IBM IOD 2010: Emerging tech, predicting the future and getting it right

News
By Maggie Holland
published

We spoke to David Barnes, program director of IBM's emerging internet technology group about what the next big thing will be and how the company goes about finding it.

Right now I ask a question and get an answer. I want to have an answer in the question. Think about that. IBM's doing Jeopardy next year, by the way. Remember when we built a machine called Deep Blue that beat Gary Kasparov at Chess? We're building in research right now and we're going to be taking on Jeopardy.

In the years of computing it's always been ask a question and get an answer. We're going to start giving an answer and getting a question. And we've got to get our heads around that.

Analytics is very different now as the whole web is out there. Sometimes we don't even know what it is we're looking for and that's what we're working on. That's why we say insight instead of typical analytics. Find that needle and then we'll find out if that needle is worth anything.

Maggie Holland
Maggie Holland

Maggie has been a journalist since 1999, starting her career as an editorial assistant on then-weekly magazine Computing, before working her way up to senior reporter level. In 2006, just weeks before ITPro was launched, Maggie joined Dennis Publishing as a reporter. Having worked her way up to editor of ITPro, she was appointed group editor of CloudPro and ITPro in April 2012. She became the editorial director and took responsibility for ChannelPro, in 2016.

Her areas of particular interest, aside from cloud, include management and C-level issues, the business value of technology, green and environmental issues and careers to name but a few.