Group IV: making a better light bulb
My Clean Break column in today’s Toronto Star takes a look at an Ottawa-area company that is using silicon to make a (much) better light bulb. Group IV Semiconductor Inc. has its roots in the telecom industry — in fact, every person working for the company, including its co-founder and CEO Stephen Naor, have some kind of connection to Ottawa’s telecom sector.
The company is building on the same technology used to push pulses of light down a fibre-optic network. Naor says after the collapse of the telecom industry and Ottawa’s tech sector, he and his colleagues decided the technology could be repurposed as a general illumination product that’s far superior to your standard 60-watt light bulb.
How superior? About 80 per cent more efficient and 20 times longer lasting. Group IV also believes its silicon-based products, within the next three years, will be more affordable and better quality than compact flourescent bulbs and will surpass the performance of LED lighting when it comes to the $12-billion market for general illumination.
The company is making sufficient inroads to attract the attention of Vinod Khosla (Khosla Ventures), who made an undisclosed investment in Group IV earlier this year.
Read the story for more details.
Tyler Hamilton is editor-in-chief of Corporate Knights magazine and a business columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper. In addition to this Clean Break blog, Tyler writes a weekly column of the same name that discusses trends, happenings and innovators in the clean technology and green energy market. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005. It is not an official blog of the newspaper.
