3 ms·

This looks amazing ... a modern Bell Labs or Xerox PARC.

by _pius 11y ago

dreamdu5t 11y ago
Bell Labs had an annual budget of over 3 billion since the 80s.
- sama 11y ago
  Clearly if it seems promising we're going to up the funding significantly.
  - suyash 11y ago
    That is great news Sam! This is really exciting to see an incubator starting it's own research lab and on top of that, keeping it totally in the open source. I'm fascinated by Research work folks have done at Parc and Disney, you should have a look here and perhaps speak with someone at Disney as well: http://www.disneyresearch.com http://www.disneyresearch.com
  - stock_toaster 11y ago
    Just curious, are you going to also have people filing grant proposals (with government agencies, etc), as an avenue of additional funding?
  - r0naa 11y ago
    Well, I hope you are taking interns
  - Natsu 11y ago
    And I hope you guys really do make the next Bell Labs :)
- csomar 11y ago
  You are making a wrong correlation. Putting more money won't necessarily drive research forward. Most breakthrough researches and inventions were done with little money.
  - go1979 11y ago
    I am a professional scientist and I have to disagree. 10 million is just seed cash that I'm sure will be magnified. But do not underestimate the cost of research. While a particular project that pays off seems (and is) a great return, salaries, equipment and conference travel consume a lot of money.
    - adamnemecek 11y ago
      It probably depends on the type of research that you do. Drug research is expensive. But I think that you can do something like Xerox PARC (it seems like YCR might be going for something similar) with relatively little money. It appears that in 2001 their budget was $65m (http://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=86872 http://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=86872). I'm not sure if their budget was larger during the 70's but that's not that much money considering what came out of there.
      - sbov 11y ago
        From what I can tell, back in the 70's Xerox PARC's annual budget that focused on computing was $10-14.5 million in today's dollars, which seems fairly cheap. But it took multiple years to develop it. This also feels like cheating because we're targeting extremely successful research. If we knew ahead of time which research would be successful it would be a lot cheaper to do.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - netheril96 11y ago
    But it is inevitable to have a lot of unsuccessful research projects before one breakthrough. Similar to startups where most fail. Those "failures" add up to the cost pretty quickly, and you cannot avoid them.

This looks amazing ... a modern Bell Labs or Xerox PARC.

by _pius 11y ago

This looks amazing ... a modern Bell Labs or Xerox PARC.

dreamdu5t 11y ago

Bell Labs had an annual budget of over 3 billion since the 80s.

sama 11y ago
Clearly if it seems promising we're going to up the funding significantly.
- suyash 11y ago
  That is great news Sam! This is really exciting to see an incubator starting it's own research lab and on top of that, keeping it totally in the open source. I'm fascinated by Research work folks have done at Parc and Disney, you should have a look here and perhaps speak with someone at Disney as well: http://www.disneyresearch.com http://www.disneyresearch.com
- stock_toaster 11y ago
  Just curious, are you going to also have people filing grant proposals (with government agencies, etc), as an avenue of additional funding?
- r0naa 11y ago
  Well, I hope you are taking interns
- Natsu 11y ago
  And I hope you guys really do make the next Bell Labs :)
csomar 11y ago
You are making a wrong correlation. Putting more money won't necessarily drive research forward. Most breakthrough researches and inventions were done with little money.
- go1979 11y ago
  I am a professional scientist and I have to disagree. 10 million is just seed cash that I'm sure will be magnified. But do not underestimate the cost of research. While a particular project that pays off seems (and is) a great return, salaries, equipment and conference travel consume a lot of money.
  - adamnemecek 11y ago
    It probably depends on the type of research that you do. Drug research is expensive. But I think that you can do something like Xerox PARC (it seems like YCR might be going for something similar) with relatively little money. It appears that in 2001 their budget was $65m (http://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=86872 http://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=86872). I'm not sure if their budget was larger during the 70's but that's not that much money considering what came out of there.
    - sbov 11y ago
      From what I can tell, back in the 70's Xerox PARC's annual budget that focused on computing was $10-14.5 million in today's dollars, which seems fairly cheap. But it took multiple years to develop it. This also feels like cheating because we're targeting extremely successful research. If we knew ahead of time which research would be successful it would be a lot cheaper to do.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- netheril96 11y ago
  But it is inevitable to have a lot of unsuccessful research projects before one breakthrough. Similar to startups where most fail. Those "failures" add up to the cost pretty quickly, and you cannot avoid them.