations started by early Internet pioneers. By 1995 his system was serving up a million files via FTP, Gopher and Web access. (Remember, back then graphical browsers were still somewhat new, and many websites were predominately text-based.)

Sadly, the PTO turned off this access for several years. Malamud lobbied PTO but to no avail, and IBM posted the patent data online until PTO could offer their own service in 1998. Since then, they and others including Google, FreePatentsOnline. Cambia's PatentLens and LegalZoom (the latter for a fee) offer patent searches.

Malamud told me that "The patent database is pretty much liberated at this point. Jon Orwant at Google did all the heavy lifting, deserves the credit for making this a reality." You can read a copy of his letter to Al Gore back in 1998 here to get some additional perspective.

(Above you can see Doug Engelbart's diagram in his 1970 patent for a computer mouse.)

What about non-US patent access? In addition to some of the free sites mentioned above, the European patent office can be searched here using its Espacenet service, which was started in 1998 with bare-bones features. Search was enhanced earlier this year, and you can now export results to Excel, setup RSS feeds, and keep a query history as part of its free service. You can search in English, French and German.

And the World IP Organization maintains its patent search here with its PatentScope service, which also has been expanded and improved.

Patent applications have been growing steadily for the most part, and IBM is the most prolific: each day it is granted about 20 patent applications. Samsung and Microsoft get about half that. That is each calendar day. Apple gets about 500 patents a year, and Google and Motorola less than that. We're glad to see that more information is entering the public domain, and hope that this trend continues.

This is where IBM Research wants to help by recreating the user interface for mobile email. The first step is to help users triage (sort) email messages. So instead of the mobile email client opening straight to the inbox, IBM's notion is to open it to a triage screen. It provides color-coded "badges" to help users determine what untriaged mail they have. In the picture to the left, , the grey badge represents the number of read messages, light blue unread messages and dark blue for new messages.

Once a user has determined new messages, the untriaged view of the inbox looks a lot like a normal mobile email client. A dot to the left of the message indicates how many people have received the message, with a full green circle for the user as the sole recipient, half a circle for a select few users and an empty circle for a large amount of users. New messages have a light blue background.

It is then time to capture the intention of what users want to do with the email. The triage is just a way to determine how to initially react to an email. The next step is to actually act. An overlay appears in the client with the prompts of Next, Deferred and Reference. Next is for when users want or need to respond when they have a spare moment, Deferred is to be used later when a user is at a desktop computer and Reference is for relevant information that does not require an action of its own at this particular time.

Users can also assign a specification action such as call, print, read, reply, save, schedule, send and visit. If users do not want to assign a category, the "next" category will be assigned by default. Tasks can be acted upon by the user from within the client. Users can view, edit and delete tasks. Tasks are synced to the cloud to be available across devices and desktops.

IBM's research on a new mobile email client is directed at enterprise users. To a certain extent this would not work well for commercial users with a high volume of emails or people that see hundreds of emails a day (like the staff at ReadWriteWeb). IBM's strategy centers around Lotus and while that is one of the most-used email clients overall, it may rub some people the wrong way. To a certain extent, IBM's research is classic enterprise thinking: give IT managers and users more layers of control. On the other hand, the notion of triage, capturing intentions and tasks adds more pain points to the email experience. Users want things to be as simple as possible. IBM's triage and capture does not seem to be simple.

The study was done by IBM Research guru Jeff Pierce. You can see the details here and here.

Does mobile email need to be rethought or does the current system work just fine? What are the differences in needs for enterprise users versus commercial users? Let us know what you think in the comments.

I spent a day talking with leaders from IBM, Microsoft and Google about their operations and goals in Africa. We spoke in their offices in Kenya, increasingly important as a gateway to East and Central Africa, as well as to the content as a whole. It turns out that each company's culture has significantly tinted how each sees Africa, and how they operate.

IBM was the only company that gave us a presentation during our meeting. The presentation, riddled with typos, was nonetheless almost painfully professional. It listed assets and plans and platitudes. It focused on the past, specifically, Africa's. The meeting, carefully planned, more mannered than polite, was also overstaffed, with four people representing the company.

IBM was depicted in an introductory slide as being present in Kenya since 1959. In reality, they were in Kenya for a couple of years before leaving for almost six decades, to return only in 2009, once the election violence was well and truly past. Their presence was maintained in the interim by sales representatives. Now they staff a full-fledged subsidiary office.

Charles Munyororo, Global Technology Services Leader for IBM East Africa Ltd., and Vincent Njoroge, Global Business Services Leader (I still have no idea what those titles mean), took us through the set of slides.

The long and short of it (mostly long) was that IBM is a firm believer in an Africa made up of refineries, mines, ports and governments. For IBM, this suits its strength as a large-scale, well-entrenched firm with a focus hardware and consulting. The realities of African tech strengths and needs were touched on by, but seemed lost on, the company.

One of Kenya's best known social web innovations is a bankless mobile money transfer system, called M-Pesa. M-Pesa, although allegedly developed independently, was subsequently managed by Vodafone affiliate, Safaricom. IBM now runs it for Vodafone. It is popular because banks have very little to do with the way it works, person-to-person. Most users will never interact with a bank as long as they employ it. Since most Kenyans, and most Africans, do not have bank accounts and credit cards, M-Pesa is a popular product. IBM, however, plans to develop bank-specific payment tools so that all the banks people aren't using can, as Njoroge put it, recoup the fees they aren't getting from the people who are using M-Pesa. Good for IBM and its customers, possibly, though it is hard to see the gain for M-Pesa's existing customers.

As we took our leave, I asked Mr. Munyororo whether IBM had a relationship with the de facto geek HQ of East Africa, iHub. "No."

IBM's agreement to manage the large African mobile provider, Bharti Airtel, will make it a mobile player for some time to come. But its apparent disdain for the rich ecosystem of geeks in its midst may indicate a time of difficulties to come when its tech equivalent of a resource extraction economy falters.

Microsoft

Microsoft's General Manager for East and Southern Africa, Louis Onyango Otieno, met us in an office with a lengthy boardroom table that would have not been out of place anywhere from Osaka to Redmond. In fact, nothing in the room would have led you to the conclusion you were in Africa aside from Otieno himself. As General Manager for East and Southern Africa, Otieno has led the software company's efforts in the region in recent years.

"What I'm most proud of," he said, leaning back in his padded chair, "what I hope I'm remembered for, is our localization of all of Microsoft into Kiswahili." Kiswahili, an Arab- and Bantu-based lingua franca for East Africa, is Kenya's national language. Microsoft agreed to a project that would allow everything from software help copy to the Windows operating system itself to be expressed in that tongue.

Otieno created a list of 3,000 tech words that Kiswahili did not already have - CPU, web browser, Windows - and assembled a group of linguists and charged the latter to translate the former. They did so with great pride, he said. It was their, and his, legacy, and a formidable legacy for Microsoft in Africa.

One gets the sense after talking with Otieno about Microsoft, that the company is under no illusions as to the importance of the market, which is 1-billion strong and is assiduous in its work toward understanding and appealing to it. Nor do they underestimate its capacity for growth. 40% of Africa's people are currently under 20 years old. That is a huge growth market.

There is also an effort made to welcome African interns and high-performing graduates into the company. Clearly, Microsoft is paying attention to its customers and to the culture (and language) of its future customers. How much are they learning from Africa however is impossible to say. Focus is still, in Africa no less than Redmond, on Microsoft's successes, namely, its operating system and its Outlook business suite. But the former is 30 years old and the latter debuted well over a decade ago.

Google

One of the things I asked the representatives of all three companies I visited was how the African tech landscape would look in five years. Specifically, how would Africa enter the world's tech consciousness on a big scale?

Both IBM and Microsoft demurred. But Joe Mucheru, Google's regional lead for Sub-Saharan Africa, launched right into his vision of the region with no reservations.

"It won't be five years," he said, leaning forward in one of Google's small conference rooms in Nairobi. "I don't even think it will take two." In Mucheru's future, Africa's contribution to the social web will be in the creation of a "social labor marketplace." In much the same way that eBay enabled a globalized individual marketplace of things, Mucheru believes that African geeks will help to create a similar marketplace for labor.

"Africa needs more jobs than it can import," he said. With a distributed one-to-one and one-to-many marketplace, the growing number of increasingly educated African youth will be able to sell their skills - coding, translating, journalism, piecework manufacturing and assembly, whatever it might be - on a worldwide market at the rates it will bear. This, he believes, will mark the beginning of a new kind of marketplace, used by both sellers and buyers of work around the globe, and it will bear the unmistakable mark of its African developers.

Google is counting on the African developer ecosystem to make its market work, but it is still focusing mostly on nurturing the market and not as much on nurturing the contributors. Its current push is to get all local and regional businesses online, using Google products. It is donating expertise in training and materials such as computers to local universities.

Mugu Kibati, Director-General of Kenya's Vision2030 program, described Kenya's government as "grateful" for the company's decision to locate its primary Africa office there, despite the 2007 election violence. Google has placed a long-term bet on Africa in general and Kenya in specific, Kibati said Google officials had told him. They see Kenya much as Kenyans do, as a place with ups and downs but whose overall course is straight and fruitful.

Despite the Googleness of the offices I visited, those working there were nonetheless far more formally dressed than their counterparts back home. One resident journalist remarked that Kenyan businesses were unfailingly professional and "procedural" than an analogous workplace in the States. This is in part a function of the formality the country's inherited from its colonial British overlords upon declaring independence in 1963. In fact, Kenya's former president Daniel Arap Moi was nicknamed "Nyoya," or "footsteps," as in, people should follow in his, with alacrity and a minimum of fuss. Those who didn't wound up in Nyoya House, the basement of which was famous for its torture chambers.

Kenyan business places are hardly torture chambers, but they are stiff and that stiffness may not put them in as good a position as they could hope to be in, so that they might quickly shift and catch new currents in the continent.

Qui Bono?

But the workplaces of giant tech companies may not, in the long run, be where the business of the nation is conducted. In a later story, I will examine Kenya's entrepreneurial geek culture and the private organizations that incubate them.

The "corporate culture" of these three big high-tech companies has not changed with its change of scenery. I suspect it is much the same for Cisco, Samsung and the many others currently lighting out for, or landing in, Africa, with its increasingly educated and gradually more affluent consumer base. In fact, they are as likely to change Africa as much as Africa changes them, unless, of course, the real engine of Africa's growth is found somewhere else, in, say, the native expression of an international constant: nerd love.

Otieno photo via Nairobitech, other photos by Curt Hopkins | Disclosure: the Republic of Kenya provided the reporter's airfare and hotel.

This is the Web in a sense, but it's not about personal computers. IBM wants to build a Web of sensors producing massive amounts of big data for governments, health care providers, first responders and businesses. It wants to measure the weather, the sewers, the vehicles, the buildings and the people. Barnes offered five bullet points about how IBM thinks big data will change the world around us in the next five years.

1. Cities Will Have A Healthier Immune System

We're moving into cities at an unprecedented rate, and the immune system is at risk. Crowded cities are hotbeds of infectious diseases. Sensors will help health care providers, businesses, schools and governments prepare for health crises in advance.

2. City Buildings Will Sense And Respond Like Living Organisms

Buildings have lots of systems - heating, cooling, electricity, plumbing, et cetera - but they don't all work together. Better data could enable management of these systems in an integrated way, increasing efficiency, reducing waste and decreasing impact on the climate and environment.

3. Cars and City Buses Will Run On Empty

A smarter electric grid will be able to more efficiently manage power delivery to electric vehicles, but that's only part of the benefit. Vehicles generate electricity through kinetic energy that can be returned to the grid. IBM has partnered with the Danish EDISON Research Consortium to create a smarter grid to power transportation.

4. Smarter Systems Will Quench Cities' Thirst For Water And Save Energy

Barnes says big data can help manage the mounting global water crisis. He says that one in three city dwellers doesn't have access to clean water. IBM is working on a sewer system that can monitor the water for impurities and help governments mitigate risks.

5. Cities Will Be Able To Respond To Crises - Even Before Receiving An Emergency Call

Sensors will be able to detect little problems, like blocked sewer lines, and combine them with other data, like impending rain and nearby trucking routes, to alert officials to a crisis before it arises. IBM's vision of big data will create a platform for governments and first-responders to benefit from these data and connect the dots before there's already an emergency underway.

Check out the Web 2.0 schedule and watch the events live here.

Until now, Google's Crisis Response team provided Person Search sites on an ad hoc basis, including sites for the earthquake in Haiti and New Zealand, and the latest in Japan. Red Helmets hopes to make its comprehensive site an enduring, permanent global feature of rescue response.

A Comprehensive Platform for the Missing

The alpha version has launched around the aftermath of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami. Although people have been leaping forward to use social media to find lost loved ones and companies and groups have lent a hand, a permanent, optimized site specifically devoted to missing persons recovery in crisis situations is missing. This tool is designed to provide that and to promote it to both governmental groups, non-governmental charity organizations and people at large.

Among the functions that are receiving a baptism by fire in the midst of the current crisis in Japan are the following.

• Missing person profile with information including photo, civil status, last known
• home address, physical description
• Research a missing person by keyword or browsing by profile elements
• Post pictures and videos.
• Geographic localization of the victim on maps automatically integrated to the missing people's profile
• Ability to bring feeds together around a disappearance
• One-click broadcast of found person
• Facebook and Twitter integration

The service has elements of a platform, a search engine and a social network, as Sarah Aizenman, Red Helmets' communications manager, told us.

"Missing.net is a social collaborative network where you can upload lots of content to help the research between the declaration (of a missing person) and finding them. We want definitely to allow to all the potential witness to bring their contributions to find a missing people. As an NGO, we identified the humanitarian needs and we understood that they wanted to use a common tool to share and exchange data easily and quickly. With Missing.net, I hope that we will fulfill their expectations."

Missing.net can be used in French, English, Chinese, Russian, Arabic and Spanish so far.

A History of Crisis Communications

Red Helmets, chaired by former French Secretary of State for Victims Rights, Nicole Guedj, has a history of crisis communications and of collaboration. They created Emergesat, a telecommunications container of telecommunications designed to enable rescue teams to communicate in crisis areas when the traditional communication network has been destroyed.

The container, developed in partnership with CNES and Thales Space, has been deployed with the United Nations High Commission on Refugees to refugee camps in Darfur and to Haiti after the earthquake.

Using LanguageWare as a basis, the team created a set of digital language analysis tools, including one they called Wordsmith, and used them to understand the creation of propaganda in the aftermath of the 1641 Irish Rebellion.

The picture to emerge in the aftermath of Cromwell's destruction of the Catholic rebels was one of mass slaughter by Catholics of women and children. This project's forensic analysis showed how that picture was created.

One thing they found - and that would have taken a generation to parse by hand and eye - was the the worst atrocities were usually accompanied by language indicating the interviewee had not witnessed the occurrence him or herself. This persists throughout the depositions.

In a statement, Dr Nicci MacLeod, a forensic linguist, and one of the four research fellows on the project, said:

"The atrocious acts committed against women and children are a central image of the Rebellion as it was reported in London newspapers and other propaganda texts of the period. We wanted to be able to support our observations (that these were unsupported statements) with hard quantitative evidence and were able to do this using Wordsmith software which enables us to enter a search term such as 'wife' or 'woman' and see what contexts it occurs in, how it relates to other words and in what position, which combined together give us a particular impression of who did what to whom according to the testimony."

Pamphlet image from Trinity College | other sources: Past Horizons

This week, an IBM supercomputer dubbed Watson took on Jeopardy champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in a competition, pitting natural language processing and machine learning versus two Jeopardy champions. The three-day tournament ended on Wednesday with Watson soundly whooping its competitors. Now that it's over you might wonder how it was done. What problems did the team behind Watson run into along the way? What's next?

If you head on over to social bookmarking site Reddit, you can ask them yourself. The site has gotten the IBM research team behind Watson to agree to hold a Q&A with Redditors and is fielding questions for the next several days.

Currently, users can submit questions to the topic. Over the next several days, users will be able to vote on these questions and the IBM Research Team will answer them on Tuesday, Feburary 22 at noon EST.

Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian wrote today about what he thinks makes Reddit as successful as it is (it recently broke 1 billion monthly pageviews), pointing to the IAmA subreddit. IAmA "is an endless treasure trove of fabulous content being created within reddit," wrote Ohanian.

To take part in the Q&A, simply head on over, sign up for a free account if you don't have one, and fire away. 

Oh, and currently, the number one question? "Can we have Watson itself/himself do an AMA?" The answer? "We're working on it ;)"

With a victory that was certainly commendable but not really all that surprising, IBM's supercomputer Watson successfully finished the three-day Jeopardy tournament last night by beating its human competitors by a whopping $50,000. A victory for artificial intelligence and computer science. Scrawled at the bottom of his final Jeopardy response, Jennings quipped "I for one welcome our new computer overlords."

Today, IBM announced its post-Jeopardy plans for our new overlords: healthcare.

IBM has announced a partnership with Nuance Communications to utilize Watson's technology in healthcare. The partnership will involve research combining IBM's Deep Question Answering, natural language processing, and machine learning capabilities with Nuance's speech recognition and Clinical Language Understanding solutions. The goal is to help improve diagnosis and treatment of patients.

According to Dr. John Kelly, senior VP and director of IBM Research, "Combining our analytics expertise with the experience and technology of Nuance, we can transform the way that healthcare professionals accomplish everyday tasks by enabling them to work smarter and more efficiently." This will allow, for example, a doctor to consider diagnosis and treatment options using Watson's analytics and Nuance's clinical language processing technologies in order to quickly process the latest information from research journals.

"Watson has the potential to help doctors reduce the time needed to evaluate and determine the correct diagnosis for a patient," said Dr. Herbert Chase, professor of Clinical Medicine at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons.

At least our new overlords care about medicine, right?

And at a practice round today, Watson was faster on the buzzer - and correct with its responses - than its human competitors.

Watson is the successor to IBM's Deep Blue, the computer that famously beat World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov in 1987. But winning at Jeopardy is significantly more complicated than winning at chess (no offense to chess champions), as it involves a great deal more than simply understanding the next-best-move on a chess board. Watson needs to be able to understand the questions asked (or, rather, answers given), something aided by the 200 million some-odd pages of content that have been entered into its system. And it also has to be able to weigh which categories to choose and how much to wager in the final round.

Watson is powered by 10 racks of IBM Power 750 servers running Linux with 2,880 processor cores running at 80 teraflops and 15 terabytes of RAM. By comparison, Deep Blue ran at around 1 teraflop. It takes Watson less than 3 seconds to scan those millions of pages of content, and respond with its noticeably Hal-like voice.

Photo credits: Sam Gustin, Wired

How do computers
Remember? By disc and RAM,
And now by "racetrack"!

Discs spin, cheap but slow;
RAM is quicker but costly;
Racetrack's fast and cheap.

Who developed it?
IBM (old dog, new tricks).
They are on a roll.

They manipulate
Magnetic states of regions
At the speed of jets.

To seek, to find, to
Yield up a datum:
A second's billionth part.

Spintronic currents
Shoot domain walls down the track;
Distance equals pulse.

There are no plans yet
To monetize this breakthrough,
Just imagine, though.

All movies released
In a year on your cell phone
Off one triple-A.

***

We welcome comments,
As long as they're in haiku,
If longer, tanka.

Sources: Linus for Devices, IBM Research, Science, Basho

This is not just a story about Android struggling to keep developers happy, though. Mobile developers can program on top of device hardware capabilities, Operating System or software capabilities - or on top of the telephone networks themselves. The story of the Bad Piggy Bank is a page out of the larger story of a fight between device-level companies and network-level companies for the attention of developers. Traditionally, we think of post-iPhone mobile apps as being almost entirely based on the phone and its OS - but it doesn't have to be that way. Carrier level payment joins a list of other capabilities being advanced on the carrier level, including location tracking, presence status, push notifications and more.

Verizon, the largest wireless network in the United States (and, in full disclosure, a ReadWriteWeb sponsor), for example, held an all-too-unnoticed developers conference this September where it unveiled 20 different network-level Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) now available to developers building apps for customers who use the Verizon network.

People generally hate their telephone network providers, but they often love their handset providers. A big part of that is because the few apps that carriers have offered have been terrible, but handset and Operating Systems have become platforms for tons of very cool apps. What if the phone company could be as app-cool as an iPhone or Android? That's not just cool, it's also profitable and a source of industry power.

Carrier-oriented mobile apps would still be experienced by the user on their handset, of course, but the developers of those apps are able to tap into technical capabilities offered by the telephone networks themselves.

Payment is Just One of Many Options

Telecommunications middleware giant Alcatel-Lucent (disclosure: a ReadWriteWeb sponsor) is now focusing significant energy on bringing its carrier customers together with the most exciting developers it can find. Allison Cerra and Christina James of Alcatel recently outlined a number of key categories of network level APIs that carriers could offer in their book The Shift, including:

• Presence or availability status of an end user


• User location for ambient information services, geofencing and place-based commerce


• Identity; user profiles like social networks provide today


• Quality of Service flexibility for developers (bandwidth use turned up or down as needed - this one does make a person wonder about network neutrality of course)


• Storage, similar to the way a Content Delivery Network serves developers today


• Finally, billing - the type of service that Angry Birds announced today is something that carriers themselves could offer developers in some circumstances.

(Disclosure again: I wrote the foreword to the book The Shift. It's a really good book, not explicitly salesy at all.)

Alcatel-Lucent is taking a variety of steps to try to facilitate this move of application developers towards a more carrier-centric orientation, including this Fall's acquisition of cross-platform mobile app compiler OpenPlug (so the company's phone network customers can offer their own app development platforms) and a nascent API monitoring service (like Consumer Reports for anyone considering building on top of someone else's API) from ProgrammableWeb, another recent acquisition.

It's not just traditional telephony companies that are thinking in terms of network capabilities as a development platform, either. IBM's chief scientist Jeff Jonas emphasizes that there are a whole lot of options that remain unexplored to date for software development and data analysis throughout the mobile value chain. "Mobile devices in America are generating something like 600 billion geo-spatially tagged transactions per day," he says.

"Every call, text message, email and data transfer handled by your mobile device creates a transaction with your space-time coordinate (to roughly 60 meters accuracy if there are three cell towers in range), whether you have GPS or not. Got a Blackberry? Every few minutes, it sends a heartbeat, creating a transaction whether you are using the phone or not."

For potential developers on top of that huge data platform, that number Jonas references is 7,000 times bigger than the full firehose of Twitter data that so many companies are scrambling to get their hands on - and potentially far more valuable. (A final disclosure, IBM, like Verizon, advertises on ReadWriteWeb through the Federated Media ad network. This is not a commercial, it's a blog post about a really interesting development in technology. It only makes sense to reference some of the most interesting work being done online in this area and it just so happens that the most interesting companies doing that work also sponsor ReadWriteWeb.)

This wealth of carrier-level opportunity is something that some application developers have recognized for years, of course. The first big recognizable location-based social network on the market was Loopt - which was funded an incredible 5 years ago, you'll note, by Sequoia Capital, backers of Google and YouTube. Loopt ties in to carrier level location data and thus has offered "background apps" since before the iPhone was out of diapers.

In other words, sometimes teaming up with carriers lets developers do things they couldn't otherwise do. Like build a Bad Piggy Bank, for example. That's not the end of the story at all, though. The story of mobile developers beginning to explore more carrier-oriented development paradigms is much, much bigger.

The program helps students learn about the architecture of the 10 petaflop IBM Blue Waters supercomputer that will be online at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2011. It also helps them learn the programming languages they will need in order to use the supercomputer.

Big Data, Big Student Projects

Michael Laielli, an undergraduate at Stockton College in New Jersey been participating in the program. His project "Blue Waters: Towards Petascale Simulations of Sediment Fate and Transport in Rivers" creates a model as to how sediment particles in rivers travel downstream. As the research involves billions of particles, the computation is impossible to perform on a standard PC. And with the help of the petascale program, Laielli has constructed his model to run on many computer cores simultaneously. Laielli says that one of the goals has been to configure the model and the code to take advantage of parallel processing and particularly the Blue Waters computing system, and what he's learned from the program has helped him both define his research goals and design a strategy to get there.

Laielli says he's learned a lot about working in Linux, C, and MPI as well as learning new languages languages, including OpenMP and CUDA. "Regardless of what language I'm programming in," he says, "the general skills and concepts of parallel programming I've gained have been the greatest asset to our project. I will take with me and expand on them throughout my future work."

While having the opportunity to work at the petabyte scale is amazing, I asked Laielli what the biggest challenge was. His response: the "unforeseen problems that occur while working with multiple processors. We have these amazingly complex machines working for us, but it's hard to imagine everything that's going on, and it's not like we can just open it up and see where the problem is. When we see something amiss in the data, we must brainstorm, research, and work pretty hard to seek out the source of our problem. But, that's when and where the real learning begins."

The "real learning" that the Blue Waters Undergraduate Petascale Education Program offers is meant to equip the next generation of scientists with the ability to handle massive amounts of data and massive amounts of processing power - a skill that is sure to be in demand with the explosion of big data.

The full firehose delivers 1,000 Tweets each second, Twitter's Ryan Sarver said yesterday, too much data for most companies to handle without "dropping a lot of it on the floor." The Twitter announcement was made at the data-centric Defrag conference outside of Denver, where IBM Chief Scientist Jeff Jonas today discussed separately a firehose of data far, far larger: geo-tagged transaction data created by mobile devices. While Twitter data gets a whole lot of hype, the most disruptive data platform for development may instead come from the wireless mobile network operators.

Mobile devices in America are generating something like 600 billion geo-spatially tagged transactions per day. Every call, text message, email and data transfer handled by your mobile device creates a transaction with your space-time coordinate (to roughly 60 meters accuracy if there are three cell towers in range), whether you have GPS or not. Got a Blackberry? Every few minutes, it sends a heartbeat, creating a transaction whether you are using the phone or not.

For those keeping track at home, we can now do some comparison. 1000 Tweets per second equals 86 million 400 thousand Tweets per day. That's a big number, but 600 billion geo-spatially tagged transactions per day is a whopping 7000X bigger.

That mobile data enables prediction of our actions, analysis of our real-world social circles and really interesting business analysis, Jonas said today. Want to know how many people of a particular demographic group are willing to travel 20 miles to shop at a particular store, and how that has changed over time? Jonas says analysts can use that mobile use data to predict a department store's commercial performance before quarterly earnings are reported.

De-anonymizing that data? Trivial, Jonas says.

Data as Foundation for the Future

It's not about spying on you. Jonas says the coming era of big data will be one in which "data finds data and the relevance will find you"; where questions are answered before we think to ask them, where recommendations take precedence over search.

That's a vision that Google shares, too. "If I look at enough of your messaging and your location, and use Artificial Intelligence," Google CEO Eric Schmidt said this Summer, "we can predict where you are going to go." Schmidt told the Wall St. Journal in August:

"We're still happy to be in search, believe me, but one idea is that more and more searches are done on your behalf without you needing to type....I actually think most people don't want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next."

In other words, mobile network-level user data as a platform for development of software and services is going to dwarf the hottest real-time consumer data feed on the market today (Twitter's firehose) in both size and sophistication.

If those mobile data points were to be sold at the same price as Twitter is now selling each Tweet, how much money would we be talking about? 14,000 times $360,000 would be $5 billion. That seems like a very reasonable sum of money to imagine all that data being worth. 600 billion mobile social data points from across the United States could be used to generate far more wealth than that, too.

All of this analysis neglects to adress the rise of network-connected devices, the Internet of Things. Earlier this year there were for the first time more connected devices coming online with AT&T and Verizon than new human subscribers. That trend will skew the numbers in favor of data sources outside of social network data even more.

Of course there's no one single vendor who owns all that data (Who owns it at all, in fact? Do mobile phone users have some ownership over it?) but there are a number of companies taking different approaches to monetizing the parts of that data they do have access to. (Including, incidentally, ReadWriteWeb sponsor Alcatel-Lucent.)

Jonas said on stage today that he has talked to one company that sees 85% of those 600 billion data points flow through their hands, though he declined to name the company.

Streams of data available to serve as a foundation for innovative development may be a very significant part of the future - but the biggest sources of that data might not be what we expect.

By holding the phone up and looking around with the camera, users can view information about the tournament - including live scores, food menus, transportation, first-aid and restroom locations - in real-time AR perspective. Fans of augmented reality may not be blown away by this implementation, but the exposure for the technology from the tournament and from IBM is significant.

Rick Singer, IBM's Vice President of Sports Technology Partnerships, was interviewed recently (see embedded video below) by Fox Business's Brian Sullivan who asked, "What's in it for IBM?" Singer notes that IBM can show to its clients that the company is on the cutting edge and experimenting with new technologies, but he also very succinctly summed up why AR is important.

"This is all about data. It's about how you take data, aggregate it and make it simpler to use," says Singer. "This is like having your best friend with you that knows everything about the Open right by your side because you can take all of that data and you can make better decisions."

Making better decisions with more useful aggregation and presentation of data. Now that's a great slogan for augmented reality!