Happy New Year! And welcome to the new LEDs Magazine News & Insights newsletter for Jan. 3, 2020. This is of course our first missive of 2020. And it’s the first of a revamped newsletter portfolio that we will bring you in 2020.
The LEDs Magazine News & Insights newsletter will be our primary email newsletter offering covering LED and solid-state lighting (SSL) technology, applications, news, and more, along with my commentary — across the entire LED and SSL spectrum from LED components to general lighting and niche applications to case studies and more. This newsletter replaces and extends what we previously referred to as our weekly newsletter. Subscribers will receive this newsletter twice a week on Wednesday and Friday.
We will also continue to do our vertical application newsletters. Those newsletters will remain largely unchanged. We will increase the frequency of our LEDs Magazine Horticultural Lighting Newsletter to twice monthly.
Moving to the news, the business world has been mostly on a couple of weeks' break with the holidays. The general media has had its hands full with continued political issues and unrest around the globe. But the technology world has rested – and many will need that rest with the massive Consumer Electronics Show launching 2020 in Las Vegas next week. We will have some reporting from that event in the coming days. It looks like mini LED technology is going to be a major story on the show floor.
The courts, of course, can’t fully rest. In California, we have had the issue over LED replacement lamp efficacy lurking with the state planning to take action to lower efficacy requirements. In fact, that policy did go into effect yesterday. The National Electrical Manufacturers Association (NEMA) and the American Lighting Association (ALA) have sued California to stop the new policy, but a federal court denied the plaintiffs’ request for a temporary restraining order. We haven’t heard the last of this story in California or the broader policy moves made by the Trump administration's Department of Energy (DOE).
We do have one CES-related story about a technology we’ve written plenty about lately — Li-Fi, or visible light communications (VLC) intended to be used in a manner like Wi-Fi. Our Mark Halper has followed Li-Fi developments closely. And he reported that the national energy and technology agency in France called CEA will demonstrate a way to eliminate crosstalk problems when multiple Li-Fi access points are located near one another.
Meanwhile, we within the Endeavor LED & Lighting Network remain focused on our own upcoming event Strategies in Light scheduled for Feb. 11–13 in San Diego.
Our Carrie Meadows has done some very nice previews of learning opportunities at Strategies in Light and over the holidays posted an interview with well-known designer Clifton Stanley Lemon who will lead a full day workshop on Feb. 11 with some fantastic colleagues contributing. You have less than a week to get an Early Bird discount on Strategies in Light registration.
You will find many more stories of interest in the body of today’s newsletter. Please note my relatively new email address below. And always feel free to contact me to discuss content we post or to pitch a contributed article.
- Maury Wright, (858) 748-6785, [email protected]