DG: We played around with the Starbucks Coffee Store Locator on the Palm VII. I was in Connecticut recently and wanted coffee. The solution wasn't perfect though, because I needed to find out what my ZIP Code was (which wasn't a feature of the Coffee Store Locator) before the Coffee Store Locator could tell me where the nearest Starbucks was. I really just wanted it to tell me how to find caffeine.

JP: Yeah! But the application would work much better with location-based information. It's just not available yet. We did an application that was more critical than the Starbucks finder. It was a Heineken application. We had the beer finder.

DG: Guess it depends on your poison. Right now, my personal poison seems to be Ben & Jerry's Festivus (a holiday for the rest of us). It's outrageous, mixing brown sugar ice cream with cinammon spice and gingerbread. It's so good. The best I've ever had. It's kind of dangerous.

JP: I'll have to write that down.

DG: Before I get too carried away, let's talk about the relationship you just announced with Palm, Inc.

JP: The relationship with Palm we recently announced focuses on extending the Palm platform into the enterprise. We're focused on forming an IBM Global Services competence centered on developing mobile e-business solutions based on the Palm computing platform and the IBM Software infrastructure. Let me make that a bit clearer. For us, e-business applications are reaching out to land on this new class of devices. The Palm computing platform is a clear market leader, one of the most identifiable brands in the pervasive computing space. Our relationship with Palm is helping us develop solutions specifically to and for Palm platforms.

DG: What kinds of solutions would be the types that IBM would be expert at providing in this area? Also, please clarify that when you say solutions, you're offering a custom solution as distinguished from off-the-shelf products, right?

JP: A little bit of both, but for the most part, I think it shouldn't be thought of as a consumer buy where you're going to go into an electronics store or a Palm.net site and download an application for your Palm device. This really is focused on the IT organization and the end-user organization within our customers--our mutual customers (Palm and IBM). We're rolling out a set of applications for a broad group of users. So it's not all one-time engineering projects, per se, but it really is a replicated solution in the hands of many.

DG: So it might be the same kind of customer who would buy a Lotus Notes solution.

JP: Yes. Now, it could be a business-to-employee application. So, obviously, we extend our Domino Mail system to Palm platforms. But we also, for example, could do a business-to-consumer application. One of our most successful applications was with a shopping chain in the UK. For Safeway UK, we developed a shopping application that runs on the Palm computing platform where users have full shopping lists on Palm units and can select desired foods. They also have sale promotions sent to them and they can shop. They can connect the Palm device up to Safeway UK and place an order. Again, it's leveraging the immediacy of things, someone who needs to get milk and chicken. You don't have to order on the spot; you can hang onto what you've chosen and eventually, when you're ready, you send your order up. A key to that, leveraging our e-business thought, is that it's not merely a shopping application, but it is also a business intelligence application. Everybody doesn't get the same shopping list. They get a shopping list based on their shopping habits. Therefore, Safeway is able to deliver a very tailored personal shopping experience on the device.