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While those programs are partly aimed at tapping into the small but growing number of iPhones in the enterprise, IBM's manager of Lotus software, Alistair Rennie, says they're also timed to give Big Blue a foothold on the iPad, which will use the same software platform.

"Our customers are looking at the iPad and they're excited about it," says Rennie. "No one quite knows its use patterns yet, but it's our intention to deliver as much of our portfolio as possible on it as fast as possible."

Rennie says IBM will also design applications targeted specifically at the iPad, which it hopes to release "very close to the delivery date" of the device. "The screen real estate and the touch interface should give us the opportunity to do some very interesting things," he says.

Apple's ( AAPL - news - people ) iPad seems squarely targeted at consumers, not BlackBerry-wielding suits. But Rennie says that the tablet, like the iPhone, will likely be used by executives who blend their home and work life and want to use their own personal gadgets to do work securely. "Peoples' lives don't segment neatly between work and home. The iPad gives people what will probably be a home device, but they're still going to want to access a full suite of business software on it," he says. "It'll be a device our customers will own, and they'll expect us to support it."

Apple's products represent one of the strongest forces in the so-called "consumerization of IT," the influx of gadgets into companies without regard for which technology is meant for use inside or outside the enterprise, says IDC analyst Stephen Drake. While IDC estimates that there are only about 4 million iPhones being used in an enterprise setting today, the firm expects that number to reach 9 million by 2013. IDC also predicts that the number of iPhones bought and maintained by companies will grow the most dramatically, quintupling over the next four years to total more then 3 million devices.

As IBM attempts to ride that wave of iPhones into the enterprise, adding software specifically for the iPad is a low-risk bet. "It makes a lot of sense for IBM to get its solutions onto the iPhone and into the mobile space," says Drake. "Given that the iPad uses the same software infrastructure, porting their software to that platform is relatively painless."

Unlike Microsoft ( MSFT - news - people ) and Google ( GOOG - news - people ), which compete with IBM in collaboration and messaging software, IBM doesn't have its own mobile operating system to promote. That platform-agnostic approach means that IBM may be freer to develop Apple-focused software than the two other warring tech giants. "Anything Microsoft does will be first focused on Windows mobile, and Google will push apps for Android," says Drake. "For IBM and others that aren't tied to a particular environment, this is a good opportunity for them."

Apple appears to be preparing an all-out assault on the handheld gaming market, moving to snap up gaming industry insiders from Microsoft to go with its growing team of graphics-chip specialists.

News that Apple has poached Richard Teversham from Microsoft's Xbox business this week is only the latest sign Apple has gotten serious about the gaming business. Teversham, who was senior director for insights and strategy at Microsoft's Xbox Business, drove the "three year strategy for the Xbox business" in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Earlier this week Apple ( AAPL - news - people ) hired Bob Drebin, chief technologist at Advanced Micro Device's graphics group and the creator of the Nintendo ( NTDOY.PK - news - people ) Gamecube's graphics processor.

That move came as IBM ( IBM - news - people ) chip designer Mark Papermaster began his role as head of Apple's iPod business last month after a long legal tussle with IBM.

Apple is also putting some of its huge pile of cash into semiconductor technology. In December, Apple purchased 3.6% of U.K.-based ImagInation, licensing its PowerVR graphics technology. And last year Apple purchased processor designer PA Semi for $378 million (See "Apple Buys Chip Designer ").

Where will those investments be put to work? Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs said in an interview last year that he plans to put his PA Semi designers to work building silicon for the company's iPhones and iPods. And while Apple keeps its hardware roadmap to itself, iPhone developers such as Damon Allison figure the iPhone and iPod's hardware will evolve in at least three areas.

First, the iPhone will almost certainly get a better camera and multi-media capabilities. That could unleash a new generation of applications that integrate video and still images into games and social applications, as Nintendo's new DSi has done.

Second, sooner or later the iPhone and iPod touch will get a new, faster processor, most likely an ARM-based design customized by Apple's in-house designers. The result will be snappier, better looking games.

Third, Apple will experiment with new form factors, launching a netbook or tablet computer that may use the same software that powers the iPhone and iPod touch. Such a device might be a terrible phone--it's hard to imagine shoving a 10-inch screen in your pocket--but it could be an ideal platform for games and social networking.

Of course, guessing what Apple will do next is a tricky business. The problem with Apple is that while it appears to plan long-term--keeping projects such as its 2005 shift to Intel ( INTC - news - people ) processors under wraps for years-- it says very little about even its short-term plans.

However, talk to a few of the thousands of developers who have flocked to build software for Apple's iPhone since last year and they'll say that Apple's instructions have always been very clear: Build your applications so that they're compatible with different screen resolutions and screen sizes.

"Apple has told us from the beginning to be sure to write our new software in a way that will accommodate different resolutions and screen sizes," Tapulus Chief Executive Bart Decrem says.

Translation: Today's iPhone applications will be appearing on bigger, sharper displays sometime in the future.

And those developers are building applications that are wildly different from the quick and casual games that have appeared on mobile phones in the past.

That's in part because of the device's lack of buttons. Neil Young, chief executive of gaming startup Ngcomo, is betting that the iPhone's touch screen can handle more complex, fast-moving games than are found on today's mobile phones or handheld gaming consoles possible. "You've got a lot more fine control," Young says. "It is a very precise interface."

So he's betting big on a pair of games based on genres that have had mediocre success, at best, on small gaming devices. "Live Fire," slated for later this year, is a fast-moving shoot 'em up. Then there's "Star Defense," a real-time strategy game where players protect a planet from swarming invaders.

Such games are certainly a preview of what's to come as developers continue to explore the iPhone's possibilities. They might also be the best hint at where Apple's hardware could go next.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - IBM will cut around 5,000 jobs in the United States, mainly in its global services business, sources with knowledge of the matter told Reuters Wednesday.

An International Business Machines Corp (nyse: IBM - news - people ) spokesman declined to comment.

The company has not disclosed how many jobs it has cut so far this year, but has said it was making "structural changes" to reduce spending and improve productivity. (Reporting by Ritsuko Ando and Jim Finkle; Editing by Gary Hill)

Copyright 2009 Reuters, Click for Restriction

IBM PC Keyboard Scan Codes

Char.  Decimal Pair     Hex Pair    Char.  Decimal Pair    Hex Pair

ALT-A     (00,30)    (0x00,0x1e)    ALT-B    (00,48)    (0x00,0x30)

ALT-C     (00,46)    (0x00,0x2e)    ALT-D    (00,32)    (0x00,0x20)

ALT-E     (00,18)    (0x00,0x12)    ALT-F    (00,33)    (0x00,0x21)

ALT-G     (00,34)    (0x00,0x22)    ALT-H    (00,35)    (0x00,0x23)

ALT-I     (00,23)    (0x00,0x17)    ALT-J    (00,36)    (0x00,0x24)

ALT-K     (00,37)    (0x00,0x25)    ALT-L    (00,38)    (0x00,0x26)

ALT-M     (00,50)    (0x00,0x32)    ALT-N    (00,49)    (0x00,0x31)

ALT-O     (00,24)    (0x00,0x18)    ALT-P    (00,25)    (0x00,0x19)

ALT-Q     (00,16)    (0x00,0x10)    ALT-R    (00,19)    (0x00,0x13)

ALT-S     (00,31)    (0x00,0x1a)    ALT-T    (00,20)    (0x00,0x14)

ALT-U     (00,22)    (0x00,0x16)    ALT-V    (00,47)    (0x00,0x2f)

ALT-W     (00,17)    (0x00,0x11)    ALT-X    (00,45)    (0x00,0x2d)

ALT-Y     (00,21)    (0x00,0x15)    ALT-Z    (00,44)    (0x00,0x2c)

PgUp      (00,73)    (0x00,0x49)    PgDn     (00,81)    (0x00,0x51)

Home      (00,71)    (0x00,0x47)    End      (00,79)    (0x00,0x4f)

UpArrw    (00,72)    (0x00,0x48)    DnArrw   (00,80)    (0x00,0x50)

LftArrw   (00,75)    (0x00,0x4b)    RtArrw   (00,77)    (0x00,0x4d)

F1        (00,59)    (0x00,0x3b)    F2       (00,60)    (0x00,0x3c)

F3        (00,61)    (0x00,0x3d)    F4       (00,62)    (0x00,0x3e)

F5        (00,63)    (0x00,0x3f)    F6       (00,64)    (0x00,0x40)

F7        (00,65)    (0x00,0x41)    F8       (00,66)    (0x00,0x42)

F9        (00,67)    (0x00,0x43)    F10      (00,68)    (0x00,0x44)

F11       (00,133)   (0x00,0x85)    F12      (00,134)   (0x00,0x86)

ALT-F1    (00,104)   (0x00,0x68)    ALT-F2   (00,105)   (0x00,0x69)

ALT-F3    (00,106)   (0x00,0x6a)    ALT-F4   (00,107)   (0x00,0x6b)

ALT-F5    (00,108)   (0x00,0x6c)    ALT-F6   (00,109)   (0x00,0x6d)

ALT-F7    (00,110)   (0x00,0x6e)    ALT-F8   (00,111)   (0x00,0x6f)

ALT-F9    (00,112)   (0x00,0x70)    ALT-F10  (00,113)   (0x00,0x71)

IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., was built in 1961 as the ultimate bastion of pure corporate research. Its architect, Eero Saarinen, laid it out as a perfect 1,090-foot glass and fieldstone quarter-circle, a gentle arc that never quite seems to end when you walk its main corridor. But it is an incomplete shape, meant to suggest there is always unfinished business to pursue.

Visiting there is a healthy reminder--amid Detroit's woes and hand-wringing about Asian economic dominance--that a U.S. institution (populated, it must be said, by a lot of emigrés) can compete vigorously in innovation and the sciences.

IBM (nyse: IBM - news - people ) runs the biggest private research operation in the world--with an estimated $6 billion budget, 3,000 people and eight labs in all--and, year after year, accumulates far more patents than its rivals. The Watson Center remains IBM's locus of work on speech recognition, nanophotonics, high-performance computing, IT services research and the social Web. (See: "IBM's Infinite Research Problem.")

While Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) scales back its beloved plan to let all employees tinker on side projects with 20% of their time, IBM will continue to commit one-third of its research to what its head of worldwide operations, Mark Deane, calls "exploratory" work.

That work includes radical ideas like "cognitive computing." In November, Dharmendra Modha of IBM's Almaden Research Center in San José, Calif., won a $5 million grant from the Defense Department to lead a group of 10 IBM scientists and seven outside researchers to come up with a brain-like computer that can deal with ambiguity, continuously learn and make split-second decisions based on constantly changing data.

Despite all the fancy supercomputers and smartphones we now have, computers still compute using the same model John Von Neumann wrote up 63 years ago, with data and memory mapped together in the same address space. It's a brittle architecture for handling the swarms of data flooding market trading floors, the Internet and machines laden with actuators and sensors. That is where computing needs to go.

Some of the work will stem from IBM's decades of experience in artificial intelligence, which also informs its work on speech recognition and machine translation. Millions of mobile phones and cars on the market now use voice commands to make information requests from servers on the Web. Honda (nyse: HMC - news - people ), Acura and General Motors' (nyse: GM - news - people )Onstar system all use IBM software for voice-activated controls, as does Vlingo, a voice-search start-up that powers Yahoo!'s (nasdaq: YHOO - news - people )mobile search on the BlackBerry and iPhone.

What can your genome tell you about yourself?

High school genetics taught me a thing or two: I would never have red-headed children, and that growth spurt I hoped would eventually happen was, at best, a remote possibility.

But it turns out our DNA can tell us more than just our hair color or height. A year and a half ago, my family took part in the Genographic Project, a nonprofit collaboration between National Geographic and IBM (nyse: IBM - news - people ), aiming to discover the migratory patterns of human groups out of Africa. My cousin volunteered her genetic data, swiped her cheek with a cotton swab and sent it off to a lab for DNA analysis. I already knew my immediate ancestors were Roman Catholics from Spain. But it turned out they took a circuitous route to the Iberian Peninsula: from Eastern Europe to Scandinavia to probably France before settling near Barcelona.

Science has evolved rapidly since the Genographic Project launched in 2005. Now, you can simply spit into a vial and send it off to several genetic-testing start-ups, such as 23andme and the nonprofit Personal Genome Project. These companies will tell you some interesting stuff--not just the migratory patterns of your ancestors but your predispositions for certain diseases or why you don't like Brussels sprouts (a sliver of DNA that allows you to taste a bitter compound in vegetables).

"For science and individual health and identity, I think we're in a key time," says Mary Sue Kelly, a 63-year-old retired psychiatrist who has had her DNA analyzed by the Genographic Project and Navigenics, a disease-focused genetic-testing start-up. "I've made the analogy of when the first mirror was seen--that must have flipped out a whole bunch of people for a long time, or when the first camera came. I think this is as illuminating as that--the first time you saw yourself and just 'Oh my word, that's what I look like?' "

My results from the Genographic Project didn't quite rock my world, but they were surprising. "Guess what we are," my aunt exclaimed when the results came in. I had always thought, due to my grandmother's darker complexion, that I was descended from Arabs who had come to Spain during the expansion of the Ottoman Empire. But I was wrong. "We're Jewish," my aunt said, as my grandmother shook her head incredulously in the seat across from us. "Eastern European Ashkenazi Jews." I briefly wondered if this explained my attraction for Jewish men, shrugged and went back to my book.

I recently, however, decided to dig a little deeper. A search on Ashkenazi Jews brings up some fascinating details--we're really smart, and we were heavily involved in the ostrich-feather trade. But Ashkenazi Jews are also susceptible to a host of scary-sounding genetic diseases, such as Fanconi anemia--associated with short stature (check); bone marrow failure (yikes, I hope not); a predisposition to leukemia and other cancers (my mother had cancer); and Cystic Fibrosis.

Since the Genographic Project is an anthropological study, it doesn't tell me what chance I have of developing any of these diseases. But other genetic-testing companies can, at least to some extent.