IBM Eye

One of IBM’s recent news articles about patents covers some of the interesting work IBM is doing.

Patents from IBM aid everything from recycling to traffic jams

New ways to recycle plastic bottles, anonymous wireless communities to spread word of traffic jams, hyperlinks in video files – these are just some of the possibilities offered by new patents from IBM.

Three main patents were the focus of the article:

Recycling – In a patent jointly invented with Stanford University , IBM researchers from San Jose, CA , disclosed an organocatalytic, environmentally friendly means of depolymerizing (recycling) polyethylene teraphthalate (PET)

Wireless communities – Researchers in Hawthorne, NY , have patented a location-specific messaging system that allows indirect and anonymous communication between mobile devices in a specific area. When a user of a mobile device wants to give pertinent geographic information (e.g., news of a traffic jam), tap into local experiences of others (e.g., get recommendations for a restaurant), or otherwise communicate with other nearby users, his mobile device will send both his message and location to a central or local server. The server, in turn, will determine one or more mobile devices in the vicinity and relay the message. Users may be anonymous or part of predefined groups.

Video hyperlinks – from researchers in Yorktown allows hyperlink data to be added easily to existing video files.

While the first two are certainly very useful - I think the Video hyperlinks will have a huge ramification for the media, especially as the convergence of traditional broadbast and new online services accelerates.

I can think of two uses for this - your television / media center will become another information resource, with users able to select hyperlinks during a news broadcast for more background on a particular story, during a sports coverage for statistics and player bios, during a movie for trivia, deleted scenes and other such info. Especially useful for advertisers - select a “buy now” hyperlink and you are taken directly to their online store. Also useful for DVDs - allowing statically published video to link to dynamically updated information on the web.

The second obvious use will be for online advertising or other such presentation of information. While watching an advert on your computer, the links can be contextual based on what part of the advert you are seeing. In a corporate environment, this can allow links to supporting documentation to be added to online training videos and such.

Hopefully this leads to some standardisation that can be used widely by a lot of different devices and mediums.