Collab-Or-Ate

I’ve been working for a year now on Beehive, with Werner Geyer, Beth Brownholtz, and Casey Dugan. We can finally (officially) talk about it outside IBM, starting with Lotusphere, and there has been some buzz generated by that, in the press and the blogosphere:

In the press:
• eWeek: IBM`s Social Beehive and Discovery Search
• Business Week: Managing the Global Workforce (This is a more general article about IBM and mentions Beehive at the end as an example of how IBM is dealing with a globally distributed workforce.)
• CIO: IBM Shows Off Social Software for Business

And on the blogs:

• Judith Hurwitz’s Weblog: Is there a Link Between Social Computing and Business Networks?
• Collaborative Thinking: Lotusphere 2008: IBM Research – Glimpsing The Future
• Lotusphere 2008 – Day 2

I’m still in Orlando, digesting my first trip to Lotusphere. Here are some of the thing that surprised me:

Although I’m staying in this enormous hotel complex within walking distance of Disney’s parks, I am not in a Disney hotel. At least that is what they tell me. After they wish me a magical day. Very confusing.

The opening session was more like a rock concert than any conference I’ve been to.

The highlight of the opening for me was definitely when Mike Rhodin (the “Steve Jobs” of Lotus) introduced a new server called Foundations that can… fit inside a DHL envelope! I can only find one mention of this on the blogosphere, but I found this to be an absolutely hilarious reference to last week’s MacBook Air.

The surprise guest keynote was Bob Costas?! Last year it was Neil Armstrong.

There was also an opening panel discussion called LotuSalon, “inspired by the famous Salons of Paris during the 18th Century Enlightenment.” Hmmm. The most interesting part of the panel was realizing that in addition to knowing invited panelist Golan Levin, from graduate school, it hit me halfway through that I also knew another one of the panelists, Ze Frank, because we were in the same freshman dorm at Brown (shout-out to Unit 33!). Small, random world.

There was mention of Notes running on the iPhone, despite what Fake Steve Jobs says. But it was downplayed and almost just mentioned in passing. Oh well.

That was Monday and after that I pretty much spent the rest of the week inside the Innovation lab demoing our project Beehive.

Last year around this time, I blogged “Basically, Lotusphere is like Macworld for Notes users.” At the time, I was kidding. No more joking around, it really is!

So this week, we had Macworld, where Jobs announced the MacBook Air, a drool-worthy new sub-notebook.

But next week, we have Lotusphere, where IBM is going to announce that Notes has been custom built to run on the iPhone. As Engadget says, we kid you not. I’m pretty surprised and now have yet another reason to want an iPhone. Good-bye, Blackberry Pearl, it was nice while it lasted.

I’m attending Lotusphere for the first time, so I will report back on all the Apple-friendly announcements, as well as hopefully a few announcements related to my own project.