Hursley: where innovation happens

I’m over in the US at the moment, and I was out of the office all of last week as well, but I see that the BBC has been visiting my friends and colleagues at the Hursley mothership.

The coverage is in two parts. Firstly there’s a nice article on the BBC News website which talks about the history of Hursley, some of the software developed at the lab such as CICS and MQTT, and (of course) Andy Stanford-Clark’s twittering house.

There’s also a set of interviews with IBMers such as Kevin Brown talking about the twittering Hursley minibus, in the May 5th episode of the Digital Planet podcast (here’s a direct link to the MP3). The IBM coverage starts from around about 17 minutes in to the programme.

So, if you were wondering what wild and wacky things we get up to at Hursley – we do a lot of different stuff, and it can be very cool indeed 🙂

INNOV8 – a Serious Game hits 2.0 at IMPACT

This week I’ve been at IBM’s IMPACT 2009 conference in Las Vegas, along with a lot of my colleagues from IBM Hursley. As I wrote over on my personal blog, this is an event aimed at Smart SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) and the Smarter Planet… but the synergies between them are bringing in all kinds of interesting themes and topics from the emerging technology space, including virtual worlds and gaming, social computing, and green / sustainable computing.

We’ve briefly mentioned INNOV8 on eightbar before. It’s a serious game for business and education aimed at teaching the principles of Business Process Management. The latest version was announced at IMPACT this week. INNOV8 2.0 is playable on the web, and has a set of new scenarios covering Smarter Supply Chain, Smarter Traffic, and Smarter Customer Service. The trailer is great – very movie-like 🙂

If you want a sneak peek at the gameplay, check this video too.