Industry Leaders Unveil Groundbreaking Technologies at Theenterprise 2.0 Conference
165102
SAN FRANCISCO, June 12  /PRNewswire/ -- CMP Technology today released some of the vendors making significant announcements at The Enterprise 2.0 Conference. The event takes place June 18-21, 2007 at the Westin Boston Waterfront Hotel. Registration is now open at http://www.enterprise2conf.com/.
480570
(InfoWorld) - Power consumption, parallelism, and the rapidly-expanding world of mobile communications are among the leading areas of research and development currently being investigated within some of the IT world's largest companies. Taking the stage at MIT's EmTech Conference (formerly known as the MIT Emerging Technology Conference) on Monday were top researchers from Cisco, HP, and Intel who shared their visions for the products of tomorrow by unveiling some of their leading areas of study and experimentation today. From the growing impact of mobile computing devices to the push to make IT eco-friendly, along with new efforts to take advantage of parallel data processing capabilities, researchers from the three technology bellwethers spoke of commons threads woven through all their work and in what directions they believe the results of those efforts will subsequently drive future technologies. Following a panel discussion on social networking tools that also focused heavily on the impact of mobile devices, Andrew Chien, vice president of research at Intel, said that the chip giant is also focusing heavily on the changes in IT usage and consumption that are being driven by handheld machines. However, despite the rapid development of the mobile space, Chien said Intel feels that wireless device, applications, and service providers are still falling short in terms of how "intuitive" and "seamless" their technologies currently work. "We have a healthy amount of concern about the amount of effort that these technologies require from all of us today," said Chien. "To that end, we're very excited about the idea of inference in the context of small mobile devices, about the richer senses and analysis of data that can be realized based on the body of techniques currently lumped under the umbrella of machine learning." Among the specific examples of the types of mobile applications that Intel envisions taking root in the near future are systems that offer "seamless presentation" of more useful information than those available today's handhelds, including tools that use geolocation and onboard sensors to give users data that is pertinent to their personal condition and immediate surroundings. Both Cisco and HP also count mobility among their leading areas of research, the panelists said, with Cisco looking into ways to merge "telepresence" with its recently acquired WebEx collaboration tools, and HP working on ways to more tightly link handhelds with back-end datacenter systems. Prith Banerjee, only six weeks into his new post of senior vice president of research at HP's Labs division, said that the company's work in mobility, green IT, and parallelism are converging in its larger efforts to make large data centers more efficient in general. In some cases, the work is oriented toward improving performance, such as through the use of photonic interconnects -- advanced electromagnetic technologies -- to allow datacenters to communicate more quickly. In other cases, HP Labs is looking at datacenter power consumption, using sensors built into its prototype servers to reduce costs and headaches associated with cooling the massive hardware farms. The challenges of parallel computing As for parallel computing -- roughly defined as the simultaneous execution of numerous program instructions on multiple or multi-core processors -- Banerjee said that HP is hoping to use its research efforts to help clear some of the software programming obstacles that exist on the market today. "We're very aware in our research of the challenges of making parallel software applications; we need engineers who can start writing code designed for multi-cores and to help transition software designed to run on a single processor," said Prith. If some of those roadblocks can be pushed aside, the benefits could be enormous, according to the HP researcher. "We're imaging a world where you plug in a computer and all the applications work automatically, and users don't have to worry about patches and updates," he said. "We're imagining a world where software is automatically updated and maintained so that environment for end-users will be completely automated and allow them to increase productivity. That is a very difficult problem to solve, but we're going to try to solve it." Another area of focus for all three organizations is the process of refining their internal research and development operations. Under Prith, HP will attempt to lower its overall number of research projects by folding them into larger efforts, the executive said, and Chien added that Intel is having success with "lablets," groups of researchers it sponsors at academic institutions to augment its internal R&D work. At Cisco, the massive networking company is attempting to inject an air of entrepreneurialism into areas of research that it believes can be turned into revenue-producing businesses rapidly, as evidenced by the launch of its physical security and telepresence product groups over the last several years, said Guido Jouret, CTO of the firm's Emerging Markets Technology Group. "We're trying to re-create the start-up atmosphere inside Cisco. So far, we've announced four different units, and the goal is to create one every several months," Jouret said. "We'll also continue to do small acquisitions where we can gain vital technologies or teams to help flesh out our ideas. The idea is to create an interesting mix of entrepreneurial drive." Along with security and telepresence, the company has launched a digital media group s part of the effort as well as a business devoted to replacing the static product displays found in retails stores today with "digitally-driven network displays." Jouret said that the telepresence group is working to mesh device geolocation with collaboration tools and multimedia-sharing systems. "We want to combine video with collaboration platforms for rich multimedia interaction, tools that allow companies and consumers to interact in ways that we can't even imagine yet," he said.
721221
Industry executives at the NXTcomm trade show in Chicago roll out ambitious plans for land-based and wireless broadband services.
611730
New solutions lead the way to market leaders.
516753
SAN FRANCISCOâOracle Corp. topped off a torrent of product announcements during its OpenWorld customer conference this week with the introduction of its Collaboration Suite 10g, which is designed as a universal
745487
VMware isn't the only vendor unveiling technology at its annual conference.
604091
Eventective, the web's most comprehensive  meeting and event space search engine, has announced expanded  capabilities for planners, including advanced search tools and the  ability to export venue lists.
483302
At Demo, a gathering of venture capitalists and corporate high-tech investors watch as demonstrators are present their efforts at breakthrough technology worth investing in.
67483
Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/c41819) has announced the addition of The 2005 Web 2.0 Conference Distilled to their offering.
445763
PC Magazine - The issues of patents, indemnification and the potential risk of using open-source software took center stage at the keynote panel of industry leaders at the Gartner Open Source Summit.
387225
As the big name CIO keynoting at this yearâs Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Rob Carter of Federal Express could have been forgiven for doing a deep dive on how his 7,000-person IT team is using AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), mashups, Web video, LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Perl/PHP/Python), and other checkbox items from the cool-tools list. But Carter took things in a different direction: talking philosophically about how the Internetâs impact is accelerating changes in the way the world interacts and in the way IT works.
85210
New publications, experiments and breakthroughs in information technology--and what they mean.
769589
Developers by the thousands flocked to the International Convention Center in Hyderabad, India last week as Sun Microsystems kicked off the second leg of its world-spanning series of Tech Days conferences. The theme of the event was "shape your future" -- and indeed, no slogan could be more appropriate for Sun, its developers, and its partners.
476728
A round up of some of the  technologies on show at CES that are making the digital living room a reality.
441454
CES has always been about gadgets, but the addition of using gadgets to access Web 2.0 services intensified this year.
490260
Wired magazine's NextFest comes to Los Angeles this weekend. Attendees will hear inventors and researchers from around the globe and see displays of what's coming down the tech pike. Here's a glimpse of what's on the menu.
329036
Executives at Morgan Stanley and Pfizer explain how their companies are starting to use Web 2.0 tools to improve communication among workers and with customers.