The first From the Labs was presented by Gene Becker.

Gene started off by asking how many people in the audience were growing board with the traditional computing interface of keyboard, mouse and monitor. He called the current computing interface a kazoo when we really need a virtuoso violin. HP Labs is fovused on utility and ubiqitous computing. The Web has become increasingly social, diverse, mobile, creative, experiential, contextual, and physical. HP Labs is designing software and hardware for this new world.

He showed a number of interesting developments from HP Labs such as physical hyperlinks, media scapes - digital landscapes overlayed over physical locations by combining gps + wireless + audio + ipaqs, the misto table - an interactive digital coffee table, and virgil - a context aware extensible media driven browser. Gene also mentioned that HP has been making strides in utility computing by renting out their grid networks to animators such as DreamWorks SKG. Their grid has also enabled independent animators to have access to large-scale render farms that would traditionally be out of their price range.