Welcome to the LEDs Magazine News & Insights newsletter for Dec. 2, 2020. I will start this week by sharing some news from inside our LEDs & Lighting team at Endeavor Business Media. We have made the decision to postpone Strategies in Light 2021 from the previously-announced June dates to Aug. 24–26. After a comprehensive evaluation of the COVID-19 situation and vaccine deployment plans, we feel the added two months will provide the cushion needed to allow us to hold an in-person event in Santa Clara, CA next year.
The news does go deeper than an additional two-month delay, however, and adds what I believe will become a game-changing approach to conferences and exhibitions. While we are changing the date specifically to maximize our chances of presenting an in-person program and exhibit floor, our recent experience with virtual conferences has led us to realize that the modern conference needs some of both. So Strategies in Light 2021 will include a virtual conference overlay that will result in about half of the conference-track content being presented online a few weeks after the in-person event in California. We will maximize usage of our curated content and serve people who couldn’t travel or just might not feel safe traveling by next August. We will be announcing full details of these plans in the coming days, including some other exciting changes for the exhibit floor.
Moving to LED and solid-state lighting (SSL) industry news, the ams acquisition of Osram is the deal that just won’t quit yielding news, and our Mark Halper has covered the details every step of the way. Current Osram CEO Olaf Berlien will be relieved of his duties in February. Former Osram CFO Ingo Bank, who moved from Osram to ams back in May, will return to Osram and take on the CEO role. This news comes just a few weeks after the ams CEO Alexander Everke said the Osram digital business was not strategic to the future of ams.
Frankly, I have wondered if we have devoted too much effort to covering the stops, starts, and hair-pin turns of this drive toward acquisition. But our Carrie Meadows surveyed the web traffic to all of our content posted during November. And Carrie learned that the story linked above on the Osram digital business was the most trafficked story on our site for the month.
In the coming weeks, we will be looking back at all of our 2020 content to see what resonated the most with you the readers. It’s an exercise we pursue each year out of both interest in how we performed and as guidance for what we should do going forward. In advance of seeing the 2020 rankings later in the month, you might want to revisit our results from 2019. Something tells me the two years will be vastly different.
We have another online, virtual event for you next week. And the event called Product Demo Days goes beyond the LED and SSL sectors. Within Endeavor Business Media, we are part of the Advanced Technology business unit. Our business unit is working to produce easy-to-consume product and educational content across eight areas of interest, one of which is LEDs & Lighting. Other sectors include optical communications, broadband technology, and more. The virtual event will feature video content from companies in each of the eight technology sectors and enable attendees to communicate directly with the companies involved.
You can register for Product Demo Days for free. The registration form is very simple and you can quickly choose the application sectors you wish to visit. Also, we have some incentives for attendance. Prizes that will be awarded just for attending include a Yeti cooler, a very nice drone, and a JBL audio system. I also recorded a welcome video and I encourage you to take five minutes to view that video. I need the ratings.😉
And as I reminded you all the last two weeks, we are in the midst of a drive to update and add to our circulation database. You can quickly apply for the free subscription. Or if you have received an email from us asking for you to update your subscription data, please take the couple of minutes necessary to comply. Such support is vital to our ability to do business and to continue to supply content to you.
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]