big blue

Impressed by the speed and accuracy with which Watson churned out answers (or rather, "questions") in its winning performance in the Jeopardy! Challenge last year? Citigroup was, too -- so much so that it has hired the supercomputer to assist its human financial professionals.

There's never a dull moment on Wall Street, especially now that we're hitting 2012's first earnings season. What will help shape the week that lies ahead? Earnings and answers from banks, Google, eBay and IBM, and a big education related announcement from Apple.

If nobody's perfect, same goes for computers. Big Blue's digital dynamo Watson may have handily defeated its human rivals this week on the Jeopardy! challenge, but it made some major errors along the way. IBM's engineers have been posting post-mortems about that on the Internet.

For Watson, it was elementary. IBM's mighty supercomputer has landed the title of new Jeopardy! champ. No matter how hard Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings -- the two human contestants pitted against the machine -- tried, they were just no match for the brainy Watson.

IBM's Watson supercomputer wasn't The Terminator. But it did easily beat out two human champions in the first game of a much-anticipated Jeopardy! showdown between man and machine. The event is also proving to be a ratings winner for CBS.

Brandishing hardware and software optimized for understanding the nuances of natural-language questions, Big Blue's ultra-brainy machine is preparing to face two flesh-and-blood champions of the TV game show. And if it also brings in some new customers for IBM's growing analytics software business, all the better.

IBM reported earnings of $2.82 per share for the third quarter, compared with $2.40 a year ago. Analysts were expecting EPS of $2.75, according to Thomson Reuters. Global services revenues of $9.5 billion were well below the $12.8 billion forecast.

IBM and Aetna's ActiveHealth Management subsidiary have jointly launched the Collaborative Care Solution, a new cloud-computing and clinical-decision support system that aims to improve medical practices at hospitals, helping them provide better care at a lower cost.

IBM has realigned its executive suites and expanded the roles of four of its top managers, according to an internal memo sent to employees Monday -- a move that potentially paves the way for one of them to become the successor to CEO Sam Palmisano.

The brain is an amazing thing. "It consumes less power than a light bulb and occupies less space than a two-liter bottle of soda," writes Dharmendra S. Modha, manager of cognitive computing at IBM (IBM), in his blog. Yet it performs functions no computer can -- many of them quite basic. Think of...