10 New Technologies IBM Is Cooking in Its Innovation Labs

IBM Lotusphere 2008 is the setting for the introduction of new collaboration technologies, but it also affords IBM the opportunity to show off software from its research labs around the world. Here are 10 new technologies that have promise, but don’t get too excited! Some of these products will get rolled into existing IBM offerings–or may never see the light of day at all.

By Clint Boulton

IBM’s metaverse for the public sector, Bluegrass is a virtual reality application that lets workers set up virtual conference rooms. Sure, the convergence of social networking and virtual reality is neat, but will people really forgo meeting in person to meet in a virtual boardroom? Time will tell, but Big Blue has big hopes for this technology.

This application is IBM’s Facebook. Boasting 6,500 IBM profiles, the application is not only attractive but totally serviceable, allowing users to post pictures and video, and share event information. Moreover, users can drag and drop text like it’s going out of style. Beehive has great promise as a product, but, for it to make money, IBM will have to offer Beehive as a white-label platform.

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Why? Because we can’t get enough of games. Tag It collects tags applied to items to boost intranet search. We’re not sure whether this will make searching a corporate intranet fun (Scrabulous, anyone?), but it should help employees get a better feel for their colleagues-

How do you give search a human touch? Social Discovery returns documents like any other search engine, but it also adds names of people related to a topic from the company’s internal Blog Central application, from any IBM Dogear tags associated with the theme and from user recommendations. Results gauge users’ interests, user feedback about documents and the popularity of documents.

Imagine a search application that can retrieve your instant messages down to the minute. This is a frightening prospect for some people, but it could be a compliance specialist-

Simply put: This is secure file sharing through the Web browser. Cattail e-mails users when files are altered, and provides feeds for people, topics and full-text searches. We’re not sure the world needs another feed system, but Cattail provides a counterpoint to Google’s “no attachments” Apps policy.

What Google Presentations application? SlideRiver lets users work together on presentation files at a time when more and more knowledge workers are collaborating on the digital front.

Named for Disney character Dumbo’s large ears, Project Jumbo could be a boon to hearing-impaired users of IBM Lotus SameTime. Jumbo offers automated speech recognition. Speak into a headset plugged into your computer, and the Jumbo plug-in turns your words into digital print in the SameTime IM window. Pro: It works in seconds. Con: You have to speak deliberately.

International companies are bound to have communication barriers among team workers spread across different countries. Enter RTTS, or Real-Time Translation Service, which offers speech-to-text and speech-to-speech translation. Type a SameTime instant message in English, and your colleague in Tokyo will be able to read it in Japanese. Speak Spanish in a SameTime Web conference chat, and hear it turned into English.