Innovation Jam

Ok, consider this a quickie since I have lots of other important things to do. But I was taking a break from my reading by catching up on some blogs. A new addition to my RSS symphony is ‘eightbar’ written by an IBM employee who heads its virtual worlds research department. He spends a lot of time attending conferences on the future of virtual worlds like Second Life and others that seem to be growing steadily across the web. My own Second Life is almost as successful as my First Life since my laptop has troubles running the software and I seem to spend my time within the world crawling around Islands at a painfully slow rate.

Anyways. One of his more recent blogs referred to IBM’s third ‘Innovation Jam’ which seems to be just a mass brainstorming session open to the public and interested persons. This year the event was run simultaneously in Second Life, greatly increasing participation. Over 46,000 ideas were submitted and a panel narrowed them down to just ten. These finalists will receive $10 million a piece to make them happen. The list can be found on the website but one super brilliant idea caught my attention and it links in with my passion for all things green.

‘Integrated Mass Transit Information System’.

Sounds sexy huh? Ok. Deep breathing now, calm yourself. Good – here is the brief:

“Establishing on demand systems for integrating, managing and disseminating real-time data for all of a municipality’s or region’s transit systems, optimising buses, rail, highways, waterways and airlines.”

Woooooooooooooooooooo. How stunning does that sound? My RSS page is crying out, no – screaming out at the top of its lungs for such a thing. It would be brilliant. We want people to leave the cars at home and adopt public transport right? Well lets make it as easy as possible for them to know how and when.

God bless IBM - with ideas like this - who is to know that in an older form IBM was actually a logistics firm that helped the NAZIs shuttle Jewish prisoners from concentration camp to concentration camp. But then Britain's industrail rise was built on slave trade profits. Swings and roundabouts my friend. Swings and roundabouts.