Earlier this week, IBM researchers announced a discovery that could lead to plastics made from plants instead of petroleum. The new plastics will be more energy efficient, more versatile, and infinitely recyclable (until we move to our space colony). More »

Reuters - IBM has started a two-year research program that aims to make cellphones easier to use for groups including the elderly and the illiterate.

IBM is working with academic institutions in India and Japan to improve access to mobile phones for the aged and illiterate

AFP - IBM researchers on Tuesday said they have discovered a way to make Earth-friendly plastic from plants that could replace petroleum-based products tough on the environment.

AP - When you recycle a plastic bottle, it doesn't necessarily become another plastic bottle.

AP - The pay package for IBM Corp.'s CEO notched slightly higher in 2009, according to calculations by The Associated Press, as he was rewarded for a year in which the technology company wrung out big profit gains despite a rocky market that clipped sales.

InfoWorld - Honing in on the need for more security in application development, IBM Rational is planning an enterprise-level  product that features two separately acquired technologies for security testing and code scanning.

Lenovo loves its red mousing nipple, Apple digs its aluminum and IBM adores those light pulses. Nearly two full years after we heard this very company touting breakthroughs in science thanks to a nanophotonic switch, in flies a similar technique from Yorktown Heights that could "greatly further energy efficient computing." As the story goes, gurus at IBM have figured out how to replace electrical signals that communicate via copper wires between computer chips with tiny silicon circuits that chat using pulses of light. The device is called a nanophotonic avalanche photodetector, and according to Dr. T.C. Chen, this kind of embedded optical interconnection makes the "prospect of building power-efficient computer systems with performance at the Exaflop level" something that could be seen in the not-so-distant future. Reportedly, the avalanche photodetector demonstrated by IBM is the world's fastest device of its kind, able to receive optical information signals at 40Gbps and simultaneously multiply them tenfold. We know that's over some of your (read: our) heads, but there's a sufficiently nerdy video after the break that gets right down to the whos, whats, whys and wheres.

Continue reading IBM keeps light pulse bandwagon rolling, uses 'em for chip-to-chip communication

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If you have a personal blog, or even a corporate one that you help write, you’ve undoubtedly run into it: the Wall. Also known as “writer’s block,” it’s the inability to come up with something to write about, or a lack of enthusiasm for doing so. Well, researchers at IBM think they may have come up with a way to get past the Wall, with what they’re calling the Blog Muse (PDF link) — a kind of social recommendation system for blog posts in which users say what they want to read about and then other users vote on those suggestions, and the most popular topics get distributed to those most likely to want to write about them.

Casey Dugan and Werner Geyer of IBM Research started working on the problem a couple of years ago, after finding “blogger’s block” or “blog fatigue” to be one of the leading problems for both internal social networks at IBM and some of the company’s clients. “We asked what they had trouble getting people to contribute content to, and they said blogs,” Dugan said. “They said that people would start them and then stop writing, or that there were a lot of blogs with not very much on them.” In fact, IBM research shows that about 80 percent of those who begin a corporate blog never post more than five entries.

Geyer said many companies see the value of blogs because they allow people to share information, but that “often people stop blogging because they don’t get any attention with what they’re writing, no one comments on their blogs, they don’t know what to write, and so on.” As the researchers describe in their paper:

In order to inspire bloggers, our system suggests topics they can write about. The audience is given a voice by letting blog readers share topics they would like to read about with the blogging community. Our system then suggests these topics to potential blog writers who can decide whether or not they would like to address the topic requested.

The system consists of two simple widgets added to BlogCentral, the internal blog network at IBM, which was launched in 2003 and has since seen a total of more than 145,000 blog posts written on 16,000 different blogs by over 14,000 users. One widget allows users to suggest topics they’d like to see written about, while the other allows them to vote on recommendations from others. In testing the system, using the profiles created by users in SocialBlue (IBM’s version of Facebook), it found up to 50 users who might be interested in writing about those topics and sent them the recommendations. When a post was written, it sent the post to anyone who voted for the topic.

And what did the research show? According to Geyer, in a study of 1,000 users who tried Blog Muse, “blog posts created from our system got twice as many comments and got more views as well, and they got 3 times as many stars (or likes).” Interestingly enough, Dugan writes that “we didn’t find an increase in the number of blog posts, so maybe there was some substitution going on there — maybe people didn’t write more, but the ones they wrote got more readers.” There was also some resistance from blog writers who wanted to follow their own muses, rather than playing to the crowd, As he put it:

Some described how they already have topics they write about, are without a shortage of ideas, and find blogging a “personal” activity that suggestions might infringe upon. One went as far as saying, “This would be similar to writing paid reviews for consumer products.”

Among bloggers who didn’t write as frequently, however, there was support for the system because it helped them come up with ideas. The researchers said in their report that their goal was “to inspire users to write more blog posts, and our approach is to involve readers by allowing them to share their topics of interest with the blogging community. Sharing and voting on topics adds a new communication channel to the blogging ecosystem.” IBM says it’s planning to roll out Blog Muse internally, and may look at commercializing it at some point in the future.

There are a number of blogosphere recommendation systems that do something similar to Blog Muse — arguably, topic filters such as Techmeme and Tweetmeme perform the same kind of function, by letting bloggers know what topics are getting the most attention from readers. But does this remove some of the serendipity that can make blogging so powerful? We don’t always know in advance what we want to read about or what will move us. What do you think?

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

Why NewNet Companies Must Shoulder More Responsibility

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Kristina B.

InfoWorld - OSGi, which is intended to provide modularity for Java, is the focus of efforts afoot at IBM and the Eclipse Foundation, with IBM leveraging OSGi in its application server and Eclipse using it in a new framework for accessing enterprise technology.

IBM researchershave created of a low-power device that can transfer information between chips at high speeds using light instead of electrical signals.

PC World - IBM researchers are a step closer to developing chips that use pulses of light instead of electrical signals to carry information between them.

We’re not looking back, we’re looking ahead. We’re continuing to invest in R&D, in strategic acquisitions, in growth initiatives–and most importantly, during these difficult times, in our people.

– IBM CEO Sam Palmisano in his letter to shareholders last year

So much for IBM’s (IBM) lifetime employment concept.

In 2009, the company sacked as many as 10,000 employees. Now comes word that thousands more losing their jobs in what the company likes to refer to as “resource actions.” Alliance@IBM/CWA Local 1701 Web site, which tracks layoffs at IBM reports that nearly 2,500 IBM employees have been let go this week, with more to follow. And unsurprisingly, the group says offshoring is, once again, to blame. Evidently, RA’d employees are being asked to train their overseas replacements before they’re cut. “IBM is shifting work offshore,” Alliance@IBM national director Lee Conrad told me. “The company appears to be abandoning the US workforce.”

And this, not two months after IBM announced that its full-year profit will be at least $11 a share, exceeding earlier targets.

What was that about investing in our people, again, Sam?