Earlier this week I visited Bell Labs in New Jersey and got a tour from Bell Lab’s new President, Dr. Jeong Kim, a good friend and a partner in my sports teams. He was previously CEO of Lucent’s optical computing division and came into this new position nine months ago. (Bell Labs is a part of the Lucent corporation now).

Earlier this week I visited Bell Labs in  New Jersey and got a tour from Bell Lab’s new President, Dr. Jeong Kim, a good friend and a partner in my sports teams.  He was previously CEO of  Lucent’s optical computing division and came into this new position nine months ago.  (Bell Labs is a part of the Lucent corporation now).

We toured Bell Labs and went for a walk with their archivist through their in-house museum, and it was like a walk through the history of modern technology.  Among other amazing accomplishments, we saw the history of the telephone, the fax machine, the commercial space business, and the first intercontinental phone cable.  And it should have come as little surprise, as Bell Labs has been the home of no fewer than six Nobel Prize winners.   We also looked to the future, and we talked about nanotechnology applications; smell-sensing ID systems (I kid you not); a clean room in which crystals were being made; new techniques in security and encryption; high-speed wireless platform architectures; and video search algorithms.  Bell Labs houses some of the smartest people in the world — more than 1500 PhDs — and they have generated an average of one patent a day, every day, since 1925.   It was really an amazing opportunity to take a look back, as well as explore the future with some world class thinkers.

Mario Lemieux, one of the greatest hockey players of all time, retired this week.  Despite chronic back problems and a battle with Hodgkin’s disease, he won two Stanley Cups and led Team Canada to a gold medal at the 2002 Olympics.  Even though I feared playing against him, I will miss watching him skate. 

It’s been a big week for the online music business with the announcement that the sale of legal music downloads passed the $1 billion milestone in 2005.   For all the hype, however, we should still put the online music business in context.  It’s still a small part of the overall business, just 6% of total sales for 2005.  And the gains in online sales have not matched the decline in traditional CDs and other recorded music, as the overall industry has fallen from $39.7 billion in 2000 to under $31 billion last year.  But the staggering growth rate, in which online music sales tripled from the prior year, have given hope to the recording industry that it’s finally turned the corner into the new digital world.