IBM to Collaborate with Leading Singapore Institutions

IBM has announced a research collaboratory in Singapore, where researches from IBM will collaborate with Singapore local institutions to improve urban services. This is one of the project which will come under IBM Smarter Planet strategy.

From the news,

IBM will work with several agencies including the Economic Development Board (EDB) and the Land Transport Authority (LTA) to develop decision support tools to help Singapore more effectively manage its resources. As part of these efforts, IBM also intends to drive research collaborations with an ecosystem of research institutes and universities in Singapore.  

The collaboratory will enable world-class researchers in Singapore and IBM's mathematical experts, renowned for applying advanced analytics to solve real-world issues, to share skills, assets, and resources to achieve common research goals.

Singapore is one of the most advanced cities with extremely high demands placed on its urban infrastructure (water, transport and energy) due to its geography, size, population and dependence on neighbors for natural resources such as water and power. The country has also been at the forefront on the global stage in rallying for liveable and sustainable cities for the future. Besides promoting a learning network through the hosting of the biennial World Cities Summit, Singapore also aims to serve as a living lab for companies to test-bed innovative solutions for densely populated, compact urban environments. The research collaboratory for smarter cities will advance this endeavor.

The Group director of LTA Singapore Dr Chin Kian-Keong stated

"For LTA, the use of technology has always been at the forefront of what we do - how do we squeeze out more efficiency out of our transport system, and at the same time making it safe." 

Dr Chin said the research could provide intelligent solutions to real-life transport problems. "If you can get information of any traffic congestion to motorists way before they reach this incident side, and get them to detour, that will help to relieve the congestion that can be caused," added Dr Chin. 

While Singapore already has mechanisms to control traffic and the traffic alerts in place, I believe this initiative would push it even further and could well end up with personalized commuting. Here is a little video to illustrate some of the upcoming innovations from IBM where personalized commuting is a part of it. Come to think of it, I see Singapore is already laying foundations for personalized commuting.

Once upon a time, West Indian Cricket

Excellent Video on West Indian cricket...

Beware of Starhub Digital Voice Line Bills

Recently, Starhub has been upgrading their IT systems and so the customers have not been receiving monthly bills in their usual billing cycle. I for one had not received my bills for few months ( but as i am making my payments by GIRO) every month the amount has been automatically deducted. And recently i have received bills for the month of December and i noticed that there are some charges towards the Digital Voice Home line which is around S$10 (originally it was free). Even though it's not a big amount for anyone in SG, i just wanted to clarify and called Starhub. 

Nowadays, the line seems to be very busy and finally got connected to a customer consultant about 30 mins later ( thanks to the speaker phone facility, if not you got to hold the phone all the time). To my surprise the consultant told me that " The Digital Voice Home" is still free and Starhub has not introduced any charges till now. By diagnosing further, he told me that my Digital Voice line is registered under my old address where i lived many years back and was then using Starhub also. 

So what could have happened is during the IT systems upgrade there are some details which are messed up and showed up as charges in customer's bill.  And you know what, this has been happened for the last 3 months and since i have not been receiving any bills, i didn't had a chance to realise the amount. So eventually it turns out to be around S$30 which is a decent amount anyway..

Ok, the point here is Singaporeans are very busy in day to day life and don't have a chance to notice some of discrepancy in the utility bills.  But these things could happen, so please be aware. 

Had i not noticed, i would have missed around S$30 which could well be used for a family dinner in Food Court :) Say what ?

Lotusphere Nostalgia Part 3

Ok, here is another awesome video during the closing session of LS 2010. This is done by a gentleman named DJ Steve Porter who is renowned music director, remixer and it seems one of this video Slap Chop Infomercial is viewed more than 11 million times.. Wow.

Well, we also need to congratulate the LS team for bringing in such great people and advertise the products. These sort of things will definitely appeal in general public. Look how people are enjoying themselves and some people i could recognize are Andrew Pollack, Nathan Freeman, and Mikkel besides Bob Picciano and Alistair Rennie..

Hmm, Let's see what is in store for Lotusphere 2011.

Lotusphere Nostalgia Part 2

Key Highlights from LS 2010

IBM Project Vulcan - To me this is the single most important thing from LS 2010 even when there are other things like LotusLive, Lotus Notes Traveler etc.

Because it is going to appeal to both end users and as well developers and business partners. For the end users b'cos they are going to have an user interface which is very much like any other social software they use daily eg: Facebook

And for the developers and business partners IBM is going to release a common set of API's which will talk across the Lotus portfolio starting from Notes / Domino until Lotus Connections, Lotus Live and IBM WebSphere Portal. But it is not going to happen in the next release of Lotus Notes and Domino but will happen over a period of time. That's why Project Vulcan is not a code name like 'Hannover" ( code name for Lotus Notes 8) but is a blue print for the IBM future collaboration strategy.

That being said Vulcan will include all the latest technologies to achieve this vision namely HTML5, XPages,CSS3, Web Services and may possibly include WebKit etc. Of course it has to b'cos what IBM is trying to achieve is to make the entire concept of collaboration as "loosely coupled services" which can then applied across the organisation. To make that happen Lotus has to include all the Open standards ( it is already doing though) and only then if the developer wants to go integrate Lotus Notes with any of the services available in the  Internet he / she will be able to do so. 

Some questions comes to my mind though, while in the process of making it slimmer, will IBM cut down some of the features Lotus Notes has already got but for now we don't have to worry b'cos LS 2011 will answer those and shed additional light.

The purpose of this writing is only to highlight some of the key things about LS 2010 in my eyes b'cos i have caught up with LS fever now :) We may come back here again before I close down Lotusphere Nostalgia...

Thanks for reading this and stay good.. Cheers