In what IBM calls the “world’s smallest movie,” A Boy and His Atom is a short film that was created by IBM researchers “using a scanning tunneling microscope to move thousands of carbon monoxide molecules (two atoms stacked on top of each other).” They mostly did it just because they could, and the results are pretty amazing:

It may not look like much, but the above movie is the result of IMB meticulously moving individual atoms to create a scene. It’s actually kind of mind blowing when you realize we can now move individual atoms – the basic building blocks of everything, living and non-living, in the universe.

Of course, making movies out of atoms isn’t IBM’s primary objective here. The company is researching atomic memory – a type of memory storage that packs data into incredibly tight spaces to increase the amount of storage possible in tiny spaces. Early last year, IBM was able to store a bit of data on just 12 atoms. As the technology advances, we’ll soon be able to store more and more data on smaller and smaller devices.

Until then, IBM can be content that it holds the Guinness World Record for the world’s smallest movie.

If you’re interested in learning how IBM manipulated the atoms to make the movie, check out the video below:

[h/t: Reddit]

The Electronic Frontier Foundation alongside 33 other civil liberty groups, including the ACLU and Fight for the Future, have sent an open letter Congress urging members of the House to reject CISPA during its vote this week.

Earlier this year, many of our organizations wrote to state our opposition to H.R. 624, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act of 2013 (CISPA). We write today to express our continued opposition to this bill following its markup by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI). Although some amendments were adopted in markup to improve the bill’s privacy safeguards, these amendments were woefully inadequate to cure the civil liberties threats posed by this bill. In particular, we remain gravely concerned that despite the amendments, this bill will allow companies that hold very sensitive and personal information to liberally share it with the government, including with military agencies.

It’s the idea of sharing information with military agencies that has these groups so concerned. They feel that CISPA would be much more effective if any information sharing was narrowly defined as between companies and civilian agencies:

CISPA creates an exception to all privacy laws to permit companies to share our information with each other and with the government in the name of cybersecurity. Although a carefully-crafted information sharing program that strictly limits the information to be shared and includes robust privacy safeguards could be an effective approach to cybersecurity, CISPA lacks such protections for individual rights. CISPA’s information sharing regime allows the transfer of vast amounts of data, including sensitive information like Internet records or the content of emails to any agency in the government including military and intelligence agencies like the National Security Agency or the Department of Defense Cyber Command.

Finally, the letter questions the need for CISPA at all after President Obama’s cybersecurity executive order, and other laws already on the books, do what CISPA does minus the massive privacy infringement:

Developments over the last year make CISPA’s approach even more questionable than before. First, the President recently signed Executive Order 13636, which will increase information sharing from the government to the private sector. Information sharing in this direction is often cited as a substantial justification for CISPA and will proceed without legislation. Second, the cybersecurity legislation the Senate considered last year, S. 3414, included privacy protections for information sharing that are entirely absent from CISPA, and the Obama administration, including the intelligence community, has confirmed that those protections would not inhibit cybersecurity programs. These included provisions to ensure that private companies send cyber threat information only to civilian agencies, and a requirement that companies make “reasonable efforts” to remove personal information that is unrelated to the cyber threat when sharing data with the government. Finally, witnesses at a hearing before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence confirmed earlier this year that companies can strip out personally identifiably information that is not necessary to address cyber threats, and CISPA omits any requirement that reasonable efforts be undertaken to do so.

These groups represent a pretty formidable opposition, but they have their work cut out for them. TechDirt reported on Monday that IBM will be sending 200 executives to Washington as part of a lobbying effort to see CISPA passed. Why does IBM want to see CISPA passed so badly? The official line is that it wants information sharing between corporations and government to be easier, but the company’s president has also flat out admitted that he wants to be able to send personal information to the NSA because the agency “know[s] the most” about cyber threats.

IBM and other companies that are pushing for CISPA could have nothing but admirable intentions, but it’s hard to believe that when they’re all pushing for a law that would give them complete immunity when sharing your private information with the government.

We’ll continue to follow CISPA as it heads to the House floor for a vote later this week. Don’t get your hopes up though – it passed the House with flying colors last year. We can only assume that the House will do so again this year.

For the quarter, the company posted diluted earnings of $5.13 per share, up 11%. For the year, it was they were $14.37, up 10%.

Net income was $5.8 billion for the quarter, up 6% year-over-year. Operating (non-GAAP) net income was $6.1 billion, up 10% year-over-year. For the year, net income was $16.6 billion, up 5%, and operating (non-GAAP) was $17.6 billion, up 8%.

“We achieved record profit, earnings per share and free cash flow in 2012. Our performance in the fourth quarter and for the full year was driven by our strategic growth initiatives — growth markets, analytics, cloud computing, Smarter Planet solutions — which support our continued shift to higher-value businesses,” said Ginni Rometty, IBM chairman, president and CEO.

Here’s the release in its entirety:

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced fourth-quarter 2012 diluted earnings of $5.13 per share, compared with diluted earnings of $4.62 per share in the fourth quarter of 2011, an increase of 11 percent. Operating (non-GAAP) diluted earnings were $5.39 per share, compared with operating diluted earnings of $4.71 per share in the fourth quarter of 2011, an increase of 14 percent.

* Includes amortization of acquired intangible assets and other acquisition-related charges.
** Includes retirement-related items driven by changes to plan assets and liabilities primarily related to market performance.
*** Tax impact on operating (non-GAAP) pre-tax income is calculated under the same accounting principles applied to the GAAP pre-tax income which employs an annual effective tax rate method to the results.

But Ken Jennings (and you and me) has Watson beat in one measure of intelligence: human language. Once that fact no longer holds true, well, we’re all in a hell of a lot of trouble.

Nevertheless, IBM is trying to improve Watson’s human language prowess. And to do that, Watson needs to understand how humans talk – how they really talk. I’m talking about slang, of course. People simply don’t realize just how complicated human language really is. Teaching Watson proper and direct English is nowhere near good enough to turn it into a fully functional conversation partner. I mean, how the hell is it going to know how to respond to YOLO?

So, to work on that slang element of human language, IBM researchers decided to teach Watson the Urban Dictionary – you know, the online database of anything and everything human begins say – from the inane to the foul.

Apparently, this led to a problem. Watson developed a mouth like a sailor. From Fortune:

Watson couldn’t distinguish between polite language and profanity — which the Urban Dictionary is full of. Watson picked up some bad habits from reading Wikipedia as well. In tests it even used the word “bullshit” in an answer to a researcher’s query.

Ultimately, Brown’s 35-person team developed a filter to keep Watson from swearing and scraped the Urban Dictionary from its memory. But the trial proves just how thorny it will be to get artificial intelligence to communicate naturally. Brown is now training Watson as a diagnostic tool for hospitals. No knowledge of OMG required.

Suck it, Trebek.

[Fortune via The Atlantic]

The company is based in Austin.

“CIOs and general counsels are overwhelmed by volumes of information that exceed their budgets and their capacity to meet legal requirements,” said Deidre Paknad, vice president of Information Lifecycle Governance at IBM. “With this acquisition, IBM adds to its unique strengths as a provider able to help CIOs and attorneys rapidly drive out excess information cost and mitigate legal risks while improving information utility for the business.”

“Together, IBM and StoredIQ can empower organizations to more efficiently use and govern their unstructured data to increase its value and eliminate unnecessary cost and risk,” said StoredIQ CEO Phil Myers. “IBM and StoredIQ are longstanding partners with existing integration between IBM’s Information Lifecycle Governance suite and StoredIQ’s active data management software.”

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. IBM expects it to close in the first quarter of 2013.

AT&T’s virtual private networking and IBM’s SmartCloud Enterprise+ services will be combined for this new product. The companies claims that the product will tightly integrate the security protections of both. The goal is for customers to be able to quickly move data from their own data centers to the new cloud service. Those companies will then gain flexibility while still having secure data that can move between all types of devices, such as smartphones, tablets, and retail kiosks.

“As more organizations realize that cloud can be secure, easily managed, and a key part of their business strategy, cloud will quickly evolve as a tool for innovation rather than just for infrastructure,” said Erich Clementi, senior vice president of IBM’s Global Technology Services division. “We believe this new service from two recognized leaders in cloud computing provides a compelling way for large organizations to exploit cloud’s transformational power.”

The financial terms of the agreement between AT&T and IBM have not yet been released.

IBM says the acquisition will help it bolster its social business capabilities and gain “actionable insights” from “enormous” streams of data generated by social networks. Kenexa supports over 8,900 customers across the financial services, pharmaceuticals, retail and consumer industries, including over half of the Fortune 500. It has operations in 21 countries around the world.

Alistair Rennie, GM, social business at IBM said, “Every company, across every business operation, is looking to tap into the power of social networking to transform the way they work, collaborate and out innovate their competitors. IBM is uniquely positioned to help clients generate real returns from their social business investments, while helping them gain intelligence into the data being generated in these networks to be more competitive in their markets.”

“The customer is the big winner in all this because the combination of our two organizations will deliver more business outcomes than ever before,” said Kenexa CEO Rudy Karsan. “Together, Kenexa and IBM will be unmatched in the industry, offering solutions that extend from strategy to the technology platform to the delivery of services for clients.”

IBM expects the deal to close in the fourth quarter of this year. It has been approved by Kenexa’s Board, which is recommending that shareholders do the same.

Meet Dane Kouttron, he built a 3D printer with a twist. He repurposed an IBM 7575 SCARA Robot Arm into a 3D printer. This allows him to create objects much larger than cheaper 3D printers can make. It’s all due to the incredible reach of the robot arm. Objects created with Kouttron’s printer can be sized to a maximum of 25″x12″x6.5″. A commenter on the Vimeo page says that it’s twice the size of the Makerbot’s maximum output.

Check out the giant 3D printer in action:

Scara Robot 3D ABS Printer from Dane Kouttron on Vimeo.

The best part is that you can make this very 3D printer yourself if you have the parts. I’m sure most of you have an old IMB robot arm lying around the house somewhere so it should be an easy build. All joking aside, you can find details on the build, parts and software required for this beauty over at Kouttron’s Web site.

[h/t: Make] [Image Credit]

TMS sells a family of shared rackmount systems and PICIe cards called RamSan, which are designed to help companies improve performance and reduce server sprawl, power consumption, cooling and floor space requirements.

““The TMS strategy and solution set align well with our Smarter Computing approach to information technology by helping clients realize increased performance and efficiencies at lower costs,” said Brian Truskowski, GM, Systems Storage and Networking at IBM. “Solid state technology, in particular, is a critical component of our new Smarter Storage approach to the design and deployment of storage infrastructures, and part of a holistic approach that exploits flash in conjunction with disk and tape technologies to solve complex problems.”

TMS CEO Holly Frost said, “IBM understands the positive and dramatic impact that solid state technology can have on storage and server infrastructures, and once the acquisition is complete we look forward to advancing the technology even further. With the global reach of IBM, we expect to grow the engineering staff and product lines much faster than we could before.”

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, though IBM expects it to close later this year. TMS has about 100 people on staff.

The amount of solid state storage solutions being shipped to the enterprise is expected to reach nearly 3 exabytes by 2016 (IDC).

IBM envisions customers downloading the app as they enter a store, then creating a profile based on their phone number or store loyalty card. The app will then allow customers to enter some personal information, such as whether they have specific food allergies, whether they care about biodegradable packaging, or whether they have other dietary needs, such as kosher foods. From there, as customers point the camera of their smartphone at various products, an overlay on the screen will provide informantion about price, ingredients, and possible discounts. Also, social networks can be integrated into results, in case customers want to know what types of food their friends and family “Like.”

“In the age of social media, consumer expectations are soaring and people want information and advice about the products they’re going to buy,” said Sima Nadler, retail lead at IBM Research. “By closing the gap between the online and in-store shopping experience, marketers can appeal to the individual needs of consumers and keep them coming back.”

IBM is promising to increase retailers’ in-store traffic with the technology, stating that the targeted marketing the app provides could help retailers retain customers. IBM even suggests that the app could be used to up-sell or cross-sell products to customers right as they are shopping.

The researchers at IBM have provided the infographic below that shows exactly how the app will work, why they believe retailers should be excited about it, and what they envision the app’s effect will be: