The father of the LED is now looking to revolutionize the industry he helped create. Soraa, a Silicon Valley startup co-founded by Shuji Nakamura — who created the blue laser and the white LED — officially unveiled the technology behind its LED innovation on Tuesday. The company, which is backed by venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, has developed a new way to manufacturer an LED light that produces a light that is brighter, has a better quality, is more energy efficient, and saves more money than its competitors on the market.

The first light Soraa is launching is a lamp to replace a halogen bulb (called an MR16), which are commonly used in places like recessed ceiling lights and spot lights on products in stores and venues. These aren’t lamps for the everyday home owner, and Soraa is targeting commercial and industrial building owners first, before it moves to the residential market.

During an interview with Soraa CEO Eric Kim at Soraa’s factory, Kim explained to me that “light is not a commodity,” as he showed me the light from the Soraa lamp in comparison to a variety of LED competitors including giants like Philips that also make halogen replacement LEDs. Indeed in the various tests the bright white light displayed a far better quality, consistency, color and angle than the comparison light.

That type of quality would be pretty cool on its own. But Soraa’s LED light is also highly energy efficient. It uses about 75 percent less energy than incandescent and halogen bulbs, and lasts 25 times longer than halogen bulbs. For a company that’s buying lighting for a commercial building, a Soraa light can deliver a year pay back period in energy savings, said Kim.

How does it work?

Soraa’s secret sauce lies in the startup’s early bet on using the semiconductor gallium nitride for the substrate part of the light. LEDs are usually made by putting gallium nitride onto sapphire of silicon carbide substrates. But Soraa’s light places gallium nitride onto a gallium nitride substrate, enabling the core of the light itself to create better uniformity. Soraa says the combo is more cost effective and can produce more light per lamp than the traditional methods.

While the tech sounds like a perfect thing to license to the big players, Soraa is making the big bet that it can be a vertically-integrated LED manufacturer, making the substrate, chip, packaging and entire light solution. That’s always a slight risk, because that can be capital intensive, but on the other hand, the payoff and potential are a lot higher when you own the whole value chain.

Soraa is currently moving into volume commercial production at its factory in Fremont, Calif. Kim tells me at the company’s current fab, it will be able to turn into a 0 million revenue per year company.

Soraa, which was founded in 2008, is backed by Khosla Ventures, NEA and NGEN Partners and has raised over 0 million in funding.

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Dave McClure has very quickly become a major force in Silicon Valley, by making investments in more than 250 companies since launching his 500 Startups fund. In Mountain View, Calif. Wednesday, 32 companies from the third class of the 500 Startups Accelerator program showed off what they’ve been working on to investors and press. And I sat through all the demos so you didn’t have to.

Based on what I saw, here are my favorite startups from the demos, in no particular order:

Fitocracy

Out of all the personal fitness apps out there, Fitocracy could be the one that makes the most impact in actually getting its users in shape. The application, which so far gas only been available in a private beta, already has 230,000 registered users. And those users are pretty engaged, with about 79 percent checking in every day and spending an average of 9 minutes per session with Fitocracy. It’s done that by adding gamification to the fitness process — getting users to level up, complete quests and unlock achievements as part of what founder Brian Wang calls a real-life RPG. But the amazing part about those stats are that they’re from Fitocracy’s web-based app; an iPhone app is in the works but has yet to be released. One it is, I expect a lot more users to catch on and start using Fitocracy to track and improve their fitness.

Contactually

“CRMs are an billion industry,” Contactually’s founder told the crowd at 500 Startups’ demo day. “But all CRMs suck.” You have to fill in information in forms and once they’re there, the information is difficult to extract and doesn’t actually help users manage their relationships. Contactually has a better way: it uses email — which is the common touch point for more or less all contact between human beings nowadays — and automatically helps determine which contacts are most important to manage. More importantly, it actually prompts users to do something with that info, urging them to follow up to important emails and contacts. But just because it gives a better way to manage contacts doesn’t mean it’s going to completely replace your CRM — it’ll also integrate with that CRM.

PayByGroup

Have you ever tried to book a trip with your friends, only to have a few of them lame out at the last minute, sticking you with the tab? Then PayByGroup is for you. The idea is to add a button to sites like Airbnb, Stubhub and the like that allows users to click a button to reserve an expensive hotel suite, a group of concert tickets, or a beach house and then invite other friends in a group to pay for their own share of that trip, vacation or event.

Switchcam

I’ve actually written about Switchcam before, back in a previous life when it was called Veokami. The startup is still focused on aggregating multiple user-submitted videos from the same event on public sites like YouTube and Vimeo and reconstruct that event with a timeline that allows users to switch from multiple angles. With a design refresh and a new brand, Switchcam has made a huge step forward. The startup hopes to make money by providing a white-label platform for performers and agents to provide user-created events on their own sites. Until now, Switchcam events have mostly been centered around music and concerts, but it sees an opportunity for sports and news, and even personal events like weddings and graduations.

Hapyrus

Hapyrus is looking to cash in on the big data craze by making it easier for enterprises to process and analyze that data more efficiently. According to co-founder Kentaro Suzuki, much of the inefficiency comes between engineers and data analysts who are tasked with making sense of big data. Because analysts are beholden to engineers to structure that data, engineers end up doing a disproportionate amount of the work. Hapyrus seeks to simplify things by enabling engineers to configure the software, freeing up analysts to run analysis whenever they want and quickly change parameters and needed.

And some honorable mentions:

Love With Food – I have a soft spot for subscription services like Birchbox, and Love with Food is a subscription service that delivers curated food samples to users and then allows them to purchase full-sized samples from its site. There’s a side benefit in that for each box delivered, the startup also donates a meal to No Kid Hungry.

MoPix – Honestly I might just like it because Mopix told attendees to use the hashtag #DVDisDead. But the startup is helping to enable independent studios and video publishers to reach audiences through digital distribution on new devices like the iPad. And that’s a really cool thing.

Brandboards – Brandboards is trying to make it easier for sports teams and stadium owners to simplify advertising across all the screens that are available throughout sports arenas. Teams like the Dallas Cowboys have thousands of displays throughout their stadiums and a captive audience, but inefficiencies in the sales process means about 30 percent of that inventory goes unsold. This startup is looking to change that.

Tiny Review – Like the bastard love child of Yelp and Instagram and Twitter, Tiny Review encourages users to mix photos along with three lines of text. And like Twitter, the inherent limitations cause users to be more creative with those reviews. As a consumer-facing startup, it’s a little bit of an outlier compared to the rest of the companies introduced, but that could be what makes it interesting.

72lux – 72lux aims to improve online advertising on sites by enabling e-commerce in publisher webpages. Instead of offering advertising alongside photo spreads that sends readers to outside sites, its technology allows publishers to make content shoppable right there. The startup is already pretty successful, with million in its sales pipeline, and it’s working with top brands and fashion mags.

There were plenty of other cool startups introduced today, and these are merely a sampling of those I think are interesting.

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YouTube announced new milestones in the amount of video uploaded and viewed by its users Monday. With 4 billion video views daily and more than an hour of video uploaded every second, YouTube not only continues to grow, but its growth is actually accelerating. Here’s how YouTube did it – and what Silicon Valley can learn from it:

Be open

The beauty of YouTube, and its greatest strength, is that anyone and everyone can publish to the platform. There’s no hierarchy of decision makers reviewing scripts and greenlighting projects. There’s no need for an agent. And most importantly, there’s no cost involved with participating on the site. All anyone has to do to become a YouTube publisher is to upload a video to the site.

That’s why YouTube gets an hour’s worth of video uploaded to the site every second. And it’s why people keep coming back, despite the fact that YouTube doesn’t have much of the Hollywood content that can be found on Netflix or Hulu. YouTube is a democratic platform for distributing and consuming content. Its stars are discovered not by a studio exec, but elevated and popularized by its own users.

Be global

Another strength of YouTube is that it is available to users around the world, who are able to enjoy all the same content regardless of their location. Anyone with an Internet connection pretty much anywhere can watch the same videos that you and I enjoy. That’s important, especially as most YouTube views come from non-English speaking countries.

It’s also something that Hollywood has been bad at managing as the world has gone digital. Much of piracy occurs simply because digital copies of films or TV shows are available online long before they make it to international markets. By geofencing or geoblocking certain content, today’s media companies are missing out on an opportunity to reach audiences directly that are turning to piracy instead. By being global, YouTube is addressing the largest possible audience at all times.

Be multiplatform

This is different from being global, and speaks more to targeting the wide proliferation of connected devices that have come into consumer’s hands than anything else. YouTube is seeking to make its content available on as many mobile and connected device platforms as possible, which will help its publishers reach audiences regardless of the platform they’re using.

That’s been another failing of today’s entertainment industry. On the studio side, there’s been no easy way to purchase movies that will work across devices until recently. While the UltraViolet initiative seeks to solve that problem, it still has a ways to go. And for the broadcast and cable TV networks, making shows available on new platforms means distributors generally having to secure new rights. That’s led to a hodgepodge of some networks and some shows being available on some devices, while others are not. Once again, the end result is that those publishers are limiting the addressable audience, at the same time that platforms like YouTube are enabling content to be viewed nearly everywhere.

Let’s not kill Hollywood, but offer something better

Some have suggested Silicon Valley should kill Hollywood. I think it’s naive to believe that technology companies can or should destroy the current entertainment industry. But at a time when the technology and media industries are grappling over the issue of piracy, the success of YouTube can be used as an example of how other technology companies could make something better.

After all, the advent of self-publishing tools like WordPress or Blogger hasn’t killed the New York Times or Wall Street Journal, but has enabled a great number of independent blogs and technology news sites to also be influential in shaping the news. In the same way, YouTube is enabling video publishers to reach audiences at massive scale and creating a situation where in aggregate, those independents can rival the traditional Hollywood regime.

Being open, being global, and being multiplatform really just translates to being wherever the audience is. It’s about enabling viewers access to more content, not less — which is the real impetus behind YouTube’s accelerating growth. That could be a lesson to other tech companies seeking to offer an alternative to today’s entertainment offerings, or it could be used as a blueprint for some more innovative companies in the existing media regime. Take away the limits to accessing your content, and more likely than not you’ll find more people actually consuming it and more opportunity to monetize it.

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Home Depot’s history of acquisitions has run toward building products companies and home services, not Silicon Valley start-ups. But the home improvement retailer is showing that it is trying to be more innovative and forward-thinking with the purchase of online home services marketplace Redbeacon.

It’s unclear how Home Depot wants to use Redbeacon, which allows users to get bids on home projects by contractors using Redbeacon’s marketplace. The start-up, which first launched in 2008 and won a number of start-up competitions, said today that it would remain open for business for its users. It was generally well regarded for its ability to bring together consumers who needed services from contractors. Redbeacon uses algorithms that even look at Facebook connections to find the right contractors for a job.

Home Depot didn’t disclose the purchase price but said that the Redbeacon leadership team would remain in place in San Mateo, CA. The company was founded by former Google workers Ethan Anderson, Aaron Lee and Yaron Binur. It has raised .4 million from Mayfield Fund and Venrock.

Redbeacon co-founders Aaron Lee, Ethan Anderson and Yaron Binur

The deal though shows that big retailers are increasingly looking toward Silicon Valley for ideas and inspiration about how to grow their business. By buying Redbeacon, Home Depot can get some lessons on how to tap users through online and mobile channels. And it helps them become more of a resource for people looking to remodel and improve their homes. Home Depot is not simply about being a physical store to sell goods and services but being a brand that people turn to for all their needs, including labor.

Home Depot has also been working closely on PayPal’s first trial of its in-store payment system. PayPal just said today that it expects to roll that out to all of Home Depot’s more than 2,200 stores by March. That’s another example of Home Depot getting with the times. Increasingly, retailers have to think about how to handle the changing needs of consumers, who are buying online and through mobile devices. Partnering with PayPal gives Home Depot a chance to be first with a new form of payment, but it also means it will likely get first crack at many of the other services PayPal plans to roll out, such location-based offers, in-aisle purchases, scanning products for inventory checks and other in-store services.

Big retailers are being forced to look this way. Walmart bought Kosmix and established Walmart Labs to help it evolve as mobile and social change the way people shop. Walmart Labs has turned around and started acquiring start-ups to help it get up to speed. The Gap has done a bunch of deals with mobile and social start-ups to try and get ahead of new buying patterns. Rival Lowe’s equipped its workers with iPhones last year, in response to Home Depot’s deployment of Motorola devices to help answer consumer questions.

As Venky Harinarayan, SVP Wal-Mart Global eCommerce and Head of WalmartLabs told me the RoadMap conference last year that retailers are still trying to understand the implications of social and mobile on commerce. But it’s clear companies need to move forward and embrace the changes in commerce. And that means increasingly partnering with technology companies and sometimes buying them up.

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Yesterday, a friend of mine, someone who is quite savvy about technology and the startup landscape stopped by for a chat. Our conversation veered towards the state of the web, media and of course Silicon Valley. The gist of his argument was that in Silicon Valley we have big waves that are followed by many tiny waves and they all come in a cluster. You just need to be riding one of those waves – depending on the boldness of your idea, willingness to risk it all and adapting to a new way of thinking. And if you don’t, then you miss your chance to profit from it.

His words were ringing in my ears when I turned on the computer this morning and read about Kodak’s bankruptcy. Shocking (and sad) as it might be, it is not all that surprising. People have been watching the company’s slow free fall for years. The Economist has a great rundown of what went wrongat the company — I recommend you read that and skip all the news-y nonsense – and my key takeaway from that wonderful piece: you cannot fight the future.

Companies that once were large and massive and failed to adjust to the new reality have been left behind.  Xerox that owned the photocopying industry is now a small player in what was essentially its core competency —  document management. AT&T used to be a giant wireline phone company that controlled how we communicated with each other. Now it is a cellphone provider and only a component of the way we communicate. Why? Because communication itself has since moved on to a new kind of network and isn’t limited by per-minute billing.

No coming back

Kodak Logo: through the ages

As my friend Pip Coburn says, turnarounds never turn. Kodak has been in restructuring mode for 15 years – cutting headcount, closing factories, tightening belts and squeezing rocks for blood. In other words — the company isn’t fat in a traditional sense.  But why none of its strategies worked was  because the company took too long and sat on its duff watching digital photography come and eat it for a mid-day snack even though Kodak R&D helped with the digital photo revolution when it launched the first digital camera in 1975.

And yet they failed to do what one of their major competitors – FujiFilm did — embrace digital with both arms and is now thriving. And when Kodak finally did embrace digital in 1993 it did with hesitance that comes when companies are afraid to cannibalize their existing businesses for the sake of the future. 

Today Kodak is experimenting with printers, commercial printing and other services as new ways to grow, but one wonders if that will be the path forward. I am pretty sure HP, Cannon and Lexmark have something to say about Kodak’s printing ambitions. And even if it succeeds and survives, it won’t be the Kodak of George Eastman. We might as well call it, a Corporation-Once-Known-As-Kodak!

Kodak, like many other businesses that have failed before it, made one fatal mistake – it forgot the true purpose of its business and instead focused on features, SKUs and products. (I have written about this before.) Kodak continued to define itself by “film” when all it should have done is define itself with “photos” or moments.

Who cared if the photos were on a slide, were printed and placed in albums, in digital cameras or on online sharing services. “The Kodak Moment” is what made that company powerful. Had it looked at the world from that lens it would be been an easy decision to adapt to new technologies and adopt them for benefit of their customers – us! In Mad Men, Don Draper tells the guys from Eastman Kodak when giving a pitch for their slide carousel:

This device isn’t a spaceship. It’s a time machine. It goes backwards, forwards. It takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called the Wheel. It’s called a Carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels. Around and around, and back home again… to a place where we know we are loved.

Nokia’s Kodak Moment?

Nokia CEO Stephen Elop

There are many lessons for today’s companies in Kodak’s failure to adapt and eventual bankruptcy. Is Nokia the next Kodak? I hope not – for I like those guys – but Nokia is a likely candidate. Just as Kodak’s internal team was arguing for a digital shift that the top guys ignored, Nokia too, ignored all protestations from its resident experts who argued for an Internet-centric, touch-based and app-driven mobile device. Anyone remember the Nokia 770?

That phone could have been Nokia’s future, instead it is forgotten.  Nokia defined itself by a certain kind of a product – the 12-key phone. People at Nokia talked about a multimedia mobile computer, but it couldn’t look beyond those 12 keys. It took Apple and Google to show Nokia how to re-imagine the phone. In doing so they have defined how hundreds of millions view and what they expect from a smartphone. As I have said before – it is too late for the Finnish company.

Sure, Nokia has a brand, global presence and a sizeable marketshare. So did Kodak. It took 132 years, the last 15 of those spent in constant belt tightening, for the photo film company to sink. Having missed the big wave, Nokia doesn’t have the luxury of time.

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