Blurb announced a photobook contest this week.  This is a good way to drum up business if some authors want to PRINT those photo books, as well as get more user generated content to fill their online store, so reader can PRINT those photobooks.  

Here’s the e-mail announcement I was sent:

Photography.Book.Now celebrates the most creative, most innovative, and finest photography books – and the people behind them. Enter this international juried photography book competition and compete for worldwide recognition and great prizes. Submit your book here by July 14. The Photography.Book.Now international book competition is juried by a panel of world-renowned editors, publishers, curators, and photographers, led by head judge Darius Himes. This is an opportunity to win the $25,000 Grand Prize or one of many other prizes to be awarded. Photography books can be entered in two categories, General and Themed. The winners will be showcased at an awards ceremony in San Francisco, and winning books will travel via a salon to New York, London, and Cologne. The books will also have visibility online and at the half-day symposium featuring panels and presentations exploring photography books. Get more information on the jurors, entry rules, event dates, locations, and prize levels at photographybooknow.com.

This looks really neat!  I can’t wait to see what folks do with this new form of lighting. 

GE official website: http://www.ge.com/research/grc_2_9_1.html
LED Magazine:  http://www.ledsmagazine.com/news/4/3/29

Breakthroughs in Practical-Sized, High Quality OLED Light Panel Source

General Electric Global Research has achieved a major breakthrough, developing a fully functional 2 ft. x 2 ft. light panel that produces more than 1200 lumens of quality white light with an efficacy of 15 lumens per watt. This device offers 50% better energy performance than their previous device, breaking two world records.

The goal of this three-year project was to develop an OLED light panel that delivers white light with brightness and quality comparable to a fluorescent source, and with an efficacy better than an incandescent source. Key challenges involved achieving the correct white color (critical to market acceptance), increasing OLED device efficiency and lifetime at high brightness, size, and fault tolerance. In the first year, GE developed a small area efficient white light device that produced 2 lumens of light with an efficacy of 4 lumens per watt, setting two world records. This achievement involved utilizing blue polymers developed by Cambridge Display Technologies to fabricate and evaluate device performance. One polymer was selected for white device development; in parallel, new polymers and device designs were investigated for increased efficiency.

Anil Duggal, Manager of GE’s Light Energy Conversion Program, and Mark Ginsberg, Senior Executive Board Member, DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, are illuminated by the 2 ft. x 2 ft. OLED device at a demonstration held at DOE.

In the second year, GE focused on developing a new scalable, fault tolerant architecture compatible with low-cost fabrication methods. The result was a device measuring 6 in. x 6 in. that produced 70 lumens of light with an efficacy of 7 lumens per watt — another world record. In the third and final year, the team focused on increasing lumen output and efficiency, developing a 2 ft. x 2 ft. illumination-quality OLED array using a tiling approach to link 16 panels together.

These breakthroughs demonstrate that the light quality, output, and efficiency of OLED technology can meet the needs of general illumination. The next goal is to demonstrate that organic electronic devices can be made cost-effectively on flexible material in a continuous roll-to-roll process.

For more information, see the DOE SSL Project Portfolio or visit the GE Global Research web site.

And it’s the Hello Kitty Assault Rifle again!  Here the link to this blog posting.