Media Lab Europe - which the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT, prefers to write, software-company style, as one long word, MedaLabEurope, or abbreviate to MLE - is the digital hub's anchor tenant. Several European countries wanted this prize but it came here.
Mr Denis O'Brien apparently heard the famed, celebrity-status director of the MIT Media Lab, ProfNicholas Negroponte, give a talk in late 1997 at which he mentioned MIT's interest in setting up a European version of the lab.
Mr O'Brien went to Prof Negroponte after the talk and told him he should consider the Republic. Prof Negroponte was intrigued and suggested Mr O'Brien pay a visit to the Media Lab the next time he was in Boston, so that he could get a sense of what the Media Lab did. Mr O'Brien booked a flight immediately and, to Prof Negroponte's astonishment, arrived on Media Lab's doorstep within days.
Mr O'Brien then introduced Prof Negroponte to the Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, on Prof Negroponte's next visit to Dublin. That aggressiveness put the deal in motion.
"When a prime minister encourages you and you have entrepreneurs like Denis encouraging you, it becomes very attractive," Prof Negroponte told The Irish Times, although MIT went on to talk to five other countries (Sweden and Germany were the other main contenders). The deal nearly fell through several times as negotiations seesawed.
Finally, in December 1999, the Taoiseach and Prof Negroponte announced that MLE would indeed set up in Dublin, backed by a £28 million grant from the Government to acquire appropriate premises. A rider on the deal, little discussed at the time, was that MLE would be the centre of what was termed a "digital village".
It was also unclear exactly what MLE would do, although Prof Negroponte stressed an emphasis on technology and the arts as well as the development of e-commerce technologies.
In Massachusetts, the Media Lab is unlike other research labs in the US, as it does not do pure research towards products. Instead, it lives at the intersection of technology, creativity and the bizarre, a kind of haute couture of technology where people, many of them artists in their own right, experiment.
The Media Lab does wearable computer "smart clothes", computerised "dance sneakers", intelligent roads that provide digital feedback, a virtual dog named Sydney the Cyber Terrier, experiments with film, music, and computer and human interfaces, all of which MIT describes as the place where "bits meet atoms". The lab's special interest groups include Toys of Tomorrow, Counter Intelligence (focused on "self-aware kitchens") and Grey Matter (which "considers the impact of computation and communication on the lives of older people").
Such whimsy annoys many traditional researchers. A recent New York Times article on the Media Lab noted that it has produced few products or direct contributions to technological developments compared to "serious" labs like those at Carnegie-Mellon University, IBM or Stanford. On the other hand, those labs receive a tiny fraction of the publicity regularly showered on the Media Lab.
While Prof Negroponte is an articulate spokesman and adept at publicity, the work of the Media Lab clearly stimulates the public imagination in the way that a chip design innovation does not. Yet Media Lab gets funding from some 170 corporations, half of them outside the US. Prof Negroponte has described the MIT Media Lab as "the place that big corporates go to outsource creativity".
With MLE, that focus will shift slightly, according to Prof Negroponte. MLE intends to serve as an incubator for ecommerce ideas - a move more towards the mainstream business world that Media Lab has not followed before, and an aspect that will be intrinsically tied to the digital district.
