Some vintage images for my old Color Kinetics colleagues. Circa April 2007, our very first “MegaBlast” prototype at the old 10 Milk Street office location in the Financial District of Downtown Boston. Our engineers put the first prototype optics on … Continue reading megablast
Corning’s “A Day Made of Glass” was launched in 2011, depicting a very futuristic view of a world were nearly every surface is a portal to the digital world. I posted about it about in 2013, but I didn’t realize the … Continue reading corning’s “a day made of glass” has had tremendous impact
Wow. Samsung is backing away from the lighting business, abandoning its nascent lamps effort (and presumably whatever strategies it had for luminaires) in favor of just producing LED components (which it needs to do for LCD production, anyway). So it leads … Continue reading Is the lighting party over? What’s next?
As part of my ongoing effort to track innovative small companies in the lighting world (see this post and this post for some more ventures), here is a release from the U.S. DOE on their latest Small Business Innovation Research grants: Four SBIR Grants Awarded for SSL Technology (FY14 Release 2 Phase I) The U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science has awarded four Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grants targeting advances in solid-state lighting (SSL) technology. The FY14 Release 2 Phase I awards will explore the technical merit or feasibility of an innovative concept or technology. The SBIR and … Continue reading U.S. DOE SSL releases 4 SBIR grants
A heartwarming TED Talk about Richard Turere, a young Kenyan boy who invented a lighting system for living peacefully with lions: Richard Turere is a young Maasai man who lives in the wilderness of the Kenya savanna, on the edge … Continue reading richard turere’s lion lights
Do you think it would be possible for a venture capital group to create a model similar to Y Combinator specifically for the lighting industry? For those of you who don’t know, Y Combinator is a Silicon Valley venture model that … Continue reading incubator for the lighting industry?
“The term ‘innovation’ dated back to the sixteenth-century England. Originally it described the introduction into society of a novelty or new idea…innovation began to fill a descriptive gap. If an idea begat a [scientific] discovery, and if a discovery begat an [engineered] invention, then an innovation defined the lengthy and wholesale transformation of an idea into a technological product (or process) meant for widespread practical use. Almost by defintion, a single person, or even a single group, could not alone create an innovation. The task was too variegated and involved.” Quoted from The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age … Continue reading the meaning of “innovation”
How to explain innovation for the masses: “People are very open minded about new things…as long as they’re exactly like the old ones.” –Charles Kettering, founder of Delco autoparts Continue reading quote
