Recap from IBM's Smarter Planet Event in Puerto Rico

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As I announced two weeks ago, yesterday was the local IBM Smarter Planet event in Puerto Rico. The attendance at the activity was very good and it included business partners, (potential) customers, and representatives from the government of Puerto Rico. In fact, Juan Eugenio Rodriguez de Hostos, the newly appointed CIO for the government of Puerto Rico, was one of the speakers there. He talked about Puerto Rico's effort to move towards Government 2.0. The new CIO office (created just 5 months ago) has the following goals:

1. Create an electronic Puerto Rico with virtual education and tele health
2. Make more gov services avail to our citizens 24/7/365 via any interface: phone, web, mobile, face-2-face, etc
3. Deploy systems to improve cost efficiency of intra government transactions
4. Ensure privacy and protection of citizen information by relying on digital signatures and security standards

IBM's Chief Economist, Dr. Philip Swan, was also at the event. He talked about the current state of the economy and showed us a bunch of data that he says scientifically prove that the economy is about to turn around within a month or so. I sure hope so!

At the event, I was tasked to present on Smarter Work: Collaboration Approaches for a Connected World. I don't have much slideware to share since it was mostly a demo and my own personal stories of collaboration successes. I find that a demo is often more effective than conceptual slideware that don't show anything.

I think the presentation was well received by the attendees. I constantly saw heads nodding (hopefully in agreement, maybe because they wanted me to speed up and get it over with.. ). One attendee said it was the best session, and another said that I can't hide the passion that I have for this stuff. That caught me by surprise... I guess I like this stuff too much.

One thing that I still need to figure out is how to compress an effective demo in 20-25 minutes. Right now, I'm wishing that every time I demo our collaboration solutions I would have 3 hours to show all the cool stuff we have.

Puerto Rico Startup Weekend

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This past weekend was the first Puerto Rico Startup Weekend. You may have caught my live tweets from the event. I had never been to one of those events before and it was great to meet other forward thinkers from the area. I was actually impressed by the number of awesome programmers that turned out for the event. 4-5 ideas were generated from the event and I actually joined one of the teams.

The idea of Startup Weekend is to try and launch a company during the weekend. While I don't think any company decided to incorporate, the team I joined already has a website set up to help us gather some data. In fact, now that you are reading this we are looking for fluent English and/or Spanish speakers to help us rate some words. I would really appreciate it if you could spend some time rating some words once you are finished here. I can't tell you much yet about the purpose of it, but you'll know soon (and no, it's nothing that competes against IBM ).

One of my biggest challenges was getting up to speed with the code. All the developers were PHP/MySQL gurus. That's an area that I'm just learning. Being a huge Eclipse fan, I installed a plugin and set up my PHP development environment on Eclipse on the Mac (BTW, 75-80% of the computers at the event were Macs AND 50% of the PCs crashed at the event, while only 15% of the Macs crashed).

I also set up a MySQL development environment on my Mac following these instructions. The networking that I got to do at the event was great too. It's been a while since I've done some face-to-face "social networking". Oh, and I also got to talk about Lotus Connections and developing rich client applications on the Eclipse/Expeditor framework and get some people excited about that.

In my opinion, the event was great given that it was the first one here. Looking forward to next year's (and stay tuned here to learn more about what we are coding on our free time). More pictures from the event are here.

Microblogging in Lotus Connections with Adobe AIR

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Remember how I blogged about microblogging in Lotus Connections from ping.fm 2-3 weeks ago? Well, I decided to take a different approach and instead develop a microblogging client for Lotus Connections that lets you cross post to various services.

Now, I want to emphasize that this is something that I developed in my own time and is not something officially supported by IBM. In fact, most of the code already existed and all I did was enable it to work with Lotus Connections using its microblogging APIs. Jason Feinstein is the super awesome developer who originally developed Bluto inside IBM. Because I like coding so much, I asked him if it would be possible to get access to the source code with the goal of modifying it to work with Lotus Connections.

He said the source had already been, well, open-sourced and gave me the URL to the IBM internal open source repository. When I got the code, I then had to figure out how to actually code an Adobe AIR application. Turns out that Flex development is very similar to Java so it was a snap to get started. I was disappointed, however, that the SDK for Eclipse actually costs money after 60 days. Thankfully, I was able to make my changes in 2-3 weeks worth .

Anywho, you ready for a demo?

My goal is to make this available to the public as soon as Lotus Connections 2.5 out (IBMers check my internal blog for instructions on how to download). What do you think? Do you like it ?

Enjoy!

Advising Your Clients on Web 2.0: International, Privacy & Security Considerations

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Seems like June is the month of the briefings. You may remember that last week I mentioned I'll be doing a collaboration with social software one in Puerto Rico. Yesterday, I told you about Jeff Schick's briefing in New York. Today, I learned about a new briefing that's coming up in a couple of weeks called: Advising Your Clients on Web 2.0: International, Privacy & Security Considerations.

Regardless of you talk about web 2.0, enterprise 2.0, social software, etc, these capabilities are changing the way organizations and individuals communicate, collaborate and promote themselves. Whether you embrace it or simply monitor it, clients need informed legal advice in this fast-changing area.

Speakers from IBM, Kodak, and Bristows will discuss privacy issues around social software, and Enterprise 2.0. I thinks this audiocast will be extremely valuable for those international organizations with presence in Europe. Additionally, it will be of great value for those who:

1. must provide counsel to clients on the risks of internal or external use of social media, or
2. have to draft organizational policies to protect intellectual capital (like IBM's Social Computing Guidelines)

Here's an excerpt of the agenda:

Topics to be addressed include:

• Legal issues for organizations who operate or market outside of the United States

• Special focus on how international data protection regulations apply to social media

• Case study: Governance and risk management by leading global brands that have embraced social media  

To register for the audio cast, and view more details on the event, go here.

June 10th Briefing in NY with Jeff Schick

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If you are in the New York area on June 10th, you should definitely go to a briefing that's happening next week with Jeff Schick, VP of IBM Social Software. Gemini Systems is hosting this briefing called: Real Customers, Real Impact with Lotus Social Software. Key customers will be participating and sharing their story. If you are still in the fence about Enteprise 2.0 and the benefits of social software inside the firewall, come learn how real businesses are finding tangible benefits from their Social Software and Web 2.0 solutions.

Here's an excerpt from the invitation:

You've heard the hype - now see the real business benefits and find out how Lotus Social Software is making a significant impact.

With IBM Social Software for Business, your organization can empower employees, partners and customers to connect and collaborate. Realize professional and business benefits through faster task implementation and confident decision-making based on vetted expert opinion. Form invaluable global relationships, spurring the creation of innovative products and services that will drive growth for you business.

To register, visit the event's page here. You can also see the full invite here. If you know of others that may benefit from this, spread the word!

And if you are not in New York that week, but perhaps are in Puerto Rico, don't forget to register for my briefing.