Posts Tagged 'חדשנות'

Mixing it up with IBM Mashup Center

There’s more to Web 2.0 than RSS, blogs and the 1,150,000,000 people connected to the internet. Web 2.0 is allowing us to bridge the gap between innovative (and social) technologies and business needs, in a simple (and code-less) way. I can take a map from Google, picture from flickr and a blog rss, incorporate them all into a single view – thus creating a new and unique service. It’s called a mashup:

In web development, a mashup is a web application that combines data from more than one source into a single integrated tool; an example is the use of cartographic data from Google Maps to add location information to real-estate data, thereby creating a new and distinct web service that was not originally provided by either source. [wikipedia]

IBM has been working for some time on develpoing a tool that would allow easy creation of mashups – IBM Mashup Center, that is now available free via IBM Lotus Greenhouse.CRN reviewed three mashup solutions: Google Mashup Editor Beta, IBM Mashup Center and Adobe LiveCycle. Here’s what they had to say about IBM Mashup Center:

IBM Mashup Center provides an easy-to-use, GUI-based method to combining maps, RSS feeds, and corporate data like customer lists into browser-based widgets. Creating a mashup here is as simple as dragging and dropping RSS feeds, mapping information, CSV files or other data sets onto a work board… IBM is targeting non-technologists—this is both less code-intensive and more business-friendly than Google Mashup Editor.

and closing with

The IBM Mashup Center provides a slightly more attractive alternative because of the platform’s flexibility and easy-to-deploy approach.

Mashups are definitely something that need to be in every CIO/CTO scope – the possibilities are endless, and those require little technical skills. Mixing up has never been so easy.
Stay tuned for my first mashup… coming soon.

Links:
IBM Mushup Center
Is Web 2.0 Ready for Business – CRN
IBM Mushup Center – demo (IBM)
The Business Case for Enterprise Mashups (IBM, pdf, 800KB)
Mashups – The new breed of web apps (IBM developerWorks)
IBM brings mashups closer to mainstream (Gartner, pdf, 160KB)

Embracing Social Computing at IBM

BusinessWeek has put social media at the heart of its June 2nd issue, titled ‘Beyond Blogs – What Business Needs to Know‘. You can read most of the magazine online, along with videos and photo galleries of Top 100 IT Companies, Top 10 IT Companies in North America and Top 10 IT Companies in Asia.

Big Blue Embraces Social Media is one of the articles features in the magazine, and it provides an overview of how IBM got into social computing and how our customers can benefit from our experience.

Over the past two years, IBM has been busily launching in-house versions of Web 2.0 hits. “We’re trying to see how things that are hot elsewhere can be fit for business.” Irene Greif, IBM Fellow.

Why it’s important for IBM, and business at large, to adopt enterprise social computing solutions? Excellent question! There are many answers, but I’ll mentions the ones BW did:
First, in a global company people are too far away to communicate face-to-face.

These social tools, will provide a substitute for personal connections that flew away with globalization—and help to build and strengthen far-flung teams.

Second, it’s important for recruiting.

Hotshots coming out of universities are accustomed to working across these new networks—and are likely to look at a company that still relies on the standard ’90s fare of e-mail and the phone as slow and backward.

How do IBM employees communicate with one another? I use various methods, with email being one of the last. My first option is instant messaging (Lotus Sametime), followed by twitter (internal), post on beehive, e-mail with link to a file on my web space.

So far, IBM has Dogear, a community-tagging system based on Del.icio.us, Blue Twit, and a rendition of the microblogging sensation, Twitter. It also has a Web page called Many Eyes that permits anyone (including outsiders, at many-eyes.com) to upload any kind of data, visualize it, and then launch discussions about it on blogs and social networks. The biggest success is the nine-month-old social network, Beehive, which is based on the premise of Facebook. It has already attracted 30,000 users, including top executives.

Link: Big Blue Embraces Social Media – BusinessWeek

[pictured: my social network at IBM, as of 3 weeks ago]

The IBM Social Software story

Israel and Sagi from Blink IT held a workshop earlier this week at TheMarker Com.Vention, focused on Web 2.0 for the business, or Enterprise 2.0.

Blink IT are a Web 2.0 consulting company and IBM BP, working with customers on strategy, web 2.0 adoption, enterprise 2.0 adoption and design. They started off their workshop with some examples of web 2.0 technologies (facebook, twitter, wiki, etc), and then moved on to Enterprise 2.0 best practices – and IBM is leading the pack with several slides.

You can see a social software dashboard on slide 19 (look closely at the picture…), social networking quote from John Rooney on slide 33 and another quote by my close friend Arjan Radder on slide 34. If you want to read more on IBM’s story of Social Software adoption, head over to IBM ‘getting into’ social software case study.

The complete Blink IT presentation (Hebrew/English) is available at slideshare.net.

Collaboration demo at TheMarker Com.Vention

!!!Last minute update!!!

We are going to showcase IBM/Lotus Collaboration solutions (Enterprise 2.0) at the upcoming TheMarker Com.Vention, coming Sunday-Monday, at Avenue, Airport City, Israel.
TheMarker Com.Vention is the largest Internet event in Israel, held by TheMarker.com, the leading IT news publisher in Israel. The speakers list is impressive, and includes, among others:
Craig Newmark (Craig’s list), Peter Hirschberg (Technorati), Rachel Masters (Ning), Jeff Pulver (Pulver Media), Gary Shainberg (BT), David Isenberg (Isen) and Robert Schoble.

Look up the IBM booth at the event, hear our collaboration solutions, watch the demo, set up follow-up meetings and (most important) – play with our Sony PS/3 game consoles.
Alex and myself will share this event – Alex will be on Sunday (day 1) and I will take Monday (day 2). See you at the event.

TheMarker Com.Vention 2008

I’m heading to a short vacation, so I’ll leave you with this magnificent Sony Bravia commercial, featuring purple…

Web 2.0 vs. Enterprise 2.0

Earlier this week I attended the 1st meeting of the newly formed ‘Web 2.0 Forum‘, hosted by GAIT, a prominent Knowledge Management consulting company in Israel. The meeting was held at an insurance company who’s CIO is a true collaboration evangelist, who single handedly transformed the IT in that company, and brought it to the 21st century.

The participants of the forum included colleagues and friends, vendors and customers, from every aspect of the IT arena – tech, academic, business, HR, knowledge management and consulting. It was very refreshing doing a round table with colleagues who share my passion, and I thank Gil (GAIT) for inviting me to the forum. The next meeting will be hosted at IBM, where I’ll expose the forum to some of the super cool platforms and solutions IBMers are using daily, and to the Lotus Collaboration solutions that spur from our own experience.

One of the Web 2.0 Forum goals is to increase the penetration of web 2.0 technologies and platforms into the business, and one of the main points from the round table the participants had revolved around the difference between Web 2.0 (facebook, blogs, linked-in, twitter, etc) and Enterprise 2.0 (Portals, social software, collaboration, social bookmarking, etc).
Although Web 2.0 is alive and kicking in Israel, personally I feel that Enterprise 2.0 isn’t here yet. It’s knocking at the door, pleading the security guy to let her in, but no access. Blocked.
Web 2.0 Forum should help all knowledge advocates in Israel to change that.

Later that week I met with a prominent pharma customer, who attended LCTY Israel late March. After the event, during lunch, we started talking about their interest to build ‘something’ at their infrastructure, that would increase the collaboration and sense of community at the workplace. I noticed that although they were very positive about collaboration and community, their organization didn’t share their enthusiasm. There is work and there is fun – and right now, Web 2.0 is categorized under fun. That’s exactly why Web 2.0 Forum is important – to change the culture, and making CIO/CTO/CEO understand that Enterprise 2.0 = Growth.
That’s quite a chllenge, but hey, I didn’t say it’s gonna be easy… 🙂

In that context, of changing the mindset regarding the business value of Enterprise 2.0, a presentation I gave at Knowledge Management Summit, early March – Understanding Social Networking – Getting Started.

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Mobile & Media Consultant. I help startup companies launch products to the consumer market. Reach out: dvir.reznik [at] gmail.com
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This is my personal blog. The postings here do not represent the thoughts, intentions, plans or strategies of my past employers or of my clients. It is solely my opinion.