GE sheds light on the company’s PFS phosphor red technology and developments in this latest blog entry.

Ohneka Farms, a New York-based design studio focus on organic foods, launched a fund-raising campaign on Indiegogo to raise US $75,000 on an experimental hydroponics vitrine, the ROOT.

Worldwide Grow Lights for Agriculture markets are poised to achieve significant growth as the food supply for the world starts to adopt automated process. Grow lights have become more sophisticated and less expensive to run as solar and wind energy are adopted by greenhouses and plant factories. LED grow lights offer quality for growing, homogenous light distribution at precisely the right wavelengths.

Hands-free information could stream across your contact lens, in a device that came one step closer to reality this week.

Start-up skincare company La Lumiere, LLC, creator of the innovative illuMask®, the world's first wearable light therapy mask, announced today that it has secured a $20 million Series B financing.  The investment included Johnson & Johnson Development Corporation (JJDC), the venture capital subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, joining SWaN & Legend Venture Partners as institutional investors in the company.  The Series B investment is a culmination of efforts over the last 12 months to drive commercialization in the U.S and continued growth.

When the 2014 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded this October to three Japanese-born scientists for the invention of blue light emitting diodes (LEDs), the prize committee declared LED lamps would light the 21st century. Now researchers from the Netherlands have found a novel way to ensure the lights of the future not only are energy efficient but also emit a cozy warmth.

Hodi Technologies, a premier LED lighting and smart-grid system company in China, has selected Greenvity Communications’ Internet of Things (IoT) turnkey solutions for multiple Hodi smart lighting products. In addition, Greenvity and Hodi will collaborate to develop future products focused on controlled lighting and smart metering applications.

Fujitsu Laboratories announced the development of a technology that can embed ID data in light cast by LEDs or other light sources onto objects, and also recover this ID data from objects that have been lit in this way.

LIGHTFAIR® International (LFI®) will introduce the LFI Controls & Connectivity Forum and a host of Conference advancements as a part of the world’s largest annual architectural and commercial lighting trade show and conference, which will take place in New York May 3-7, 2015 (Trade Show: May 5-7; Pre-Conference LIGHTFAIR Institute®: May 3-4; Conference: May 5-7).

Union Tool Co, a cutting tool manufacturer based in Japan, will release a system that monitors an elderly person, etc by using an LED lamp equipped with a laser device in September 2015.

After releasing Pad Extension Chip (PEC) in 2013, LED chip manufacturer Epistar, has improved the technical and support system for the product, and now the product is applied in direct-type LED TV backlight, lighting and flash lights. Epistar’s PEC chips will be applied in large volumes in direct-type LED TV next year, with target products being 32 inch to 45 inch LED TVs. The company’s orders are mainly from China and South Korea, said Epistar Deputy Director of Marketing Center, Dr. Chiu-Lin Yao while attending LEDforum 2014 held in Taipei, Taiwan on Oct. 24, 2014.

Hi-Q-LED”, a publicly funded project coordinated by Osram Opto Semiconductors, has developed LEDs with an extremely high efficacy and a reduced drop in efficacy

Hubbell Lighting, a world leader in lighting innovation, announced today that Hubbell Building Automation (HBA) has become a Member of The Connected Lighting Alliance. The lighting world is on the eve of a paradigm shift towards wireless connectivity, and HBA’s industry-leading products offer the simplest and most convenient form of new lighting control.

Smart lighting emerged in recent years as a promising technology that has attracted investments from many institutes and LED companies, but further R&D is required before the technology can become truly human centric, said Pei-Ting Chou, Manager, Electronics and Optoelectronics Research Laboratories, ITRI, at LEDforum 2014, which was held on Oct. 24, 2014 in Taipei, Taiwan.

Improvements in lighting technology for light-emitting diode (LED) bulbs have increased lighting efficiency, or efficacy, as well as color quality. In September of this year, several manufacturers released ENERGY STAR®-qualified bulbs surpassing 100 lumens per watt. For comparison, traditional incandescent bulbs, which do not meet current light bulb efficiency standards and are no longer sold, provide 13 to 18 lumens per watt.

Cost effective communication solutions are important for long range smart streetlight applications to make it acceptable to potential clients, said Gary Tsai, R&D Director, Institute for Information Industry (III) at LEDforum 2014 last Friday at Taipei, Taiwan.

Price competitions are affecting almost every aspect of the LED industry, and are observed in manufacturers chip technology developments, such as the emergence of Chip Scale Package (CSP) LEDs.

Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI), Taiwan's largest and one of the world's leading high-tech research and development institutions, is pleased to introduce In-Line Compact Thermal Analyzer (ICTA) Technology. The world's leading automatic thermal analyzer, ICTA offers a measurement speed of 12,000 LEDs per hour, reducing each LED's component thermal resistance testing time to 0.3 seconds. This is 2,000 times faster than the traditional lab method where only six components can be measured per hour. ITRI will receive a 2014 R&D 100 Award  in November for this breakthrough technology in the "Imaging" category.

One of Osram’s ongoing projects to overcome LED efficacy limitations is the development of microrod 3D LED technology, said Michael Schmitt, Regional Market Director, Asia-Pacific, Osram Opto Semiconductors at LEDforum 2014 which was hosted by LEDinside on Oct. 24, 2014 at Taipei, Taiwan.

The days of glimpsing the world through a tiny plastic porthole when you fly are soon to be a thing of the past; future aircrafts will offer a crystal clear panoramic view without any windows at all. At the UK based Centre for Process Innovation (CPI), scientists and engineers are developing ultra-flexible, high-definition display technologies that could line the interior walls of cabins and display live footage from external cameras.

Cree achieves another fundamental breakthrough in lighting-class LED performance with the groundbreaking SC5 Technology™ Platform. The new platform powers the next generation of lighting with the introduction of Extreme High Power (XHP) LEDs. This new class of LEDs can reduce system costs by up to 40 percent in most lighting applications.

LED prices will continue to fall over the next few years, but this is a phase that will probably pass, said Sean Zhou, Regional Marketing Director, Asia, Philips Lumileds at LEDforum 2014, which took place Friday in Taipei, Taiwan. Manufacturers aiming to improve profits will be increasingly turning towards cost-effective technologies, such as flip-chip LEDs.

The phase-out of traditional incandescent bulbs in the U.S. and elsewhere, as well as a growing interest in energy efficiency, has given LED lighting a sales boost. However, that trend could be short-lived as key materials known as rare earth elements become more expensive. Scientists have now designed new materials for making household LED bulbs without using these ingredients. They report their development in ACS’Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Experts at Osram Opto Semiconductors will be taking the opportunity offered by the Vision Congress in Paris (October 14 and 15, 2014) to showcase an LED for car headlights which has a luminance three times that of existing versions. This means that a single LED can be used to provide a complete low beam. Several LED chips have always been needed in the past depending on the design and the type of LEDs used. The tremendous brightness is the result of a combination of UX:3 chip technology, ceramic conversion technology and high-current technology used in projection applications. In future it will be possible to design much smaller headlights – with every lighting function smaller than a box of matches.

Ford Motor Company and NextEnergy, one of the nation’s leading accelerators of advanced energy technologies, have teamed up on a technology innovation challenge for industry suppliers to help advance state-of-the-art automotive lighting.

Even as the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics has enshrined light emitting diodes (LEDs) as the single most significant and disruptive energy-efficient lighting solution of today, scientists around the world continue unabated to search for the even-better-bulbs of tomorrow. Enter carbon electronics.

Duke University researchers have made fluorescent molecules emit photons of light 1,000 times faster than normal—setting a speed record and making an important step toward realizing superfast light emitting diodes (LEDs) and quantum cryptography.

Last October, the biologist and former GE Healthcare chief scientist James Rothman received the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for solving the mystery of how cells shuttle molecules of insulin and other substances to the right place in the body. This year, two other former GE scientists looking for new sources of light, Bob Hall and Nick Holonyak Jr., almost felt the glow of a Nobel themselves.

Nanoco Group plc (AIM:NANO), a developer and manufacturer of cadmium-free quantum dots and other nanomaterials, announces that it has signed a follow-on joint development agreement with Osram, one of the world’s largest lighting companies, in connection with the use of Nanoco cadmium-free quantum dots in general lighting.

The Next Generation Lighting Industry Alliance (NGLIA) has recently released the third edition of  “LED Luminaire Lifetime: Recommendations for Testing and Reporting”. The alliance membership includes some lighting industry heavy weights including Philips, Cree and GE lighting. Below are some of the key recommendations from the report: