Welcome to the LEDs Magazine News & Insights newsletter for Oct. 28, 2020. I would love to hear your thoughts on our recent virtual events — both the HortiCann Light + Tech conference held last week and Renaissance of Light Quality held in September. You can still catch sessions from either event on demand.
Please email me any thoughts or opinions you have on either event. From our perspective, we ended up serving a far larger audience virtually than we could have reached with an in-person event. And we have direct comparisons we can make with HortiCann having held that event in-person before. But I surely missed the interaction that happens in an in-person setting.
What I’d further like to know is did the format work having eight sessions over two days? In both cases, our live attendee numbers fell off some the second day although you can’t see that trend in registrations. We have seen other events within our parent company Endeavor do things such as hold one day of sessions, skip a day, and then hold a second day of sessions. I have even seen events spread out session days with a week spacing. What would be ideal?
Moving to news for the week, we continue to receive a lot of germicidal ultraviolet news releases, mainly focused on UV-C band (100–280-nm) radiation that can deactivate SARS-CoV-2 almost instantaneously. Many of the products we are seeing lack what we’d consider robust safeguards to protect people from the UV-C radiation, and we are carefully curating what we publish.
We did have a news item from Signify recently about such a product in a table-lamp form factor intended for residential usage. After our Mark Halper had written the news item, I was concerned about publishing the piece. It does have an occupancy sensor that is intended to disable use anytime people are present. But we have regularly covered the troublesome accuracy of such sensors. We ultimately published the news with a warning in the text.
Mark also wrote a very compelling article on LED-enabled clothing — specifically cycling gear. Why should a cyclist rely on reflective material for safety when they can don active solid-state lighting (SSL) to alert motorists to their presence? Alas, it will cost you a bit to sport the latest fashions on your bicycle.
Back to UV-C, we are planning a webcast series on the topic, and also some special reports in issues of the magazine starting with the January/February issue. We are going to deploy a special UV-C newsletter on Friday. Watch for it in your inbox. I’d also welcome your input on specific topics.
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]