The winner is….

Profitero, from Ireland (by way of Ukraine and Belarus), is the winner of the IBM Global Enterpreneur of the Year award.

Congratulations Profitero!

The People’s Vote Award Winner is….

IDXP, from Brazil, won the popular vote with 845 votes of a total of 2537 votes cast. Profitero came in second, and C-B4 came in third.

Congrats IDXP!

The Start: 1:30 p.m.

Gavin Newsom
Lt Governor of California
Entrepreneurship and Economic Development

The city is a city of dreamers and doers and entrepreneurs.

We have a formula of success. There’s intention if you want to create an entrepreneurship economy.

We have so much diversity here. That’s what we’re all about. We’re about inviting the best and brightest, where you can take risks and change the order of things.

San Francisco is becoming Silicon Valley north. The big problem is a shortage of people with the right skills. Education will be the differentiator.

The state is beginning to turn around.

We need to do more and better to make our academic innovations available to business.

In 2005, we hosted World Environment Day in SF. It also marked the first time that more people were living in urban areas. We know where the trend lines are going. The opportunity is self evident. The challenge is obvious. How can we create a sustainable framework for people in urban areas?

We have to bring the top talent to bear on these challenges and opportunities.

——–

1:45 p.m.

Panel: The New Intelligence: The Power of Insight
Evangelos Simoudis, Trident Capital
Promod Haque, Norwest Venture Partners
Alexandra Johnson, DFJ VTB Aurora
Moderator: Mike Riegel, IBM

Riegel: Talk to us about the growth of global entrepreneurship.

Johnson: We started on working on this a decade ago, and now we’re seeing things happen, especially in places like Russia and China.

Also the growth of mobile computing in emerging markets made it possible for those markets to leapfrog the mature markets.

Haque: We’ve been investing in emerging markets since 2005. The emergence of the middle class in those countries is creating opportunities. We have a single global fund. All our partners are sync-ed together. We have teams on the ground in all these countries, and we’re working together.

Simoudis:  We’re seeing a lot of knowledge coming from outside the us and affecting the way we think about investing.

Riegel: Is analytics a big opportunity around the world.

Pramod: In the US, we’re in the third generation. In emerging markets they still installing things like ERP systems. So the work on big data is happening here. It’s the volume of data and the variety of data, and we have real time data. It’s not about reducing costs but about making my company grow.

Simoudis: People are moving from spotting patterns in data to actual insights. We’re focusing on companies that are industry specific. The software can saw to the user because of these patterns you should change the marketing budget in the following way.

Johnson: We see all sizes of companies change their behavior based on analytics. Big banks have embraced business analytics tools, and smaller banks are trying to get into the game in the same way. If they can predict the behavior of their customers and go to the places where their customers are, then they can expand their businesses.

Pramod: We have machine learning now. You can inject real time data. You have the location based information. You can make precise recommendations to users in real time.

Riegel: What’s your best advice to the entrepreneurs here?

Simoudis: I’ve been an entrepreneur twice. First, you need passion and optimist. Also, remember, your investors are your friends. Treat you money like it’s theirs.

Haque: My advice is don’t give up–no matter what happens. Figure out a way. If you’re passionate about what you’re doing, you’ll stick to it. There are a lot of new disruptive technologies coming, and those are opportunities for you.

Johnson: Choose your investor carefully. It’s a long term relationship. Find a way to build a company where 2 + 2 = 9.

——

2:30 p.m.

Manoj Saxena
General manager
IBM Watson Solutions

My lessons from being an entrepreneur

I worked for 3M for several years and then moved to Austin, and launched my first startup. I used 13 credit cards. In early 2001 the company was bought by Commerce One. Then I started another company, which was bought by IBM

The companies created about $250 million of value and nobody got hurt in the process.

The lessons:

As an entrepreneur you have to understand your personal core competence. My skill is transferring something from a Powerpoint into a business. IBM is making it possible for me to do that again.

Entrepreneurship is changing. There’s a lot more realism about how businesses are built. It’s no longer Build it and They Will Come. Now it’s, If they Come, You Can Build It. You need to validate the market before invest a lot. It’s about building a business, not building a startup. Back in the dot-com era, entrepreneurs just wanted to build quickly and flip it. They didn’t build a business model. Today, people are building real businesses.

Also, you have to build a business with a bigger purpose. It has to be about more than you bank balance.

The other lesson is great companies are build by exceptional people. Don’t start a company with your beer buddies. It’s the team that gets you through.

How Watson helps create a smarter Planet.

It’s been nearly a year since Watson won on Jeopardy! This was one of IBM’s Grand Challenges—to prove what computing can do.

Last August, IBM formed a new business unit to commercialize Watson. It’s a Deep Q&A system.  It can process and understand a tremendous amount of information in a short time. I can deal with unstructured data. We can create information based applications rather than data based applications. Before Watson, computers were big calculators; After Watson, they’re learning and thinking machines. It’s the third generation of IT.

Watson helps to create a smarter planet. The world is getting more instruments, interconnected and intelligent, which creates a lot of new opportunities.

Watson represents one of the most advanced capabilities in computing—and a great opportunity to apply intelligence to solving the world’s problems.

How does it work? Three steps:

–It understands human language at massive scale.
–It generates possible answers and gives its confidence level, and can explain why it came up with the answer.
–It learns from its experiences.

The first question was: where do we apply Watson?

Our first target is health care. There’s a tremendous amount of medical information, yet doctors can’t absorb it all and apply the information at the point of care.

This is the grand challenge for Watson to take on.

It’s so difficult because there’s so much unstructured data. Most computers are not designed to understand unstructured information. Watson understands human language and understands the question that is being asked, so it can find answers.

It can serve as an advisor to doctors. It’s not making decisions. It’s the physician’s assistant.

—————-

6:15 p.m.

Guy Kawasaki
Garage Technology Ventures
The Lessons I learned From Steve Jobs

I worked for Apple from 1983 to 1987 as a software evangelist for the software division. I worked for Steve Jobs. I had a great time there. We were trying to change the world

I’m sure right now Steve’s telling god how to run the universe.

–“Experts” are often clueless. As entrepreneurs, if you listen too much to the experts, you’ll go wrong. The most dangerous experts are people who are successful and rich. Rich and famous doesn’t mean smart. Most of the time it means lucky.
–Customers can’t tell you what they need. Nobody told Apple to build the Macintosh. Customers told us to build a better Apple II.
–Jump to the next curve. Don’t just duke it out on the same curve.
–The biggest challenges beget the best work. Apple took on IBM. Find a mighty competitor for yourself.
–Design counts. It’s not all about price. Enough people care about design.
–Use big graphics and big fonts. Example from Jobs: iTunes: The best windows app ever written. The optimal number of Powerpont slides in a presentation is 10. You should give it in 20 minutes max. The minimum font size should be 30 points.
–Changing your mind is a sign of intelligence. When things change you have to react and change.
–A-players hire A-Players. I’d say you should hire people who are even better than you. A+ players.
–Real CEOs can demo. They can show how the product works. They don’t hand it over to the vp of engineering.
–Real entrepreneurs ship. They don’t wait for the perfect product. I say: Don’t worry, be junky.
–Marketing = unique value.
–Some things need to be believed to be seen. In order to see a Macintosh, developers had to believe in it first.

(His slides had very large fonts, but his talk lasted 30 minutes and he had way more than 10 slides. His retort: “These rules are for you, not for me.”)

John Squire is IBM’s director of Digital Marketing and Analytics.

Updated Post
AN UPSET IN THE MAKING
3 February 2012, 11:30 AM Eastern

Just like on the field, Eli Manning is riding a late surge to overtake Tom Brady in the IBM and USC analysis of Super Bowl XLVI social media sentiment.  Overnight results of Super Bowl Twitter buzz drove Giants quarterback Eli Manning’s ‘T score’ for positive sentiment ahead of Tom Brady. Manning now leads with 66% vs. Brady’s 61%, which represents an 8-point shift compared to the previous day. In another interesting development positive sentiment for Giants head coach jumped dramatically with his score rating increasing to 76% positive. That places Coach Coughlin above all of the players and coaches on both teams.

This day-to-day shift in Super Bowl fan sentiment illustrates the speed at which consumer sentiments can shift online — a factor that businesses are watching closely due to the potential impact on their brand equity and sales.

By applying analytics in social media settings we can identify nuances – positive, negative, irony, snarky vs. sincerity, in real-time.  That’s enough time to help an organization, or in this case professional athletes, adjust their comments and actions to dramatically (and positively) impact their brands.

Original Post
SUPER BOWL ANALYSIS TAKES US BEYOND THE TWEETS
2 February 2012

One of the most dramatic NFL games ever played was Super Bowl XLII pitting the undefeated (18–0) New England Patriots led by record-setting quarterback Tom Brady against the surprising NY Giants with young, unproven Eli Manning at the helm.   A thrilling, some say shocking victory for the Giants ended the Patriots bid to be the only 19–0 undefeated champion in league history.  And now Super Bowl XLVI –  The Rematch —   anticipated to be the most watched American television show in history, promises to take social media to a whole new level.

As my colleague, and former NFL player Kevin Nosbusch posted on Wednesday, IBM and the University of Southern California Annenberg Innovation Lab are conducting the first sentiment analysis of the two Super Bowl quarterbacks to illustrate how new analytics technologies make it possible to quickly assess the positive, negative and neutral sentiments shared by fans.

Why is this sentiment analysis important to IBM? In addition to being a longtime partner of the NFL, IBM recognizes that its clients, just like football players, are closely connected to their brand presence.

Using advances in analytics companies, academics, journalists can gain new insights into consumer perceptions via social media on endless topics from football and baseball to movies and retailing. Technologies can even distinguish irony and figure out which tweets are just background noise and those that are truly important.

Branding Upset on the Digital Playing Field

The Super Bowl analysis shows us that today the two quarterbacks, Tom Brady and Eli Manning are in statistical dead heat:  Brady earning 65% positive sentiment and Eli Manning earning 62% positive sentiment.  That actually represents a big branding upset on the digital playing field. Most sports and marketing followers would assume that Brady should be far ahead given his lofty status as an elite QB for many years and three championship rings.

Other noteworthy findings show that wide receivers have upstaged the quarterbacks, who are being positioned in the news media as the chief protagonists — Wes Welker is #1 in positive sentiment and Victor Cruz is a close 2nd.  Interestingly Brady leads by 3% points, exactly the point spread Las Vegas oddsmakers have favored the Patriots.

So while it looks like Tom Brady is going into the game as the Social MVP, now is not the time to get cocky.  Eli Manning is holding his own against the more experienced Brady in terms of positive sentiment.

The IBM USC analysis illustrates the potential insight and benefits that social media analytics can deliver to a brand — whether you’re an professional football player or a global enterprise.  Businesses that ignore the impact of social media will be stuck on the sidelines.

Learn more about IBM and USC AIL social media analysis projects.

Technorati Tags: Analytics, Big Data, business analytics, Education, entrepreneur, IBM, IBM Research, Jeopardy, nfl, picture stories, predictive analytics, retail, smarter commerce, Smarter Planet, social business, storytelling, twitter, Watson

Technorati Tags: Bitcarrier, ibm smartcamp, Martin Mendez

When I played football at the University of Notre Dame and for the San Diego Chargers, broadcast television and radio were the primary ways fans enjoyed the game. There was no ESPN, no sports talk radio, the Internet was only known by DARPA scientists and social media didn’t exist.

Gosh, I sound pretty old. But in just 30 years the media and sports industries have been completely transformed by technology.  Today, fans are not only Tweeting about their favorite players and teams, but just last week at the Pro Bowl athletes were participating in the virtual conversation on the field at Twitter stations.

This week, IBM and the University of Southern California Annenberg Innovation Lab (AIL) are conducting an analysis of social media trends related to Super Bowl Quarterbacks Tom Brady and Eli Manning.  By analyzing hundreds of thousands of public tweets they’ll determine the fans’ sentimental favorite – the people’s champion if you will.

Like previous analyses on movies, retailing and baseball, analytics makes it possible to understand positive, negative and neutral sentiments of social media commentary, distinguish irony, and even apply machine learning to figure out which tweets are just background noise and those that are truly important.  So we can now break down the Big Show’s compelling story lines in a way that traditional media never could.

Take the eternal New York/Boston sports rivalry. Is this a grudge match for the Patriots who had their perfect season ruined by the Giants four years ago?  Will Tom Brady be the first quarterback to win four Super Bowls since Joe Montana?  With his second Super Bowl in four years, has the Giants’ Eli Manning earned elite status and taken up his brother Peyton’s mantle as arch-rival of Tom Brady?   How will the family dynamic affect Eli Manning who will play on his brother’s turf in Indianapolis during Super Bowl XLVI?

Talk radio and sports columns are full of pundits and prognosticators discussing these topics ad nauseam. Coaches and players are focused on playbooks and game strategy. Organizations running commercials are waiting anxiously for consumer reaction. In this context, fans today have an opportunity to both share and learn from others instantly; and they’re providing researchers with an unfiltered voice that is ripe for analysis.

But this is about so much more than analyzing which QB fans are rooting for in Super Bowl XLVI.  Uncovering hidden insights from public Twitter comments can help a slew of people, from marketers to the NFL franchise owners, better understand opinions toward players, teams and products.  These opinions can no longer go unnoticed, which is why the NFL has wisely established a Super Bowl Social Media Command Center.

We can see from the work that IBM and USC are doing that this notion of shared community engagement continues to expand exponentially thanks to other social media platforms like Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and YouTube. In this context, sentiment analysis can be applied to learning how consumers perceive brands, reputations of companies and organizations, and new television shows and movies – just to name a few.

So which quarterback will be the social MVP of Super Bowl XLVI?  We’ll find out later this week.

In the meantime, the data that IBM and USC are gathering affirms what I’ve known since my playing days — statistics are an important part of sports.  And today gathering social media data can be a powerful tool that impacts the bottom lines for businesses of all sizes in all industries.

• Learn more about IBM and USC AIL social media analysis projects.

Technorati Tags: Analytics, Big Data, business analytics, data, Education, IBM, IBM Research, picture stories, predictive analytics, retail, smarter commerce, Smarter Planet, social business, Watson

“The good news is given where you are now your odds of raising capital have been raised dramatically. Being in SmartCamp raises your profile. The bad news is it’s a very very hard environment for raising capital.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

You need a good pitch. “You have to get the investor to say “wow.” There are so many companies out there. You have to stand out. In fact, you have to get the venture capitalist to fall in love with you. “Venture capital is a stunningly emotional process.” Due diligence for a VC is about making sure they’re not making a stupid mistake because they fell in love with a startup.

Raising money is a sales process. I pitched four startups to VCs over a 12 year period. 90% of the time, I failed.

–Before you talk to a VC, you have to generate momentum for your company.

–Target the right venture capitalists, the ones that have shown interest in your markets. Find information through your business partners. “Go after them with a rifle, not with a shotgun.”

–VCs want to co-invest with other VCs, typically. They want to syndicate their deals. You have to help build the syndicate. You have to drive the process. “We call it herding the cats.”

–Manage the process. Have your database of prospects. Set goals. Have your to-do list. Follow through step by step.

Technorati Tags: Garage Technology Ventures, ibm smartcamp

Much of the growth in new markets comes from the entrepreneurial companies who are building the new applications.

IBM is an integrator. In the Smarter Planet sphere, the integrator can take new technologies and services to market more quickly than the startups can. So IBM has a strategy of forming partnerships with innovative startups, and, in some cases, buying them.

Click here to view the embedded video.

To get the most value out of new sources of data, interconnectivity and analytics, cities have to integrate their data and their operations–breaking down the barriers between individual departments. Technology is one of the key tools for integrating this information and these operations.

So IBM has built a platform for integration called the Intelligent Operations Center. “Think of this an analytics hub were we can do high volume real time data analysis, including predictive analytics,” he says.

The idea is to pre-integrate a lot of the pieces of technology in the intelligent operations center. Now IBM is partnering with companies or buying them. One example is i2, a leader in public safety.

We want startups to see this as a development platform they can build upon. Together, we can build a total solution.

We’re also working on integration platforms for other industries, including the financial sector, health care sector, etc.

Here’s a quote he uses frequently when he talks to city leaders about making their cities smarter: “Gentlemen, we have run out of money. Now we must think!” Sir Winston Churchill.

Editor’s note: Vol Pirrukh leads one of the contestants in the IBM SmartCamp competition world finals this week (Jan. 31, Feb. 1 and 2) in San Francisco. Nine startups from around the world will compete for fame and expert advice. To follow the event virtually, return to A Smarter Planet for liveblogging, view livestreaming video and follow the Twitter hashtags #IBM SmartCamp and #startups.

Yes, it’s true; our company name did come from those delicious little cakes – profiteroles. When we were brainstorming the name of our start-up we all liked “profiteroles” because it has “profit” and “the cherry on top” – i.e. sweetness – in it. But it was a bit too long and the domain Profiteroles.com was taken. So we sent a survey to over 100 friends to pick their favorite name from a few alternatives and “Profitero” got the most votes.

Profitero offers an online service to retailers to help them monitor competitors’ prices, stock availability and shipping charges. We help our clients increase sales and maximize profits by leveraging high-quality online competitive data. Profitero simplifies and significantly speeds up the process of collecting and assessing this data and the service can be used by both online and offline retailers.

Our service grew out of the own pain that Kanstantsin  Chernysh (one of the Profitero co-founders) as an online store owner had to go through to monitor his online competition; Dmitry Vysotski and myself saw the huge potential for this service while working at IBM and Google and decided to bring it to the market.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Now our clients tell us there was a big gap in the market for this service. “I was looking for something like Profitero for two years and couldn’t find anything even close to it! What used to take me two to three hours each day, I do now with Profitero in minutes!” one client says. Another said, “We were price comparing 1000 products once a week which took one person a full day. Now we price compare over 2000 products, checked daily and all we have to do is analyze the information given to us by Profitero.”

Despite Profitero providing a price monitoring service for retailers and manufacturers, the backbone of our technology is the ability to collect and analyze large quantities of online data. Profitero collects data on 30 million products from 2,800 retailers with plans to grow this to 100 million products by mid-2012. Over the past fifteen months, Profitero has secured contracts with a number of key retailers in the European market. Tesco, Auchan, Worten are just a selection of the high-profile retailers using our software to help them grow their sales and profit margins. We are also partnering with some significant service groups operating in the retail industry e.g. Nielsen.

Why did we apply to participate in IBM SmartCamp? There were two main reasons:

For starters, our business has good synergies with IBM Smarter Commerce. At Profitero we have this vision: Modern day consumers are very smart in their purchasing decision-making: you can go to the store to try the gadget, check the prices online on your smartphone and then buy it where you get the best offer. Price comparison is the industry that has existed for years. Consumers are savvy! The IBM study Capitalizing on the Smarter Consumer found that 49 per cent of consumers use two or more shopping channels during a single purchase. But retailers are lagging behind. We want to help retailers to be smarter: helping them to make data-informed timely decisions on pricing to grow their sales and avoid losing customers. Hence we found that our vision really relates to the IBM Smarter Commerce strategy.

Another reason we participated is we wanted to work with Big Blue. It is very hard for a start-up to begin working with a large company; they have many layers of hierarchies and thousands of constantly changing priorities. Despite some successful cases where we managed to build some really great business relationships, this is a tough area to break into. Thus we find it fantastic that a company of such size and influence as IBM supports start-ups and gives them an opportunity to connect with the right people, offering support to get things moving. Thanks to all IBM’ers who have made it possible to start working with the organisation. We really appreciate your help and support!

Along the way we discovered more benefits than we originally counted on: 1) Excellent mentors during the IBM SmartCamp sessions. The experience and range of mentors was incredible. Entrepreneurs, VCs and IBM’ers were asking tough questions, that we often don’t want to ask ourselves. Thanks to all the mentors we met and will meet during the finals. 2) Networking opportunities. We got some really important contacts during SmartCamp London, but even more came along when we continued working with IBM after the event. 3) Great PR exposure (even writing this blog post!) Every start-up likes to see their name in publications but being mentioned alongside Big Blue goes a long way with clients and leads.

We believe that IBM SmartCamp is really useful for any start-up. Even the story of SmartCamp itself is similar to the stories of successful tech start-ups: with great idea, no money but lots of work and support you can achieve incredible results! We look forward to this week’s IBM SmartCamp Global Finals, which is promising to be even more exciting then what we saw at the SmartCamp London.

Technorati Tags: ibm smartcamp, Profitero, Vol Pigrukh

Editor’s note: Startup entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and business leaders will gather in San Francisco for the IBM SmartCamp competition world finals next week (Jan. 31, Feb. 1 and 2.) To follow the event virtually, return to A Smarter Planet for liveblogging, view livestreaming video and follow the Twitter hashtags #IBM SmartCamp and #startups.

How do you create something from nothing? It seems like magic to take an idea and turn it into a growing enterprise.  Yet this is what entrepreneurs do every day.   And that’s also what we did when we created IBM SmartCamp.

Our journey started almost 3 years ago.  I was traveling to conferences and events around Europe. As I met entrepreneurs, it became clear that very few had heard about what we think is the biggest technology opportunity over the next decade: making the planet smarter by putting intelligence into things no one would recognize as computers, including cars, appliances, roadways, power grids, buildings, farms, waterways and clothing.

It became clear: We needed to do something to get the startup community focused on making a smarter planet- and help the ones who do so become successful.

Click here to view the embedded video.

IBM doesn’t invest directly in startups, but we’re heavily involved in the startup community. We acquire 15-20 companies a year.  We are investors in the funds of many of the leading VC firms. We believed we could help passionate entrepreneurs succeed by connecting them with individuals who had built or invested in great companies.

SmartCamp started life as an internal startup. It was a night and weekend activity for a small group of us. We had no resources and no budget. However it’s amazing how many people wanted to help these early stage companies grow.

We piloted the program in Dublin in Oct 2009.  We sought out like minded individuals and organisations who were excited by the idea of working with startups.  We hoped we’d find the funds and resources to make our vision a reality.  ’This is too important to let lack of funds stop you – this is a great idea you’ll find a way to fund it’ was how one of the exec team put it. Immediately we discovered how infectious the passion of entrepreneurs is–how exciting it is to be surrounded by individuals who believe they can change the world. We were amazed at how some of the best and most experienced investors and mentors were willing to give up their time to be part of this for nothing material in return.

After a lot of work and a great event, we figured that this could be exported to other cities and regions. We sought out the best partners and mentors we could find and ended up being overwhelmed by support in Austin, Boston, Barcelona, Bangalore, Istanbul, London, New York, Rio, Silicon Valley, Stockholm, Shanghai and Tel Aviv.   The program scaled much quicker than we thought thanks to our amazing mentor network and the hard work of lots of local team who took on this additional responsibility because they too were infected by the entrepreneurs passion.

Now we are approaching our 2nd world finals.   The teams from last year have done very well.  A number of them raised significant investment rounds including Carecloud ($20.1m), Panoramic Power ($4.5m), Sproxil ($1.8m) and Streetline ($15m).  We also signed a global partnership with Streetline, a company that provides sensor-based street parking systems, to roll out a Smarter Parking Starter Kit.

From parking in the US to validating medicines in Africa these companies show it is possible to bring combine sensors, interconnectivity and analytics to bear on complex problems.   The SmartCamp mentors have proven how they can help accelerate these teams by sharing their wealth of experience and contacts.

Sometime I have to pinch myself to believe it is real. I recall listening to Jim Breyer from Accel (Forbes Midas List #1 tech investor)  at SmartCamp Rio talk with these early stage entrepreneurs about the amazing opportunities open to them. And I remember being pleasantly surprised when I turned on a television in a hotel room there and saw a BBC World Service feature on Sproxil’s progress in Africa. These confirm for me how well the SmartCamp program can support early stage entrepreneurs.

Overall, the past couple of years have taught me you can’t predict the future.  At our global finals event last year, we never imagined that our keynote speaker (then-Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen) would be busy negotiating a financial bailout package with IMF.  He delivered a great presentation at our event that in the face of an international crisis.

My takeaway message from all of this is that many things are out of your control. This is especially true for start-ups—with their very limited resources. However, the best entrepreneurs have belief and passion. It helps them to have investors and mentors lending a hand. But what matters most is their ability to respond to the daily cycle of opportunity and crisis.

Technorati Tags: ibm smartcamp

As the systems that run the way we work and live become smarter, the way people connect and communicate, find and share information, and perform everyday business tasks is changing in dramatic and dynamic ways.

Everywhere you look, new devices combined with social collaboration tools are transforming how work is done today — how information is shared, relationships are built, and decisions are made.

Thanks to clever social software tools that make collaboration happen easily and naturally, new delivery models such as cloud and mobile computing, and new ways of finding and sharing information, businesses are becoming social businesses — ones that are connected in a variety of ways, both inwardly and out.

    Creative Connections

For example, instead of simply pushing messages and offers out to the market, social businesses are creating back-and-forth dialogues with their customers through social tools, and are able to target the right content to the right customers using profile data from the Web and analytics.

This could enable a retail buyer to use seemingly unrelated purchases events to find an emerging trend in a product line; an automated electronics assembly process to pull in the best parts, suppliers, and assemble expertise without disruption as market needs continuously change; and an insurance firm to connect its independent agents and underwriters, helping them to reduce policy turnaround time from weeks to days.

The Social Enabler

Mobile devices equipped with new social networking software are becoming the great enablers of a social business, and vital business tools that allow workers to be more productive in more places because they can access mail, calendar, contacts, employee records and to-do lists anywhere in the world.

And as organizations struggle to find ways to more accurately gather, share and gain insight through smart devices, IBM is there to help with new software and services designed to bring a new level of intelligence to the mobile enterprise marketplace.

Connecting and Empowering People

As the rapid growth of social networking and mobility erases some of the boundaries that separated individuals in the past, people increasingly use their relationships with other people to discover and use information to accomplish innumerable tasks.

Gone are the days when a person had to be tied to a desk and chair in the office to get his or her work done, or when innovation was a guarded secret, with all of the novel ideas created in isolation.

We’re in a new era now, in which any person, any object, any process or service and any organization — large or small — can become digitally aware, connected and smart.

And now savvy organizations around the world are transforming their workplaces, not only by connecting and collaborating in new ways, but by unleashing the genius and creativity of the workforce itself.

 See also:

Picture Story: How IBMers Work

Technorati Tags: animations, mobile, picture stories, smarter collaboration, social analytics, social business, social commerce

The Galley has been gathering applications from software hackers, artists, community activists, engineers and urban planners who want to participate by producing installations, performances, workshops, apps, etc.  The call for proposals closes January 20, but Dillon says it’s not too late to get started on a proposal and urges people with innovative ideas to bring them forward. Find out more here.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The plan is to use the entire city of Dublin as a living laboratory for events and experiments. But the scope of the thinking is global. The exhibit will tie in with the Dublin City of Science conference which will bring hundreds of scientists from around the world next July to showcase the latest advances in science, encourage cross-discipline and cross-border collaboration and promote the role of science in society. The HACK THE CITY organizers also hope to take elements of the exhibition on the road in the future to cities around the world, including San Jose, California.

IBM is one of the sponsors of HACK THE CITY and will take the lead in one of the projects–an effort to use technology to develop practical solutions to urban problems. “The idea is to come up with solutions that we can then publish out to the world,” says Martin Kelly, a partner in IBM’s Venture Capital Group.

Science Gallery is an enlightened organization. It’s about promoting science, but it does that by mixing science, technology and art. Approaches like this help create well-rounded individuals and transcendent societies.

Technorati Tags: IBM, Science Gallery, Trinity College Dublin