This morning I received an email from IBM letting me know that I was named an IBM Champion for Cloud. I’m honored to be part of this group of technology professionals. A huge thank you to those people who nominated me for this designation.
Category Archives: IBM
Amazon Alexa Meets IBM Domino
I had the honor of becoming a contributor for the outstanding NotesIn9 Video Podcast produced by David Leedy. In this show, I demonstrate how I built and Amazon Alexa Skill for the IBM Domino based IdeaJam app. If you have any questions, please let me know. I would be more than happy to answer them! Thank you, David, for having me on. More videos on building Alexa Skills coming soon.
Amazon Alexa Meets IBM Domino – Sneak Peek
Here’s a sneak peek of the app I will be featuring on an upcoming NotesIn9 screencast:
Here’s a sneak peek at the Amazon Alexa demo I’m building for @NotesIn9 that reads data from @ideajam pic.twitter.com/p43WbOQuEr
— Bruce Elgort 🐧 (@belgort) February 8, 2017

End of an Era: IdeaJam.net
After serving the IBM community for over 9 years, new idea submission, voting and commenting has been turned off on the http://ideajam.net site. The site will remain available in “read only” mode for the foreseeable future.
The site collected 4,581 ideas, 12,346 comments and 108,544 votes.
The Business of Beacons
I’m a 2016-2017 IBM Champion for Cloud
Late on Friday, I received an email from IBM letting me know that I was named an IBM Champion for Cloud. I’m honored to be part of this inaugural group of individuals. A huge thank you to those people who nominated and encouraged me to start using Bluemix.
Using IBM Watson Language Translation Services with Python
Here is a very simple example using Python of calling the IBM Watson Language Translation Service. Feel free to use and modify the code as needed. You will need an IBM Bluemix account in order to use the translation service.
# CTEC 121 Intro to Programming and Problem Solving # Bruce Elgort / Clark College # Using IBM Watson's Language Translator # February 27, 2016 # Revised: May 24, 2016 # Version 1.1 import requests def cls(): print("\n" * 5) def translate_text(text,source,target): username = 'your username' password = 'your password' watsonUrl = 'https://gateway.watsonplatform.net/language-translation/api/v2/translate?source=' + source + '&target=' + target + '&text=' + text try: r = requests.get(watsonUrl,auth=(username,password)) #print(r) return r.text except: return False def welcome(): message = "Welcome to the IBM Watson Translator\n" print(message + "-" * len(message) + "\n") print("Have fun!\n") def main(): cls() welcome() data = input("Enter some text to be translated:\n") print() print("What language should I translate it to?") print("1) Spanish") print("2) Arabic") print("3) French") print("4) Portuguese") print() target = input("Select a language from the list above: ") if target == "1": target = 'es' elif target == "2": target = 'ar' elif target == "3": target = 'fr' elif target == "4": target = 'pt' results = translate_text(data,'en',target) print() print("Here is the text translated for you:") print(results) main()