Travel Socially!

This morning I was at the 'glimpse of the future' session by the IBM research center. I'll cover the center in another post - here I want to discuss one specific research project - Project Sojourn.

This was a 6 week project to research how corporate travel could be improved through the use of social software. The result is an application mockup and some storyboards on how everything would work.

For those familiar with TripIt, there are a lot of parallels (if you're not familiar then go have a play!), but the IBM solution is much more geared towards enterprises, allowing users to see things like corporate rates and leveraging internal sources of information such as whereabouts, calendars, units DB, user profiles etc. Other nice enterprise features include automatic notification of other people attending the meeting if you are delayed, real-time update of travel plans etc. I can't really do it justice here so will make sure the slides get posted when I'm back in an office.

As a frequent traveller myself, I want this tool yesterday! On the other hand we do already have some parts of this functionality, such as the 'who is visiting site x' in the whereabouts DB (Christophe can now be smug as he was way ahead with this idea!)

My personal prediction? Expect to see this as a linked-value* offering with Lotus Connections v3.

*I had no idea what all these IBMers meant by 'linked value' either, so I asked! Basically it refers to anything you get when you are using multiple Lotus products. In this case you would probably get the full functionality through a combination of Sametime (to be able to seamlessly contact fellow travellers), Connections (to mine for people potentially travelling to the same events) and Lotus Notes (for the Calendar)