Feature

PodSmart, MP3 Technology to Deal With Information Overload

New technology from IBM will enable you to listen to your e-mail, appointments and news feeds from your MP3 player or iPod. Cool. But the PodSmart software was finished in 12 weeks, by college students. Now that's the way to run a summer internship program!

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By Diann Daniel

July 05, 2007 — CIO — Being stuck in traffic on the way to work is bad enough. But the worst part may be the nerve-wracking feeling of wasted time. Surely, your time could be better spent catching up on e-mail, news and articles. Thanks to a few IBM college interns, help is on the way.

PodSmart is new technology from IBM that allows you to have your work and personal e-mail, calendar appointments and news feeds read aloud on any MP3 player, including an iPod. You can customize playlists, so, for example, PodSmart reads your most important e-mails, your urgent appointments and your favorite news sources. You can even listen to music.

And it was created by college kids.

Although the product is not yet to market, PodSmart has been demonstrated at several conferences. It is generating an excited interest from executives, a user group that's motivated to manage countless e-mail messages and to stay abreast of relevant information.

The technology was developed by interns in the Extreme Blue program, IBM's most competitive internship, which has a dozen locations throughout the world. The 12-week program, led by IBM mentors, charges software development and MBA students with developing the technology and business plan for a new product or service that addresses an existing market challenge outlined by the company. PodSmart is the brainchild of last year's interns at the IBM Extreme Blue lab in Dublin, Ireland.

The application was created with a younger generation in mind, but executive interest is eclipsing that of other groups, says Michael Roche, IBM's lead developer for PodSmart and mentor on the project. "Since [business executives] are dealing with information overload, I think a lot of them see this as a way to process more information." PodSmart may help executives prepare or catch up during downtime commutes and workouts.

In many companies, college interns are relegated to the role of IT janitorial work, doing the stuff that no one else wants to take on. Instead, IBM takes a more open approach, to encourage innovation among these best-and-brightest students. This IBM internship program gives great freedom to do actual work. "Idea-generation and innovation can happen at all levels of an organization," says Brian O'Gorman, software development engineer at IBM Lotus, who also mentored the students. "Any idea, no matter how small or seemingly unimportant, could be the spark that starts a major new innovation."

The Dublin intern team was charged with creating personal audio radio programming from text sources, including e-mail, calendar, news-feed, online articles and e-learning programs. Students were given laptops, assigned a business mentor and a technical mentor, and encouraged to contact any of the 350,000 IBM employees throughout the world, as well as people in other industries. In short, the students were encouraged to collaborate with anyone who seemed appropriate.