Lightning Laboratories

Lightning Laboratories provides professional consulting services to executives in a wide range of companies and institutions, from the Global 2000 to pre-money startups. Our focus is strategic innovation, including all aspects of the creative lifecycle for new products, new business startups, and innovation-focused initiatives and teams. We work closely with client companies to identify, develop and execute breakthrough programs that deliver positive business results including profitable growth, customer engagement, brand enhancement and cross-industry impact. Our work encompasses a wide range of projects and products, built around the core technical themes of personal, mobile and ubiquitous computing, utility, SaaS and cloud computing, and digital media services. We are especially interested in emerging technologies applied in what Hal Varian calls "combinatorial innovation", integrating devices, software and services to create exciting new end-user experiences. Lightning Laboratories is based in the San Francisco - San Jose - Silicon Valley region, with connections to a worldwide network of designers, marketers, technologists and influencers.

Gene Becker

Gene Becker is founder and managing director of Lightning Laboratories. With over 20 years of experience in research, product development, executive leadership and entrepreneurial ventures, Gene brings creativity, insight, and strategic expertise to client engagements. At Hewlett-Packard’s technology research unit HP Labs, Gene led advanced research and business development for Cooltown, a web-based platform for mobile and ubiquitous computing that became part of HP’s CEO-level strategic vision for 2 years and prefigured many connected world developments in common use today. Also at HP Labs, Gene led the creation of utility computing services used in the production of DreamWorks Animation’s feature films Shrek 2 and Madagascar, and co-founded a new cloud services business unit within HP’s Services business sector. Most recently, he was worldwide Director of Product Development for extreme performance and mobility brand Voodoo PC, where he built the engineering and product management teams and led development of award-winning products including the HP Blackbird and Firebird liquid cooled gaming systems and the Voodoo Envy carbon fiber notebook. Gene earned his engineering degree at MIT and studied computer science at Stanford, in the days when you had to go to a special room to use the computers.

Gene is an avid proponent of social media tools for community forming and social business engagement. If you are on Twitter, follow @genebecker and say hello!