IBM

Apple and IBM have entered an agreement with Japan Post to bring iPads to the elderly. The move is a technological step for Japan Post’s ‘Watch’ service, which leverages postal employees to check in on the elderly now and then. Watch currently costs 1,000 Yen/month ($8.50 or so). Japan Post is government-owned, and operates roughly 24,000 post offices in addition to a large bank. Japan Post is also one of the nation’s largest insurers, and hopes iPads will both scale their Watch service as well as make it easier on everyone involved.

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IBM envisions the future of medicine where vast networks of medical information are securely stored in a cloud network. IBM plans to use its AI supercomputer, Watson, to analyze the data and a make new record keeping system that could be used by all health care systems. IBM has reportedly developed a new department at its headquarters dedicated to developing Watson for the medical field. Furthermore, IBM recently acquired the medical analytics company Explorys, which has access to 50 million medical records in the U.S., and Phytel which gives feedback to doctors and patients about after-care.

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BlackBerry has just revealed a new tablet, but don't worry, it's not a follow-up to the flop that was the company's PlayBook. It's called the SecuTablet, and it's basically a modified version of Samsung's Galaxy Tab S 10.5, albeit with a strong focus on data security. The device is a result of BlackBerry's purchase of security firm Secusmart last year, as well as a software partnership with IBM. The SecuTablet is part of BlackBerry's attempts to find success in targeting the corporate and government security sectors.

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IBM’s Watson knows quite a bit — enough to compete on Jeopardy. A brilliant database of info, Watson isn’t so great at other languages. To help with learning Japanese, IBM has enlisted the help of SoftBank to train Watson in Japanese. The aim of this partnership is to bring Watson to a new enterprise space; beyond that, IBM and SoftBank either don’t specifically know what they will do with Watson, or just aren’t saying. What they do know is that Watson needs to learn the native tongue before anything else.

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Christmas means a lot of things to a lot of people, but one undercurrent is noticeable: shopping. Though most stores are shut for the day, we can still go online, and we’ve likely got a series of gift cards in-hand which give us license to buy. In our mobile world, location doesn’t matter much, either. Great apps from retailers mean the mobile shopping experience is often better than on the desktop, and the latest numbers from IBM reflect as much, showing mobile shopping traffic is on the rise.

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US supercomputers are having to grow up, with a wider set of tasks the machines at Lawrence Livermore and Oak Ridge National Laboratories are being asked to do by the researchers, national security teams, and others given access to them demanding a change in architecture in order to keep them flexible. IBM and NVIDIA are upgrading two supercomputers - Sierra at Lawrence Livermore, and Summit at Oak Ridge - using IBM's support for the open-source OpenPOWER standard, increasing the interconnect speed of the CPU and GPU processors responsible for doing all the heavy-duty crunching. In fact, so the companies claim, there'll be as much as a tenfold cut in processing time for real-world applications.

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Apple and IBM partnered up this past summer on a big enterprise effort, and as part of that an AppleCare for Enterprise site has gone live, indicating that the service is now available to applicable customers. Apple details what users can expect, with everything from always-available phone support to the promised onsite repairs and device coverage. No information is provided on the pricing of such (those interested are directed to get in contact for a quote), but we've got all the details for you after the jump.

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A computer chip that thinks like a neuron in the human brain and sips a fraction of the power of traditional processors could finally open the door to cognitive computing, IBM researchers claim today. Dubbed IBM SyNAPSE, the groundbreaking chip squeezes a million "programmable neurons" and 256 million "programmable synapses" into something the size of a postage stamp, but which could one day allow for advanced digital versions of human senses.

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Apple and IBM have teamed up to “transform enterprise mobility” via apps. The two companies will combine their efforts, and bring a new class of enterprise-focussed apps designed to “redefine the way work will get done”.

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In January, IBM and Lenovo entered into a deal that would see Lenovo buying the low-end x86 server business from IBM. The deal meant that Lenovo would also be acquiring manufacturing facilities in China along with a number of new employees. Over the last week or so about 1000 workers at one of the facilities that Lenovo would get in the purchase have been on strike.

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IBM is throwing open the cognitive computing power of Watson to mobile developers, setting up a new challenge to create apps that take advantage of the supercomputer's natural language processing, machine-learning, and ability to process huge qualities of data in seconds. The IBM Watson Mobile Developer Challenge, which will be accepting entries over the next three months, is looking for the best consumer and enterprise applications for the supercomputer that beat Jeopardy, as it tries to encourage adoption of its APIs.

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AT&T and IBM are teaming up for the Internet of Things (IoT) on a huge scale, planning to outfit smart cities with cameras, roads, utility meters, and more that can all intercommunicate as residents and cars move around them. The "global alliance" will see AT&T and IBM first look at gathering and crunching Big Data from cities and utilities, potentially integrating news of traffic jams, parking lot congestion, where police and other emergency services are located, and even social media reports from those living or working in the city to dynamically shape urban planning.

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