IBM Labs: The Next Five Technology Innovations

IBM gathered business partners, industry analysts and reporters to unveil some innovations IBM is working on that it believes are commercially viable and could be on the market by 2012.

“These are not just ‘Gee whiz,’ innovations, but practical innovations that we are working on today,” said George Pohle of IBM’s global business services, during a presentation he called the “Next Five in Five” Wednesday at the company’s Silicon Valley Lab in San Jose, Calif.

Real-time language translation, medical monitoring via the mobile Web and nanotechnology to purify water are some of the innovations IBM Labs thinks will be on the market within five years.

But sorry, said Pohle, still no jet packs.

Pohle demonstrated a real-time translation program that is on trial with U.S. forces in Iraq that translates English into Arabic. He uttered a phrase into a microphone, and a laptop computer displayed his text in English and then translated it into Arabic text. Still with a few bugs in it, he could not get the computer to give the audio Arabic translation.

Real-time translation also has business applications, Pohle said, because global companies can more easily collaborate with others in foreign countries.

Another innovation makes it possible for doctors in an office to monitor patients in their homes via sensors that would transmit patient data sent over the Internet. “In the future, we see the return of the house call,” said Pohle.

Research into nanotechnology could result in development of a cloth embedded with carbon nano particles through which potable water could be filtered to make it instantly drinkable. For every gallon of water on Earth, only one drop is drinkable without filtration, he said.

The next five years could see more development of a three-dimensional Internet, he continued, in which a tourist contemplating a trip to the Forbidden City in China could visit a 3-D version of it online. This, too, has business applications, as it could enhance collaboration between co-workers in different countries, or allow retail customers to browse in a 3-D version of a physical store.

Lastly, IBM sees the potential for advanced “presence technology,” which already makes it possible for a GPS-enabled cell phone to send notice of a special sale at a store as the user walks by it. Pohle said it may soon be possible to point a camera phone at a painting in a museum and have the phone display information about the painting such as the artist or the year it was painted.

Although some of this technology is not entirely new, the demonstration shows how technology labs like IBM’s aren’t just brainstorming, but also developing viable products, said Carl Claunch, director of research at Gartner Research.

“A lot of this [research] is filtered around commercial availability,” Claunch said.

Although companies like IBM still do basic research, they are leaving more of that to university research centers, he said. IBM Labs, Hewlett-Packard’s HP Labs and other corporate-operated facilities tend to do more applied research.

Revealing lab research also helps a company maintain its customer relationships, Claunch said. “Being able to talk about continuous innovation shows they understand what you will need in the future.”

—Robert Mullins, IDG News Service (San Francisco Bureau)