Welcome to the LEDs Magazine News & Insights newsletter for July 31, 2020. Pardon me if any typos get through in today’s column. Southern California has been perfect temperature wise the last few weeks, but now a heatwave is upon us and I have sweat running through my eyes. Fortunately, I have air conditioning. But when the temperature inversions occur, the air conditioning can’t keep up and I wish I would have splurged for a smaller house near the cool beach zone. And we will soon flip the calendar to the month that makes me wish I had sprung for a solar power system.
We’ve settled back into a slow pace in terms of news. I thought people might skip their holidays this year given the ongoing pandemic. But I’m feeling a slow August on tap. At the publication, we do have some deferred projects that will improve our web presentations and other things to accomplish. But I’d rather see an uptick in LED and solid-state lighting (SSL) activity demanding my attention.
We are continuing to post the individual HTML versions of the career 40 Under 40 honoree summaries with new ones added each day. Look down through the body of this newsletter and you will see the latest posts linked. Our Carrie Meadows deserves all of the props for these individual postings. I told her that creating individual articles on each honoree would be too time consuming, but she insisted it would be worth the effort and undertook the challenge. I remain impressed, meanwhile, with the breadth of the talent in the class.
In this column a few weeks back I noted that, despite my concerns, it appeared the ams acquisition of Osram was headed to finalization. But there are still obstacles to integration of the organizations that remain. I’m no mergers and acquisition (M&A) expert, but it appears ams has still not met certain requirements of German law that govern such matters. Our Mark Halper explains that ams still must achieve what is called domination in terms of share ownership.
We also have a story for you that looks back at an outdoor area lighting project executed five years back. I was struck by an email that Crossroads LED sent updating the status of the project and documenting that the SSL installation had remained failure free. We probably need more such stories that document LED technology delivering on the long-life and maintenance-free promise. Those of you in the PR industry can probably gather facts covering such installations fairly easily.
As I mentioned in our Wednesday newsletter, we have made the difficult decision of postponing Strategies in Light 2021 until next June 22–24 in Santa Clara. The safety of everyone involved mandated the action and we sure hope that eleven months from now we are free to hold a great live event. We have a full explanation posted on the Strategies in Light website.
You will find many more stories of interest in the body of today’s newsletter. 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]