ibm

If you're looking to attract attention, setting a Guinness World Record is probably a good way to start.

That was the goal -- attracting attention, that is -- for a group of IBM Research scientists who recently set out to make what turned out be the Guinness World Record-certified smallest stop-motion film ever.

Called "A Boy and His Atom," the animated film features a small boy having a good old time as he bounces around, playing catch, and dancing. The twist? The film was shot at the atomic level and features 130 atoms that were painstakingly placed, atom by atom, as the researchers shot 250 individual frames. The images were created at a temperature of negative 268 degrees Celsius and were magnified 100 million times. … Read more

IBM's first quarter fell short of expectations as deals slipped into the second quarter. IBM's comments about a poor finish to the first quarter is becoming a common refrain among enterprise technology companies.

The company reported first-quarter earnings of $3 billion, or $2.70 a share, on revenue of $23.4 billion, down 5 percent from a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings for the first quarter were $3 a share.

IBM was expected to report first-quarter earnings of $3.05 a share on revenue of $24.6 billion.

CEO Ginni Rometty said that the company saw a strong start … Read more

NEW YORK -- IBM today outlined its flash storage plan, which includes a $1 billion investment in research and development and a series of systems that will use solid-state drives.

With the move, Big Blue is the latest on the bandwagon to push Flash into the data centers. Developments like big data are pushing flash storage mainstream in the enterprise because companies need to tap into so-called hot data---information that needs to be used real time. Fusion-io, EMC, NetApp and other storage players have also formulated flash storage strategies.

At an event here, IBM's Ambuj Goyal, general manager of … Read more

IBM has come up with a new technique for making the tiny switches and memory cells at the heart of computer chips: a drop of ionic liquid.

The technique converts a metal oxide on a computer chip from a conducting to an insulating state and back again, a transition that, using a different approach, is at the heart of conventional semiconductor chips today. Insulators don't conduct electricity and conductors do, so changing a material's state is instrumental to how it performs the logical operations of computer processing.

Today's semiconductor chips work by applying electrical voltage to a &… Read more

HANOVER, Germany -- IBM is trying to advance supercomputing technology in processing, optical communications, and memory in conjunction with an international project to peer at the Big Bang's radio remnants.

The radio telescope, called the Square Kilometer Array (SKA), will be built from 2016 to 2024 in southern Africa and Australia. Before that, though, IBM is working to develop the necessary computing technology through a five-year partnership with the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (Astron). At the CeBIT show here, the two groups are showing off some of the fruits of the cooperation, called Dome.

The idea is to … Read more

HANOVER, Germany--IBM showed off technology today designed to let people use their smartphones to take command of their real-world shopping.

Big Blue showed an app idea from IBM Research in Haifa, Israel, that uses image recognition to identify products on store shelves, then lets people sort those products by attributes such as price and nutrition information. A customer could select only gluten-free products, pick food that's from nearby, or filter electronic gadgets by operating system.

"The same experience people expect online is available in the store," said Amnon Rebak, a research staff member on the project, at … Read more

Great chefs are crazy.

There are many kinds of crazy. Some of these culinarians rant, rave, and spit fire and brimstone. Some pore over their ingredients like scientists: quiet, brooding, and deeply serious.

All believe they can create their own particular gastronomic dreams, ones nobody else can copy. Especially not a computer.

IBM thinks different.

Having seen its Watson computer crush mere humans at the trivial game of "Jeopardy," the company is now setting the machine's sights on bigger business.

According to The New York Times, the world of haute cuisine is one in which IBM would like to make a robotic incursion.… Read more

Apple is the world's most admired company, at least in the eyes of executives polled by Fortune magazine.

For the sixth year in a row, Apple took home top honors for the title, this year scoring 8.24 on Fortune's ranking system, ahead of Google with a score of 8.01 and Amazon with 7.28.

Apple was deemed the most admired despite recent concerns over the company's performance.

Its stock has tanked 35 percent since September as investors and analysts fret that Apple's best days may be behind it. But the company still rates as … Read more

Internet and social media ranked at the bottom on a list of the most trusted industries for privacy, according to the Ponemon Institute.

Released yesterday, Ponemon's "2012 Most Trusted Companies for Privacy" was compiled from a survey of U.S. adults asked to name the five companies they trust the most to protect the privacy of their personal information.

Based on more than 6,700 responses, the Top 20 list did not include several tech players that had been on it in past years.

Apple failed to make the list for the first time in four years. … Read more