Leonard Kleinrock, Founder and Chairman, Nomadix

In the summer of 1969, Leonard Kleinrock told his co-workers he needed to take some time off from Linkabit, the start-up they had all founded a year earlier. A Pentagon research agency wanted his help with a new technology it was testing called packet switching.

“They said, ‘Fine, don't worry,’” he recalled. But when he came back several months later, the other Linkabit founders — his close friend Andy Viterbi and a UC San Diego professor named Irwin Jacobs, whom Kleinrock knew from MIT — told him he couldn't bail out on them and then expect to waltz back in. They gave him a stake in the company and parted ways.

“It wasn't something I would have preferred at the time, but it's not a decision I'm unhappy with,” Kleinrock said. Under Jacobs, Linkabit went on to become Qualcomm, and Kleinrock's summer job went on to become, well, the Internet.

Decades later, the two worlds are converging, and Kleinrock is again at the forefront. Nomadix, the company he founded in 1998 with CTO Joel Short (a former student Kleinrock taught at UCLA), uses access gateways as middlemen to allow roaming, authentication and billing in Wi-Fi hot spots.

“Nomadix makes alien devices appear friendly,” he said. “If you have a static IP address that the router doesn't recognize, we map it to an address the router will accept.” Through customers Sprint and Cometa, Nomadix software has already been placed in hot spots such as the one in New York's Rockefeller Center.

Kleinrock now spends three days a week at Nomadix and the other two at UCLA, developing the far-flung technologies of the next world, such as intelligent agents and “smart spaces” (sensory data systems that recognize users' physical presence) that will make the Internet as intelligent, ubiquitous and transparent as he always hoped it would be.

For now, Nomadix is letting him have the time off.