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)

Lotusphere Keynote Announcements

We had the traditional keynote speech this morning with the Blue Man Group performing the start/finish (and randomly helping with a demo in the middle), and Dan Akroyd as the special guest talking about collaboration as part of a film crew.

Lotus announced strong growth (12,236 new customers since launch of Notes 8, and 16 consecutive quarters of revenue growth), so they must be doing something right!

I definitely don't have space here to cover all the technologies, demonstrations and customer testimonials that Lotus went through, so here is a quick review of the bigger announcements:

Lotus have been working with RIM to deliver Connections, Sametime and Domino apps (through X Pages) on Blackberry devices. IBM have also worked on making those apps accessible on other popular mobile devices. Bluehouse has been renamed and expanded and is now called LotusLive (and yes, it includes the email piece that Karoona is so smug about). The SAP integration project (Atlantic) is now a product that will ship in March under the brand name "Alloy". Connections 2.5 is due in Q3 2009 and we are promised it will "continue to make the competition pale in comparison". Sametime Unified Telephony will ship mid 2009.

Mobile Everything

The Lotus Mobility Portfolio session covered a lot of old ground that we've already blogged about at the LoLa conference last year, but there were a couple of interesting nuggets to make the 2 hours worthwhile...

There was an amusing* 6 minute clip that explains Lotus Mobile Connect better than anything I can write here. View it here

Also some good tools that the presenter uses that we should look at as we start to get more serious about mobile devices (is Col reading this?)

• www.testiphone.com - allows simulation and testing of many different devices
• www.mymobiler.com - iPhone simulator
• www.useragent.org - useful when developing websites that may be displayed on many different devices

One area that we haven't spent much time thinking about is that last one on the list. Let's take a real world example - www.MyMMs.com. Right now the site is optimised for 'standard' browsers on traditional deskops and laptops, and works great. But what if you're out and about? If someone suggests that it would make a great valentine gift? Try it on your phone now! You might buy if you can use the site right then and there, but if it's a frustrating experience would you always get onto a 'real' PC and follow though?

With the enormous growth of mobile devices and netbooks, are we missing out on impulse sales just because the site is inaccessible to mobile browsers? If this isn't a problem for us now I'm willing to bet that it will be - and surprisingly soon.

IBM has a solution for this, and I'm sure others do too. What's even better though is that tools exist to measure the number of site hits that don't result in a sale, and also to measure the browser configurations being used to access the site. But is anyone looking?

* this is the special definition of "amusing" that only applies after 2 hours of Security presentation

SameTime Unified Telephony (SUT)

It's been a year since I last looked at SUT, and it's moved on leaps and bounds since then (it's actually a product rather than flash mock-ups!)

For those that don't know, SUT is the main Lotus play for the telephony integration which sits on top of SameTime, the Lotus Unified Communications platform.

The main idea behind SUT is that the user controls how they want to be contacted (Softphone, Deskphone, Cellphone, Voicemail etc) along with 'rules' for how to route their calls depending on things like their online status, location, time of day etc. What this means in practice is that you don't need to 'guess' where the person is or worry about calling them at an inconvenient time. It's all integrated right into the SameTime client, which then includes additional rich presence (i.e. it shows you whether I am currently on a call)

The product is now up and running, and while there are still some issues to work out with the network vendors around billing and call control, the product direction is now very focussed and it's looking really slick. It is clearly targetted purely at large enterprises, and I'll be talking with Steve next week to see how we can lay our hands on some early kit!