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If there's one downside to powerful computers, it's that they're too damn big.  Luckily, that's about to change. At least, if IBM has anything to say about it.  March 19 is the first day of  IBM Think 2018 , the company's flagship conference, where the company will unveil what it claims is the world's smallest computer. They're not kidding: It's literally smaller than a grain of salt.  But don't let the size fool you: This sucker has the computing power of the x86 chip from 1990. Okay, so that's not great compared to what we have today, but cut it some slack — you need a microscope to see it.  The computer will cost less than ten cents to manufacture, and will also pack "several hundred thousand transistors," according to the company. These will allow it to "monitor, analyze, communicate, and even act on data."  Left: 64 motherboards with two tiny computers in the top-left corner. Right: The tiny computer, mounte...

IBM today announced  PAIRS Geoscope , a new experimental cloud-based service that makes it easier for developers to work with large amounts of geospatial data from across a wide variety of sources. The service handles ingesting, integrating and managing the data and allows developers to focus on their queries. Indeed, it’s the part of the service that handles the data ingesting and indexing that sets PAIRS Geoscope apart from other big data analytics services. It can take in anything from geotagged IoT data from sensors to weather data, census data, aerial imagery and even tweets or news data from the Google-backed  GDELT Project . If you are interested in how IBM does this, you’re in luck, because the team recently  published a paper  that goes into more detail about how this integration engine works. From the developer’s perspective, though, the most important feature here is that PAIRS converts all the data into common formats and units and automatically ali...