Nick Jones

One industry in the firing line at the moment is lighting. Incandescent light bulbs arrived around 1880 and are long overdue for retirement; new technologies such as energy efficient LED lighting seem likely to replace many of them in the next couple of decades.

LED lighting will succeed because it has both functional and social adoption drivers – it saves money and makes us feel we’re being green and helping the planet. But it also has another interesting property. You can modulate LEDs at very high frequencies, so it’s possible to piggy-back information onto the lighting. So the lights in your home, office, shop, train or plane can become a broadcast network. Lighting is also very directional, you can beam it exactly where you want it, so different places in a room can have different broadcasts. This is the interesting concept of smart lighting.

I think there’s a lot of synergy between smart lighting and mobile devices. Smart lighting could be the ultimate proximity marketing tool for example. Imagine, you could look at something in a shop, take out your mobile phone and pick up more information about it just by holding the handset somewhere nearby. The incremental cost to add this to a mobile phone would be tiny, likely under $1, it’s no more complex than IrDA that’s still in lots of handsets. In fact it could probably re-use the photo sensor that many handsets use to automatically adjust the screen brightness.

Smart lighting has many applications that go way beyond the mobile space, e.g. to broadcast media around your home (assuming that you don’t sit in the dark while watching TV). However I think the synergy between smart lighting and mobile devices has lots of potential so this is one technology I’ll be watching closely in the future and talking about at Gartner conferences.