"It feels like the birth of a new industry, " says John Musser, the 45-year-old veteran of Bell Labs and Electronic Arts (nasdaq: ERTS - news - people ) who runs Programmableweb.com.
The Secretary highlighted the steps the Department of Energy was taking to encourage innovation, including including the new Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy and several Energy Innovation Hubs (nicknamed Bell-lablets) based on the storied Bell Labs innovation model.
Chairman Michael Birck, a 60-year-old electrical engineer, cofounded Tellabs in 1975 after stints at Bell Labs and two small Chicago-area telecom equipment firms.
Execution challenges aside, Riggs views bold projects like Immersive Communications as a boon for both Bell Labs and Alcatel-Lucent.
Mr. SHURKIN: Well, he was a team leader at Bell Labs in the mid-1940s.
"Today Bell Labs is building next-generation networks more efficiently than ever before, " says Netravali.
"It feels like the birth of a new industry, " says John Musser, the 45-year-old veteran of Bell Labs and Electronic Arts who runs Programmableweb.com.
In some ways, Google represents the internet-era equivalent of Bell Labs or Xerox PARC legendary corporate research outfits that shaped the evolution of technology in earlier periods.
"My guess is that the window for DNA computing will close fairly soon, " says Bernard Yurke , a researcher at Lucent's (nyse: LU - news - people) Bell Labs, who built a DNA adding machine.
Chairman Michael Birck, 60, an electrical engineer, cofounded Tellabs in 1975 after stints at Bell Labs and two small Chicago-area telecom equipment firms.
Oil giant BP originally donated the land for the campus while businesses who will be involved include Rolls Royce, Hewlett-Packard, Tata, Bell Labs and BAE.
One notable self-tracker, Gordon Bell of Microsoft Labs, keeps recording devices on him at all times, and hopes to outsource his memory to a computer, with all of his conversations and interactions key-worded and searchable.
Alcatel-Lucent, which owns Bell Labs, isn't committing to a time to market for the application, but analysts say the first uses of gesture control and virtual conferencing on wireless networks and handsets will arrive late next year.
Its founder, William Shockley, was fresh from winning the Nobel Prize (he had co-invented the transistor at Bell Labs in the 1940s) and was busy hiring the sharpest minds he could find to investigate the potential of semiconductors.
The fax machine was invented in 1843, and both Xerox and Bell Labs had ongoing projects to fine-tune the concept.
Bell Labs created building blocks of the modern world--the transistor, Unix, laser breakthroughs, cellular telephony.
The geniuses at Bell Labs failed to see Cisco (nasdaq: CSCO - news - people ).
Its Bell Labs eventually became Lucent and was merged to form Alcatel-Lucent.
FORBES: For ATT, It's Deja Vu All Over Again, Even The Same D.C. Courthouse
One team packed a high-tech edge: a new microphone designed by Lucent Technologies Bell Labs .
It evolved into a mishmash of businesses--network boxes for carriers, PBXs for offices, phones, semiconductors and Bell Labs.
Mimicking conversation in a virtual room required the Bell Labs teams to process multiple incoming video and audio feeds and handle superfast 3-D.
Bell Labs' math and physics experts are devising algorithms to speed up the service's back-end computation so all this video can be rendered on the fly.
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