IBM

Watson, IBM’s formidable supercomputer Jeopardy contestant, made a video appearance at the annual meeting of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS). Watson appeared in a talk given by Dr. Martin Kohn, chief medical scientist for IBM's Care Delivery Systems.
» Read more

"Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM."

That chestnut has morphed from sales proposition to object lesson on the perils of clinging to convention in less than a generation. We've ditched the dark suits and "sincere" ties of our father's IBM for black turtlenecks and jeans, and we've embraced the "think different" ethos of Apple's celebrated campaign:

"Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in square holes. The ones who see things differently."

But how much has really changed? » Read more

I recently wrote about the $4.5 billion auction for Nortel's portfolio of 6,000 patents that went to a consortium that included Apple, Microsoft, and RIM (Blackberry) -- three of four smartphone platforms. In the wake of this sale, Interdigital has contemplated monetizing its portfolio of 8,500 patents, perhaps even putting the company up for sale. Google announced that it has bought over 1,000 patents from IBM for defensive purposes. Perennial investor Carl Icahn suggested that Motorola cash in on some of its immense portfolio of 18000 patents. » Read more

Over the last eight years, Pamela Jones, known as "PJ," wrote volumes at Groklaw—first as a blog about the holes in SCO's claims, then increasingly as a place for wider commentary on the legal issues facing Linux and open source. To summarize the site's mission statement, Groklaw was a full legal news resource, "acknowledged and used by all the parties, including SCO." But it was also a community—a place for open source believers to gather, learn, and share.

» Read more

Like many, I was surprised-but-not-really when Pamela Jones announced that she would be retiring original content on the legal analysis site that grew to fame within and without the open source community as it rose to do battle with the incredibly audacious claims by The SCO Group that Linux was directly derived from UNIX. » Read more

NASA has been implementing an Open Government Plan for nearly a year, and this week they held the first NASA Open Source Summit in Mountain View, CA. But the roots of open source at NASA go back much further, to its founding legislation in 1958, which designed NASA as a source that would "provide for the widest practicable and appropriate dissemination of information"--a goal perfectly suited to an open approach. » Read more

Over the past few weeks, the world has been consuming the newest set of revelations via WikiLeaks. The uproar caused by the release of the first set of diplomatic cables from a batch of 251,000 in WikiLeaks' possession is enough to take your breath away.

A disclaimer: in this post it is not my intention to analyze the positive or negative consequences of the actions of the WikiLeaks organization—there is plenty of that coverage, just check your favorite news reader every five minutes or so to see the latest. » Read more

Triple yields of cocoa crops. New lives for 6.5 million poor farmers on small farms in developing nations. More sustainable chocolate for you. Those are the goals of a collaborative team crossing public and private organizations that has been working to improve the cocoa growing process to benefit the world’s cocoa farmers and help lead us to a more sustainable world cocoa supply.
» Read more

This week I finally got a chance to sit down and digest IBM's latest Global CEO Study, newly published last month and entitled Capitalizing on Complexity. This marks the fourth study IBM has done (they complete them once every two years), and I've personally found them to be really useful for getting out of the weeds and looking at the big picture. » Read more

Traditional media companies are in big trouble. You may have noticed. You know who else has noticed? David Pakman, currently a partner at the prestigious Venrock venture capital firm. You may also know David as the former CEO of eMusic—a fairly disruptive media company in its own right. David has over 300,000 Twitter followers and regularly blogs here about the “undoing of big media.”
» Read more