Archive for the ‘Trade Shows’ Category

Here’s what you’ll see at Cree’s Lightfair trade show booth

Wednesday, May 12th, 2010

Spring break for lighting geeks starts today in Las Vegas. Lightfair International runs through Friday, and for those of us in the lighting biz, it’s 1,600 booths of fun, technology and education. Here’s what is going down in the Cree booth:

Our theme is “The End is Near.” That may sound dramatic but we believe it and our booth shows it. The end is near for gloomy, inefficient lighting. The end is near for hazardous lighting. The end is near for heat lamps that pass for acceptable lighting.

I know a lot of you won’t have a chance to join the 19,000 people expected to attend Lightfair. So join me on this virtual tour of our booth and here’s a link to our latest release announcing what we’re showing:

Step into the museum, where we’re displaying our directional lamps.

museum

We’ve broadened our family of replacement lamps to now include flood lights in addition to spot lights, offering different beam angles, light outputs and even different color temperatures. Because really, one size doesn’t fit all in the LED Lighting Revolution. So whether you’re lighting up purses in a showroom or avocados in the produce section, our booth shows you that Cree LED lighting can do it all.

Step into the Cree Café, where we’re dishing up “light” refreshments.

cafe

We’re showing off a gorgeous LED replacement for BR30 lamps. Our LBR-30™ lamp is a 65 Watt replacement that only uses 12 watts, providing beautiful light with high color accuracy. You can also see our LR6™-DR1000 recessed downlight that delivers 1,000 lumens using 50 percent less energy than a 26 Watt CFL, with all of the light and high color accuracy. Bonus: In true LED lighting style, there’s no mercury inside.

Step into our office, where we’re working on showing off our LED components.

components

Doubles as our component showcase, where we have our family of lighting-class LEDs on display (underneath our beautiful LED troffer products). Our LED components are an important part of our Lightfair booth because our beautiful LED lighting fixtures start with great LEDs. I’m sure the most popular demo is going to be our new XLamp® platform, the XLamp XM LED. This new single chip LED delivers a record-breaking efficacy of 160 lumens per watt at 350mA, which to us LED geeks is remarkable. This is the first time this revolutionary LED is on display.

Step into our home, where we’re redefining what you can expect from lighting.

home

It’s all about the CR6™ downlight in the residential setting, where the LED lighting revolution comes home. Visitors can flip the switches between the ghastly glow of fluorescent and the glorious glow of the CR6 downlight, our newest LED downlight aimed at the residential and light commercial, such as restaurants and hotels. This awesome new light is in production now, will be available soon and costs about the same as a twisty, toxic CFL downlight. And, a mega bonus, it’s designed to last 50,000 hours. Imagine not having to change the lights in your home for years. [if you state “decades,” you’ll need to state the number of hours of usage per day the calculation is based on]

Finally, our booth showcases the newly redesigned CreeLEDRevolution.com. The educational site shows off real world examples of LED lighting, features a monthly LED lighting giveaway (enter here) and offers a chance for you to actually join the LED Lighting Revolution by taking a pledge.  

 And if you are in Las Vegas for Lightfair, don’t forget you can stop by our booth to enter our drawing for a free iPad. All you have to do is take a photo of your favorite part of the booth and post it on Twitter or our facebook page. Complete directions on how to entere are here.

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Posted in Trade Shows | 2 Comments »

You could win an iPad by stopping by Cree’s booth at Lightfair

Monday, May 10th, 2010

You could win an iPad for stopping by the Cree booth #149 at Lightfair this week. Seriously. Some lucky Lightfair attendee will score a free iPad simply by participating in our ridiculously awesome contest. Here’s how you can qualify:

Step One: Stop by Cree’s booth (#149) at Lightfair during regular exhibit hall hours between May 12 and 14.

Step Two: Use your cell phone camera or your digital camera to snap a photo of your favorite thing about Cree’s booth.

Step Three: Upload that photo to EITHER Twitter or Cree’s LED Revolution facebook fan page. If you upload it to Twitter, you MUST include the photo in a message to @Cree in order to qualify.

It’s that simple. All entries must be uploaded to EITHER Twitter or Cree’s LED Revolution facebook fan page by noon EST on Monday May 17. Everyone who sends a photo from this year’s Lightfair booth to @Cree on Twitter or on our facebook page will automatically be entered into the drawing (unless they are employees, affiliates or agents (or their family members) of Cree or its distributors).

We will announce the winner on facebook and Twitter.

Not on Twitter or facebook yet? Well, hurry up and create an account and start tweeting and facebooking for your chance to win an Apple iPad.

As always, you can follow @Cree on Twitter or become a fan (or like) the LED Lighting Revolution on facebook. We love our fans and followers.

If you have any questions about the contest, feel free to post them in the comments section below and I will attempt to answer them.

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Posted in Trade Shows | 3 Comments »

7 tips for making the most out of Lightfair International

Thursday, May 6th, 2010

If you’re in the lighting biz or interested in lighting, Las Vegas is the place to be next week. That’s when more than 19,000 people will pass through the Las Vegas Convention Center for Lightfair International, the world’s largest annual architectural and commercial lighting tradeshow and conference.

Component Side Packed

Scene from Lightfair International 2009.

The tradeshow features more than 1,600 booths, and we’re pretty sure you’re going to see LED lighting pretty much everywhere you turn. I asked a couple of my coworkers who are Lightfair veterans to offer some tips for those who are going. Here’s what they came up with:

  1. Wear comfortable shoes. There is no exception to this rule. You will be on your feet constantly and the Las Vegas Convention Center boasts more than one million square feet of exhibition space.
  2. Decide what you want to get out of Lightfair before you leave. Just like it’s a good idea to determine how much money you’re willing to gamble when you’re in Vegas, it’s a good idea to determine your Lightfair goal before you enter the show floor. Are you going to learn more about LED lighting; to purchase lights for a specific project; to see the latest and greatest technologies; to find a job? Set your goals so that you don’t end up wasting time.
  3. Bring along a list of questions for LED manufacturers. It won’t be hard to find booths displaying LED lighting for a variety of applications. But don’t come to Lightfair prepared to accept everything exhibitors tell you about LEDs. Come armed with some solid questions. Here’s a good place to start.  
  4. Don’t be afraid to ask questions. Now that you’re armed with some good questions to ask, speak up. Don’t take attitude from any exhibitors. If you don’t understand something, keep asking follow up questions until you do. But don’t be obnoxious either. No one wants to be that guy.
  5. Let exhibitors scan your badge. Don’t shy away from being placed on a mailing list by exhibitors. Most of these lists are e-mail based, which means you can unsubscribe later with a click of a button. That said, if an exhibitor offers to scan your badge and you’re not interested, say so.
  6. Avoid eating lunch at noon. The food vendors are swamped come noon. So plan on eating early or eating a little later. There’s no point in standing in a long line for a piece of pizza when you could be looking at more energy efficient LED lights!
  7. Make time for the exhibits everyone is talking about. Obviously you’re going to see what the big companies are up to. But poke around a little to find out which smaller companies are boasting innovative products. You can even ask at the information desks who the ‘must see’ vendors are. You don’t have to be a big fish to boast a good lighting product. Besides, big fish often have mercury inside them, and that’s not good for anyone.

And, of course, you should stop by the Cree booth (#149) because that’s where I’ll be, and if you’re reading this, I want to meet you. And if you’re tweeting from Lightfair, be sure to use the hashtag #Lightfair.

If you have any tips of your own or want to let everyone know what’s worth seeing in your booth, leave us a comment below. See you at Lightfair!

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Posted in Trade Shows | 4 Comments »

You can learn how to make gorgeous LED pendant lights

Friday, April 16th, 2010

One of the world’s largest lighting tradeshows is wrapping up today in Frankfurt, Germany. More than 1,500 companies in the lighting business exhibited their goods and services at Light+Building. Among the items on display in the Cree booth are these gorgeous LED pendant lights:

Pendant lights at lightbuilding

These lights were recently crafted by our application engineers to show the world yet another example of how LEDs can be used to make beautiful lights. I haven’t had a chance to chat with any of my colleagues who are working the booth in Germany, but I’m guessing they’re fielding a lot of questions about these beautiful lights.

 How can I be so sure? Well, a few weeks ago two of these lights were installed in our office, and on several occasions, folks from other departments have stopped by to ask about the pretty new lights. And, admittedly, every time I pass this corner of our office, I wish I could snag one to replace the single incandescent pendant light that wastes energy in my kitchen.

So how can you get your hands on one? Well, you can’t – yet. You see, our application engineers created these pendant prototypes to show lighting manufacturers how easy building an LED light can be using one of our newest LED components, the Cree XLamp ® MPL EasyWhite ™ LED. This new multichip LED (we announced it back in February) can shorten the design and manufacturing cycle for new lighting products because the LEDs are specified like traditional light sources. Designers just have to indicate the desired color temperature and brightness, which can save time on learning the ins and outs of what we in the LED industry call binning.

If you look closely, the spiral metal at the top of the glass shade appears to be a decorative feature, but really it’s a heat sink designed to dissipate heat. And while they aren’t a commercial product, these particular pendants were designed to last 50,000 hours. And when used with a frosted white shade, an XLamp MP-L-based pendant can be an ENERGY STAR®-conformant SSL luminaire.

Our engineers made their design notes available for anyone to download. It’s just another way we’re leading the LED lighting revolution.

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Posted in Residential Lighting, Trade Shows | 2 Comments »

Cree goes to SXSW Interactive: Find us for chance to win LED lights!

Wednesday, March 10th, 2010

I have two geek sides. One is my LED side, where I get excited geeking out over color temperatures, efficacy and CRI. The other is my social media side, where I geek out over Twitter, blogging and APIs.

Later this week, I’ll get to focus on my social media geek side as I join some 11,000 fellow passionate Internet users in Austin, Texas, at South by Southwest Interactive, the largest web, interactive and social media conference of the year.

lrp38

Here's a look at the LED lights you could win! We're giving away 3 LRP-38s!

I have a lot of goals for the conference, one of them being to spread the good word about the LED Lighting Revolution to anyone who will listen (feel sorry for the person stuck next to me on the plane).

If you plan to attend SXSWi, find me! I’ll be tweeting my location periodically (you are following @Cree on Twitter, aren’t you?). And I’ll be at the Cree Sustainable Media Happy Hour, presented by our friends over at TriplePundit and EcoPopTV on Monday, March 15.

If you’ll be in Austin on Monday and you want to socialize with other non-profits, social entrepreneurs, issues bloggers, clean techies, environmental filmmakers and North Carolina peeps, let us know you’re coming.

And at any point during SXSWi, if you find me, give me your business card. Once SXSWi is over, we’ll draw one winner to receive three Cree LRP-38® LED lights. These are the same LED lights that are being installed in the produce sections of 650 Wal-Marts and they provide gorgeous, warm energy-efficient light!

It shouldn’t be too hard to find me throughout the week. I plan on tweeting my location and using the location-based app Gowalla. Here’s a picture of me from last night’s News & Observer Tweetup in Downtown Raleigh. Find me for your chance to win!

GinnyNandoTweetup
Looking forward to Lighting the LED Revolution in Austin!

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Posted in FYI, For Fun, Revolution, Trade Shows | No Comments »

Dispatches from the front lines of an LED Lighting Rally

Thursday, February 4th, 2010

I marched (OK, technically, I walked) in a circle on a street corner in downtown Raleigh yesterday with a group of passionate LED supporters and chanted:

“Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey, LEDs are here to stay!

One, Two, Three, Four, Kick Fluorescents out the door!”

That’s not all. We had signs. A lot of signs. Hand-painted signs. Signs that declared our love for energy-efficient LED lights.

Rally

You’re probably wondering if we lost our minds. But I can assure you, we had a plan. You see, at approximately 5:45 p.m., just as our toes started to go numb in the chilly temperatures, a group of 100+ people rounded the corner.

But this wasn’t just a random mob, they were folks who knew a lot about LEDs. The group was on an LED Lighting Walking Tour of downtown Raleigh as part of the Department of Energy Solid State Lighting Research and Design Conference (or DOE SSL R&D for short).

Seeing their shocked faces was all it took for us to spring to action. We hoisted our signs in the air and started our chant.

Within seconds, digital cameras, cell phone and video cameras were fixed on us as we continued to walk in our circle. I tried not to make eye contact with anyone because it’s hard to stay composed when you’re hollering a chant. But I couldn’t miss the smiles, the curious looks, the camera flashes—and even a smattering of applause.

So what the heck were we doing? We were showing industry professionals that we’re serious about the LED Lighting Revolution. We truly believe LED lighting is better than incandescent, fluorescent and other lighting technologies. We truly believe the energy savings that can be achieved by switching to LED lights is worthwhile.

And we wanted those conference goers — the very people who have the potential to help change the way we light the world – to know that we’re out there paving the way for LED lighting by raising awareness.

LEDs Rock! If you were at the conference and saw the rally, please let me know in the comments section. I would love to see your photos and video.

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Posted in For Fun, LED Cities, Revolution, Trade Shows | 10 Comments »

Cree brings the LED Lighting Revolution home at the International Builders’ Show

Tuesday, January 19th, 2010

Take one look at our booth at the International Builders’ Show and you’ll see that we’re serious about bringing LED Lighting into your home.

IMG_0348

In the LED lighting biz, we often hear from people who say they bought an LED bulb at the grocery store and it stunk. As a result, they write off LED lighting as an expensive technology that doesn’t live up to its price tag, or billing.

At Cree, our hearts seriously break a little each time we hear that. Our booth at the International Builders’ Show explains why. You see, we’re making these gorgeous recessed LED lights that provide beautiful, warm color and are designed to last a crazy long time (50,000 hours). These LED lights are the real deal. They’re not too dim. They’re not bluish. They don’t flicker.

IMG_0347

Yet, like anything, it often only takes one bad apple to give everyone else a bad name. My co-worker Deb actually blogged today about the LED bulbs you can buy in the store that are supposed to be a 60-Watt equivalent.  Deb wrote: “Unfortunately, except for a few, they are mostly too dim or bluish, or worse, flicker and then go out for good.”

So we’re hoping that our booth at the International Builders’ Show will help SHOW people that LED lighting is ready for the home. It just depends on the type of LED lighting you use and how you use it.

IMG_0355

All the lights you see in these photos from our booth are Cree LED lights, and we think they’re beautiful. True, they’re not light bulbs that you would screw into your desk lamp, but they provide very efficient overhead lighting for your home. And that, my friends, makes our hearts sing.

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Posted in Residential Lighting, Trade Shows | 2 Comments »

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