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Meeting and greeting

By Matthew Hidderley and Eve Gaut, Aston Science Park

We had our alarm clocks set for 6am this morning and were anticipating an exciting day ahead. It kicked off with a breakfast sponsored by Dow Corning, which was well received even though there were plenty of delegates looking rather bleary eyed. The breakfast was closely followed by a welcome from the Advisory Committee before LEDs 2008 was officially declared open.

After networking, we strolled around the exhibition hall to meet up with some friends in the industry, the first being Mick Wilcox from Nuventix. Last time we saw Mick and the team was in June at euroLED in the UK. It was great to be welcomed on the other side of the pond by a friendly face. Nuventix is already confirmed as exhibiting at euroLED 2009 so it was a great opportunity to catch up with them and to be introduced to some new faces in the Nuventix team.

Following our chat with Mick, we visited the Carclo stand to speak with Ian Bryant, another fellow UK traveller. Ian fascinated us with plenty of ‘technical talk’ about the new products Carclo is currently launching - so keep your eyes peeled for them.

The round-table luncheon was sponsored by Rohm and really was the highlight of the day. We sat outside in the Californian sunshine dining with an interesting group of people, including LEDs 2008 speaker Hank Zabawski, Director of LED Technology for Heatron Inc, and Nuventix newcomer Gary Gay, Vice President of Worldwide Sales (who in fact has only been with the company for one week.)

The conference has covered a good mix of topics including sessions on the market and industry, LED technology advancements and integration engineering: materials, devices and optics. Tomorrow’s conference line up, the last day for LEDs 2008, also promises to be as relevant for the industry.

To end the day, we made our way to the Grand Evening Reception, sponsored by Osram, where we met with speakers, panelists and fellow attendees over cocktails and sushi: another great opportunity for networking. We bumped into Tim Bushnell from Oxley Developments and Patrick Le Houillier from Optical Research Associates.

In tomorrow’s post, we’ll try to give as much insider information as possible….in addition to details of our evening out on the town. Goodnight from San Diego!

Posted by Jacqueline Hewett on October 1, 2008 11:26 AM | Permalink