Originally posted by: TonyPearson

With the [end of the PC era] upon us,IBM researchers John J. Barton, Shumin Zhai, and Steve B. Cousins from the Almaden Research Center wrote aresearch paper [Mobile Phones Will Become The Primary Personal Computing Devices], and USA Today reports that [Social networkers reach out more with cellphones]. Of course, telephones, including those attached to land lines, have always been used for social networking since the late 1800s, to arrange parties, reunions, and other get-togethers, but this article is referring to the new "Web 2.0" meaning of social networking, with services like Facebook, Flickr, MySpace and Twitter.

This is a major game-changer, forcing companies to rethink many of their strategies. For example,John Windsor, on The YouBlog asks the CBS Interactive division[What Business Are You In?]The answer is that CBS is shifting from a content focus, to an audience focus, looking to provide CBS television contentto an audience of cell phone users.ThinkBeta [Me, My Cell Phone and I] presents some interesting statistics. Google CEO Eric Schmidt estimates there are over 2.5 billion cell phones in use today, with 288 million units shipped alone in 3Q07.

That's quite a trend. As a leader in IT innovation, IBM tries to stay one step ahead of the industry, selling off mature technologies to other manufacturers, like typewriters, printers, and most recently laptops and desktop PCs, so that it can focus on newer technologies and market trends. For example, while many people might be aware that IBM designs and fabricates processor chips for all of the major game consoles (Microsoft's Xbox 360, Nitentendo's Wii, and Sony'sPlay Station 3), they might not know that IBM also makes chips for many cell phone manufacturers. IBM[POWER Architecture] blog writes about the IBM CMOS 7RF SOI semiconductor:

IBM has managed to integrate seven Radio Frequency (RF) front-end functions onto this single CMOS chip using silicon-on-insulator (SOI) technology. And this means? For cell phones, according to IBM foundry product director Ken Torino, "Our solution minimizes insertion loss and maximizes isolation which will prevent dropped calls even on the most inexpensive handsets." Currently, cell phone RF front-end functions are handled by five to seven chips and at least two of those are using expensive gallium arsenide (GaA) technologies. The CMOS 7RF SOI should not only reduce costs by eliminating the need for so many chips, but also trim the fat from materials expenditures since GaA tech is somewhat expensive. IBM predicts that manufacturers will first use the chip to reduce on-phone processors to two or three before making the leap to a single chip.

With all this demand, the world will need engineers to develop softwareapplications that work in this new environment. This plays into IBM's strength in the area of grid and supercomputing.IBM and Google announced they have jointly established an Internet-scale computing initiative to promote new software development methods that can help students and researchers address the challenges of Internet-scale applications. From[IBM Internet-scale computing] webpage:

Internet use and content has grown dramatically, fueled by global reach, mobile device access, and user-generated Web content, including large audio and video files. More of the world population is looking to the mobile Web to fulfill basic economic needs. To meet this challenge, Web developers need to adopt new methods to address significant applications such as search, social networking, collaborative innovation, virtual worlds and mobile commerce.

The University of Washington is the first to join the initiative. A small number of universities will also pilot the program, including Carnegie-Mellon University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Maryland. In the future, the program will be expanded to include additional researchers, educators and scientists.

The heart of the project is a large cluster of several hundred computers (a combination of Google and IBM systems) that is planned to grow to more than 1,600 processors. Students will access the cluster through the Internet to test their parallel programming projects. The cluster is powered with open source software, including:

• Linux [Fedora]
• XEN systems virtualization (see [XenSource])
• [Hadoop] workload scheduling

The project includes a Web site to encourage collaboration among universities in the program, built with Web 2.0 technologies from the [IBM Innovation Factory].

For more viewpoints on this, read the [Google Press Release],or the reviews at [PC World,Cnet,GridsWatch,BBC News, eWeek,IT Jungle].

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