Interesting Take in Forbes on the Future of the Lighting Market
Bill Watkins is CEO of Bridgelux, an LED manufacturer fueled by private-equity funds. That's not terribly unusual -- lots of companies are backed by venture capitalists these days. What makes Watkins unique is that he left his former life as CEO of Silicon Valley disc drive maker Seagate Technology to lead fledgling developer Bridgelux.
In a column posted Aug. 18 on www.forbes.com, Watkins compares traditional lighting technology to "the wet film industry when digital photography took hold." He also said in the Forbes article that, "The lighting market will increasingly look, feel and operate like the information technology industry. Light bulbs represent the world's last vacuum technology, so digital lighting is where the semiconductor, software and disk-drive industries were 40 years ago--on the edge of steep and continuous growth."
According to a fact sheet on its website, Bridgelux was founded in 2002 and got a $50 million cash infusion early this year to develop its LED technologies.
About the Author
Jim Lucy Blog
Chief Editor
Jim Lucy has been wandering through the electrical market for more than 30 years, most of the time as an editor for Electrical Wholesaling, Electrical Marketing newsletter and CEE News. During that time he and the editorial team for the publications have won numerous national awards for their coverage of the electrical business. He showed an early interest in electricity, when as a youth he had an idea for a hot dog cooker. Unfortunately, the first crude prototype malfunctioned and the arc nearly blew him out of his parents' basement. Before becoming an editor for Electrical Wholesaling magazine and Electrical Marketing, he earned a BA degree in journalism and a MA in communications from Glassboro State College, Glassboro, NJ., which is formerly best known as the site of the 1967 summit meeting between President Lyndon Johnson and Russian Premier Aleksei Nikolayevich Kosygin, and now best known as the New Jersey state college that changed its name in 1992 to Rowan University because of a generous $100 million donation by N.J. zillionaire industrialist Henry Rowan. Jim is a Brooklyn-born Jersey Guy happily transplanted in the fertile plains of Kansas for the past 20 years.