Online im tool

For the next three weeks, office workers across the country will have visions of buzzer-beaters dancing in their heads. It's NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament time, and that means brackets will be zipping through e-mail systems in organizations large and small. There are dozens of sites that let you make your tournament choices online, whether to test your basketball-prediction acumen against the masses, or to recruit friends and coworkers in a private pool. You can even use Google's Basketball Bracket Battle gadget to place your choices on your iGoogle page. After you select the "Create a bracket on iGoogle" link, the gadget is added to your iGoogle page, and you're invited to join a league, or to form a league of your own. ***

IBM said that it will invest more than a $1 billion over the next three years in the unified communications market, setting up another race between the computing giant and its rival Microsoft. At a conference at it Somers, N.Y., headquarters on Monday, executives outlined the company's strategy to garner more revenue from communication and collaboration products, including its Sametime instant messaging and Lotus collaboration suite. The $1 billion over the next three years represents "substantial growth" over current investment levels and represents the rapid growth of the market overall, said Bruce Morse, vice president of unified communications at IBM. ***

Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen(Credit: Charles Cooper/CNET News.com)

Good morning--belatedly, of course, to any folks living outside Pacific Time--from Adobe's San Francisco event Monday where the company is gathering developers supporting its much-ballyhooed Adobe Integrated Runtime software, or AIR. By now, all the world has read the first round of stories since the company made sure to brief everyone prior to Monday's "official" release. (Here's the link to our earlier AIR piece.)

I'll be blogging the event so tune back in for updates.

I'm looking forward to seeing what The New York Times has in store. I was talking with a couple of its developers. That's right--the Gray Lady is in the development business. That was news to me, but they say they've been working under the radar on some projects and ShiftD is the first fruits of their labors. They actually pushed the button last night around midnight, but some of the wires got crossed. Needless to say, the two guys from The Times who are demoing here didn't get much sleep. But they're mainlining coffee so I'm confident they'll last until their time slot.