IBM Happenings: October 2008

The month of October was a busy one for IBM, filled as usual with a slew of announcements in hardware, software, and services, but the highlight for the quarter has been a speech by IBM Chairman Sam Palmisano in which he outlined "A smarter planet: the next leadership agenda" at the
Council on Foreign Relations in New York City on Nov. 6, 2008.

Sam has lead a number of global conferences on innovation over the past five years to raise consciousness about how the world of business has been changing. At the Business Leadership Forum in St. Petersburg, Russia eighteen months ago he described how globalization has evolved — international companies became multinational companies and have now become globally integrated companies. As IBM has preached and practiced, becoming a globally integrated enterprise means locating operations and functions anywhere in the world based on the right cost, the right skills, and the right business environment. (IBM now has more than 10,000 employees in China and more than 50,000 in India). But now the world has changed — again — and leaders of businesses and institutions everywhere have a unique opportunity to transform not just the way the world is but the way the world works.

Sam said that the crisis in our financial markets has "jolted us awake to the realities and dangers of highly complex global systems". He went on to describe how the movement of information, work and capital across developed and developing nations is just one aspect of global integration. New factors are entering the equation — global climate change, environmental and geopolitical issues surrounding energy, and the global supply chains for food and medicine. "We are all now connected — economically, technically and socially. But we’re also learning that being connected is not sufficient. Yes, the world continues to get "flatter." And yes, it continues to get smaller and more interconnected". All this pales in comparison to something happening that holds even greater potential.

In a word, Sam says, "our planet is becoming smarter". What he means is the infusion of intelligence into the way the world works. This is being made possible as the world becomes densely populated with electronic chips. Not only a couple of billion people on the Internet, twice that with mobile phones but also tens of billions of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags will allow for much more automation and efficiency across entire ecosystems—supply-chains, healthcare networks, cities… even natural systems like rivers. As all of these become interconnected, they will be able to "talk" to one another and share information about where they are and what they are doing. An enormous amount of information will be created from cars, appliances, cameras, roadways, and pipelines. Sam painted a future where supercomputers will turn mountains of data into intelligence that can be "translated into action, making our systems, processes and infrastructures more efficient, more productive and responsive—in a word, smarter".

Not only will it be possible to implement a smarter interconnected world — it will be essential to our survival. The growth of the past decade has caused a lot of inefficiencies to creep into our global systems. For example in electrical production, there are losses of electrical energy because the grids are not "smart" enough to avoid brownouts and to intelligently distribute excess energy where it is needed. Congested roadways in the U.S. cost $78 billion annually in wasted time and fuel. Consumer product and retail industries lose about $40 billion annually due to supply chain inefficiencies. Healthcare systems don’t link diagnosis, to drug discovery, to healthcare delivery, to insurers, nor to patients. On top of that, the planet’s water supply is drying up, one in five people lacks access to safe drinking water, and half the world’s population does not have adequate sanitation.

Sam says that our financial markets problem will be analyzed for decades, but he says one thing is already clear. Financial institutions did a great job of spreading their risks around but they were not able to track what risks they actually had and quantify them. That uncertainly undermined confidence and things unraveled from there.

The good news is that all the challenges Sam described lend themselves to systems and technology solutions. There are many proof points already. Sam did not talk about IBM’s role but he obviously did not pick examples that his competitors worked on. Stockholm’s automated traffic system has resulted in 20 percent less traffic, a 12 percent drop in emissions and a reported 40,000 additional daily users of public transport. Intelligent oil field technologies increase both pump performance and well productivity—in a business where only 20-30 percent of available reserves are currently extracted. Smart food systems such as one now running in the Nordics use RFID technology to trace meat and poultry from the farm through the supply chain to supermarket shelves. ActiveCare Network monitors 2 million patients in 38 states for the proper delivery of injections and vaccines.

All of these projects and many more lead to competitiveness in a globally integrated economy. "From the boardroom to the kitchen table, people everywhere are ready, eager for a new way of doing things". Sam called it a "time for courage and vision, a period of opportunity". The New York Times summed up the speech as "IBM Has Tech Answer for Woes of Economy". Certainly a lot of opportunity for IBM but the speech also relates to the company’s corporate responsibility.

Complete index of IBM Happenings

IBM Happenings: September 2008

The month of September was a month, as usual for IBM, filled with a slew of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and strategic alliances. The list of announcements made during the month is here. Included was the revelation that IBM scientists had unlocked the secret of the Kondo Effect. The scientists at IBM’s Almaden Research Center in California have forged many breakthroughs over the years.

The Almaden center, which is set on 690 acres in the foothills above Silicon Valley, has a rich history of technical inventions including the disk storage drive, the relational database, and a bevy of innovations in nanotechnology and spintronics.

The latest breakthrough from Almaden’s staff of 400 researchers and visiting staff is that they have unlocked the "Secret of the Kondo Effect". If you haven’t heard of the Kondo effect, you are not alone. Scientists around the world have been studying the intriguing phenomenon in fundamental
physics for decades. The Kondo effect is one of the few examples in physics where many particles collectively behave as one object. Clear as mud? For me too, but discovery of how this works represents a major advance in the understanding of some fundamental physical phenomena and it may have a major impact on the development of future nanoscale magnetic devices. What that means is that our mobile phones will have more storage capacity than large computers do. Assuming that Internet bandwidth continues to expand it will mean that a vast amount of the world’s data will be stored in clouds.

Complete index of IBM Happenings

NASA 50th

There are more than a billion Internet users in the world and tens of billions of web pages. Things were quite different in 1994 when I first showed the world wide web to the senior management team of IBM. Most of the web sites at that time were government or education related and my favorite back then was NASA which just recently celebrated it’s 50th Anniversary.

Not sure who had the first web site but Internet domains began to be registered in 1985. IBM.com was #11 — registered in March of 1986. NASA was not among the first 100 but when they launched their web site in the 1990′s they had an awesome amount of content. In fact the United States government has set a good example of using the Internet effectively. (See "The Top Twenty Essential US Government Web Sites").

Unfortunately, there was no web when NASA started back in the 1950′s but the anniversary web site has captured the history very well. An animated robot gives a brief intro on how to navigate the site and you get treated to a few tunes from the 1950s (such as "Tutti Frutti") and you can then move through the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s and enjoy a lot of multimedia.

Aside from many projects with the shuttle, Mars Rover, Phoenix Lander, the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, NanoSatellites, and countless other exciting areas of exploration, NASA is about to acquire a new supercomputer cluster. NASA partner IBM Corporation will be building an iDataPlex cluster system which will combine 1,024 Intel Xeon quad-core processors with Nasa’s existing Discover computing cluster. The combined system will run at a top speed of 67 teraflops — 67 trillion calculations per second. This will put it well up in the TOP500 List. The new iDataPlex system is made by supercomputer leader Big Blue but is also part of the company’s "’Big Green" initiative. The supercomputer cluster will be running at 40 per cent of the power of predecessors but provide five times the computing power.

The new NASA/IBM system is called the "Discover Cluster" and will be used primarily for modeling of the 21st century climate and analyzing the effects of solar activity on the planet.

IBM Happenings: August 2008

The month of August is a slow one in many parts of the business world — but not at IBM. where the month was filled with a slew of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and strategic alliances. The list of announcements made during the month is here. One of the many interesting projects involved helping preserve Alaskan language and culture.
LitSite Alaska is bringing native language and stories to life using IBM technology which converts to text to audible speech.

The LitSite Alaska interactive Web site has a wealth of information, insights and stories about the history, diversity, culture and traditions of Alaskans and the IBM speech technology is bringing the stories life. A visitor could just read the stories but Alaskans believe that the ancient tradition of oral storytelling is more effective and it helps preserve native Alaskan language and culture. The oral tradition, an integral part of the lives of Alaska Natives, is in fact essential to learning and to passing on cultural knowledge and life skills. More than 1,000 pages of text have been enhanced with audio files using the IBM WebSphere Voice Server text-to-speech software. The audio files even include uncommon pronunciations of Alaskan native names and words such as KwaashKiKwaan, Tlingit, and Inupiaq. These words remind me of things I heard in Greenland.

Complete index of IBM Happenings

IBM Happenings: July 2008

There has been no summer slowdown at IBM where July brought a slew of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and strategic alliances. The list of announcements made during the month is here. The company announced record second-quarter results with profits up 28 percent on $27 billion in revenue — roughly $300 million per day! The stellar results came across the board from rom many product, service, software, and geographic areas. The company seems to be firing on all cylinders. SustainableBusiness.com placed IBM on their  list of the top twenty sustainable stocks.

Cloud computing will become more and more pervasive in the news over the next few years. So far it has been mostly consumer facing activity such as what Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Apple, and others are doing, but behind the scenes IBM is investing heavily. The clouds that IBM operates are more enterprise, education, and research oriented. The company is
spending hundreds of millions of dollars to create two ultra-sophisticated data
centers that will power the cloud computing model that in turn will enable large institutions to offer their clouds to their customers. Another way to say it is that IBM is creating a cloud of clouds.
IBM is also providing advanced new server hardware to enable others to build clouds. Microsoft is among the first to implement IBM’s iDataPlex system, a new category of server that brings supercomputing power to cloud environments. IBM is also going green — the latest Supercomputing Green 500 List shows that 39 of the top 40 systems ranked on supercomputing energy efficiency
are IBM-based. The company is designing technologies to cut energy use in half by 2010, while increasing computing capacity by a factor of 10.

On the people front, IBM’s new Corporate Service Corps program is getting some well deserved headlines. A software-development manager from IBM’s Raleigh, North Caroline office spent July in Timisoara, Romania, where he helped a furniture manufacturer become more efficient and more computer-savvy — offering his expertise for free. With Mr. Chakra in Timisoara were eight IBM colleagues from five countries. Each was assigned to help a different company or non-profit organization, sharing their experience and cultural backgrounds with the local staffs and one another. It is analogous to the Peace Corps. In the short term there is a lot of skills transfer but in the long term IBM gains a foothold in emerging markets and the assignees gain a tremendous breadth of experience which prepares them for key roles as the company continues to grow as a global leader.

Complete index of IBM Happenings

iPhone – Update No. 13

I am sticking to my story — the iPhone 3G is fantastic. There are some issues however. The iPhone is much more than a "cell phone" — it is a platform. The six basic elements of the platform are the iPhone itself, the network (AT&T in the United States), iTunes, the "App Store", MobileMe and, most importantly, the applications.

Some are saying that since the new iPhone 2.0 software is available for the original iPhone that there is no need to upgrade to the iPhone 3G. It is true that there is no need to but there are a number of good reasons to. The new iPhone uses the new "new AT&T" 3G network which is claimed to be twice as fast — as something. Speed claims are rarely delivered upon but no doubt that the 3G network is faster. The receiver in the iphone is also better even when communicating with an AT&T non-3G tower. I have noticed at least one bar improvement here at the lake where there is no 3G tower. The WiFi implementation is better too. Not sure if it is the hardware or software that is improved but it is much more reliable and doesn’t get confused about whether to use the cellular signal or the WiFi signal. I am getting ahead of myself but one of the neatest new applications is TruPhone. TruPhone allows you to make a phone call from your iPhone via WiFi even if there is *no* tower of any kind. This happens. I was visiting friends in New Hampshire last weekend and we had brunch at a nice place in a remote area. There was no AT&T or roaming partner signal. None. No service. The restaurant, however, had a very nice free WiFi signal. With TruPhone you can make calls to anywhere in the world at a very low price — pennies per minute. If you are calling another TruPhone user, it is free. I made some calls with it today and the quality was quite good.

There are other reasons to get the new iPhone. It is a bit thinner and more rounded and feels really nice to hold. It is a joy to use. The 3G has a real GPS receiver so when you use maps it is not an estimate of where you are based on cell phone tower triangulations — it is using satellites to pinpoint exactly where you are. This opens up a slew of "location based" applications — where is the nearest pizza place? What are the nearest geocaches? How do I get from where I am to wherever? The battery life is claimed to be better but I am not so sure of that. The iPhone has so much more to offer that I think the usage will be higher and maybe effective battery life will actually be less — that is the case for me so far. Good idea to have a car charger on hand. One of the irritating things about the original iPhone is that you can’t plug your favorite headset into it without a special adapter. The new iPhone accepts any headset and does so without any adapter. Bottom line, it is a really great device. There are many iPhone killers out there and more coming but I don’t think they will match the overall experience of the Apple iPhone.

The network is another story and I have written about it in not so glowing terms in each iPhone update. I do think they are getting better. As I have always said, it depends on where you live. In the Northeast, Verizon has better coverage but AT&T is putting up new towers — one just came online two miles from where I live in Connecticut. Naturally, major cities are covered. I also detect that AT&T customer service is really trying hard to satisfy their customers. The overall model of the industry is bad — limited choice, get locked into two year contracts, and penalties if you want to move to something better.

iTunes continues to dominate online digital music sales but is facing more and more competition. I have been buying my music from Amazon. They have a nice downloader that puts the mp3 music directly into iTunes and there are no digital rights management restrictions. I like this because I can put purchased music on the iTrike. One of the other great applications on the iPhone is Pandora. This has become my music of choice and I play it through the Squeezebox. The Music Genome Project is awesome. If you love music, I highly recommend it.

iTunes is is integrated tightly (as all things Apple are) with the App Store. Both present easy ways to spend your money from your iPhone. I see this as a huge emerging trend. Call it m-Commerce (mobile commerce) if you want. While sitting in the dentist office awaiting your turn you can buy music and applications from your iPhone. An eBay application let’s you spend your money — or monitor your auctions– there too. On launch day earlier this month there 500+ applications available for the iPhone. There will be many thousands of applications. So far, about 25% of them are free and supported by various flavors of advertising. You click to find the nearest pizza place and Apple gets a slice of the pie. Some are expensive but add huge value. I bought an aviation application for $69.99 that does everything a pilot can imagine. You can file flight plans with the FAA, check weather radar, airport runway lengths, pilot advisories, and much more. I am not a gamer but millions of people are and the iPhone accelerometer allows you to shake or wave the iPhone as inputs to the game. I have to admit that the Phone Saber is fun, albeit a bit geeky — lets you take on Darth Vader. The impressive part to me is that the applications are stored in the iPhone but also in iTunes. When you sync you are syncing calendar, email, contacts, and the applications. When you click the App Store icon on the phone it tells you if any of your apps have an update available. When you do a search at the iTunes Store, the search results are organized by artists, albums, movies, etc. and applications.

On the flip side, organization is an issue. So far I have 55 applications. I expect to get many more. The human mind is amazing in terms of icon recognition. You just know that the Phone Saber is at the upper left of the fourth page of applications. But at some point it is overwhelming. I expect Apple or perhaps a third party developer will soon introduce an "app launcher" that allows you to tag an application as news, weather, financial, aviation, game, etc. and let you drill down to what you want.

Last, and I hope not least is MobileMe. Apple says it is the "Simple way to keep everything in sync". The vision is great — your photos, contacts, email, and calendar are all pushed to your iPhone from the "Cloud". You can make a change on the iPhone and it shows up in Outlook or you can make a change in Outlook and it shows up in your iPhone. Those that work for companies that have Microsoft Exchange or IBM’s Lotus Notes already have this kind of capability but there are millions of us who are "independent" and have our own mail server or use gmail, or Yahoo! or any of numerous other services. With MobileMe we can be like the "corporate" world but we can set our own policies and practices. We can have Exchange or Notes without Exchange or Notes. The cloud approach is clearly the next big thing (see prior stories on this and also by Irving), but Apple has stubbed their toe big time on this. There are numerous analysts, bloggers, and experts who have ripped them apart about the failings. As previously reported, I struggled with MobileMe the first few days but then it began to work properly for a few days albeit with some hiccups. Beginning this week it is not working properly. Calendar entries get duplicated, synchronization is sluggish or doesn’t work at all at times. It is not like Apple to fail big time like this and I am sure they are scrambling to straighten things out.

I got an email from MobileMe@InsideApple.Apple.com the other day asking if I would be interested in a trial of MobileMe! Seems they didn’t check their subscriber list first. The MobileMe web site says that "1% of MobileMe members have limited access to MobileMe Mail. Full service will be restored to these accounts on a rolling basis over the next few days". 99% and in a few days were good in the old days but not these days. I decided to try the online chat support to see if they could help resolve my problems. After sending my initial "instant message" I got a reply saying "A MobileMe Support Representative will be with you in approximately 26 minutes. We look forward to answering your questions". I got a reply while I had stepped out of the room for a minute and then had to start over and wait another 26 minutes. After 3 hours and 14 minutes the support rep said he had to escalate the problem to a specialist who would contact me by email. More than two days have gone by and I have had no email from Apple.

This all reminds me of the Fall of 1995 when we were preparing ibm.com to host the Olympic Games of 1996. It turned out to be the largest web site ever built. We had 54 outstanding engineers working on it and it turned out to be successful. Fortunately, we were able to convince the company to make a large investment in the infrastructure. I remember saying that "we don’t how many people will come to the web site, we don’t know when they will come, nor do we know what they will do when they get there". It was "trial by fire". That was 13 years ago. The lessons learned in 1995 served IBM well and it is now the largest web hosting company in the world. IBM doesn’t always call it cloud computing, but they have built the largest clouds on Earth — in the clouds. Apple has a lot to learn. I am confident they will. Their brand loyalty depends on it.

Other patrickWeb stories about the iPhone <

IBM Happenings: June 2008

Thanks to Michael in Alameda, California for noticing that the June "IBM Happenings" had not been posted. A definite oops. The posting was ready to go a month ago but never got going. I’ll blame it on summer books. The month started out with the Business Partner Leadership Conference in Los Angeles and then was filled with a slew of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and strategic alliances. The list of announcements made during the month is here. One of the most interesting things IBM did in June was to release a Global CEO Study. Being the largest information technology solutions provider in the world, it is imperative for IBM to have a keen understanding of the priorities of the top management of it’s clients. The idea is to stay ahead of the curve and have the skills and resources in place to meet upcoming demand. IBM sent senior people to interview 1,130 CEO’s from 40 countries to capture insights on how the challenges CEO’s face today will impact the future of business.

Complete index of IBM Happenings

iPhone – Update No. 12

It is now more than 84 hours since I got my hands on the iPhone 3g. The bottom line is that the phone itself is a masterpiece — really great. As expected, there are many applications available in the "app store" and many thousands more to come. That is the good news. The bad news is that apple.com is failing big time.

The activation and iTunes problems are well documented in the media but I am surprised that there is not more coverage of the MobileMe issues. MobileMe is a key part of Apple’s strategy. It is basically a "cloud computing" offering that enables you to put all your email, contacts, calendar items, and data files at me.com which is Apple’s name for their cloud. Once in the cloud, you can then synchronize everything with Outlook. If you make a change in Outlook it goes to the cloud and then down to your iPhone. If you make a change on your iPhone it goes up to the cloud and down to Outlook. If you go to a kiosk at the airport or use a computer at a friend’s house and make a change, both your iPhone and Outlook are updated automatically.

I took the bait — hook, line, and sinker. After installing the MobileMe software on both my iPhone and PC, I synchronized with iTunes. This resulted in all my contacts and calendar items being removed from the iPhone — they would now be replaced by an update from the cloud. One big assumption — the cloud (Apple servers) has to be working — and it wasn’t. This is the problem I anticipated in the last post. Apple does not have their act together in maintaining their cloud. I called support today and they said "MobileMe is not working — all the servers are down". Not good. The great thing about clouds is that you do not have to worry about Windows, your varivous PC issues, etc., but the bad news is that you become totally dependent on the cloud provider — in this case, Apple — and they are not a proven player. At this point, all my data is in the cloud and none of it is on my iPhone.

This all reminds me of the Fall of 1995 when we were preparing ibm.com to host the Olympic Games of 1996. It turned out to be the largest web site ever built. We had 54 outstanding engineers working on it and it turned out to be successful. Fortunately, we were able to convince the company to make a large investment in the infrastructure. I remember saying that "we don’t how many people will come to the web site, we don’t know when they will come, nor do we know what they will do when they get there". Dave Grossman, of our team, called it "trial by fire". That was 13 years ago. The lessons learned in 1995 served IBM well and it is now the largest web hosting company in the world. Apple has a lot to learn.

Other patrickWeb stories about the iPhone

IBM Happenings: May 2008

The month started out with the Business Partner Leadership Conference in Los Angeles and then was filled with a slew of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and strategic alliances. The list of announcements made during the month is here. One of the most interesting things IBM did in May was to release a Global CEO Study. Being the largest information technology solutions provider in the world, it is imperative for IBM to have a keen understanding of the priorities of the top management of it’s clients. The idea is to stay ahead of the curve and have the skills and resources in place to meet upcoming demand. IBM sent senior people to interview 1,130 CEO’s from 40 countries to capture insights on how the challenges CEO’s face today will impact the future of business.

It was the largest study of chief executives ever conducted — spanning 32 industries. This was not SurveyMonkey — it was face-to-face interviews. The study revealed that 83 percent of CEO’s expect substantial change in the future, and are optimistic they can successfully manage change. The catch is that the CEO’s report that their ability to effectively manage change is increasing at a far slower pace. The gap between the rate of change and the skills available is growing. This is bad news in some respects, but certainly good news for IBM which increasingly gains it’s revenue and profits by filling skill gaps for clients.

A somewhat surprising insight from the study is that CEO’s believe that the most important changes are occurring within their existing customer base. Two kinds of customers are emerging. First is the ‘information omnivore’ who craves knowing everything about everything and spends a good portion of their time (maybe most of their time) online. The other customer is the ‘socially-minded’ customer. This type of person can’t get enough of providing and retrieving information about where they are, where their friends are, what they are doing, what their favorite things are, and arranging a rendezvous in both virtual and real world places. The CEO’s plan substantial increases in investments to reach both of these customer types. This spells opportunity for IBM. Take a look at a video clip with more insight about the CEO Study.

Speaking of CEO’s, two of the technology industry’s finest got together on stage at the Business Partner Leadership Conference in Los Angeles. Eric Schmidt of Google and Sam Palmisano of IBM have more in common than you might think. Eric cut his teeth on IBM’s largest scientific computers and has been a devotee of advanced computing architecture throughout his career. Sam has a conviction about the role of information omnivores and social computing. The common ground is cloud computing. The two companies announced an initiative to promote new software development methods which will help students and researchers address the challenges of Internet-scale applications in the future. The goal is to improve computer science students’ knowledge of highly parallel computing practices. IBM and Google are teaming up to provide hardware, software and services to augment university curricula and expand research horizons. The University of Washington was the first to join the initiative but the program is spreading to other leading schools around the world. The project combines IBM’s historic strengths in scientific, business and secure-transaction computing with Google’s complementary expertise in Web computing and massively scaled clusters. It seems very likely that the IBM-Google collaboration will change the way large-scale computing is exploited over the years ahead. Here is a video clip of what Eric Schmidt had to say at the Los Angeles meeting.

Complete index of IBM Happenings

Microcapital

The final speaker at IBM’s Business Partner Leadership Conference in Los Angeles was Nick Donofrio, the company’s Executive Vice President for Innovation and Technology. Always an emotional, enthusiastic and at times nostalgic speaker, little did the audience know that the next day IBM would announce that Nick will be retiring on October 1 after a fantastic career of forty-four years. I have no doubts that he will end up involved in many activities and will find that he may need to go back to work to regain some spare time.

One of Nick’s many leadership roles at IBM has been with the Global Innovation Outlook program. One of the recent GIO events brought together a diverse group of global thought leaders for a series of brainstorming sessions about the future of innovation and economic advancement in Africa. One of the greatest needs identified was to provide access to capital and financing to more of the African population. It was clear that there could be significant growth and transformation if there was a more open, scalable, lower-cost microfinance hub serving the African continent.

IBM and CARE have announced plans to enable microfinance institutions to dramatically lower the costs of providing financial services to large populations in the region who have no access to banks. The goal of the new Africa Financial Grid is to help alleviate poverty and promote economic development in the Sub-Saharan Region. The two organizations plan to establish an Africa Financial Grid built around a shared services and infrastructure model designed to significantly reduce operating costs, streamline lending processes, scale rapidly, and integrate with other resources such as credit bureaus, financial institutions and international payment networks. The Grid will also eventually be able to link with mobile payment providers in Africa to enable customers to repay loans or transfer money via mobile phones. The project will initially target 11 countries with a combined population of more than 400 million people.

There are millions of people with business ideas and aptitudes but with incomes of less than $100 per month, it has been impossible to get financing. A small loan can make a big difference. For example, a loan of $50 enabled a mother of six to purchase fabric and sell embroidered products. Based on her success she was able to get subsequent loans and expand her business. Very small loans can have a big impact but it has been too costly for financial institutions to make the loans practical. The combination of technology and expertise that IBM and CARE bring to the table has the potential to change the model and have a huge impact. One more example of how the Internet continues to empower people.