France Telecom’s R&D arm, CNET (Center Nationale d’Etudes des Telecommunications), is to open a research laboratory in Silicon Valley, California, near the R&D centers owned by its partners Deutsche Telekom and Sprint. The new lab will collaborate with US high-tech companies involved in the Internet2 project to develop the next generation of the internet. It will also house the US offices of Innovacom, France Telecom’s venture capital arm, which has so far invested over FFr70m in US and European start-ups. CNET is Europe’s largest corporate telecoms research center, employing some 4,500 staff. It has a major focus on internet-related research, covering areas such as natural language search engines, internet telephony and web-telephony integration.
