Headworx

I was blogging about my trail running habit multiple times. Overall running into this habit has been life changing for me. Despite years passing by, I continue to feel good, and in some aspects even better. Clearly being physically fit helps maintaining overall emotional balance a lot. And being able to swiftly run up a hill without sweating and gasping too much can be rewarding. Also as my friends of course know, I have been on a fairly busy business travel schedule. Daily runs are good and difficult in this context. Good, as they clearly contribute to being able to successfully combat jet lag and sometimes many strenuous hours on an airplane seat. Although still I do appreciate the magic of seating in an armchair, listening to (noise-canceled) music and sipping wine cruising close to the speed of sound at 40000 ft. Many people have just forgotten how incredible this is. Daily runs while maintaining an active business schedule also mean running in the dark for big part of the year. Of...

Some businesses are inherently good for their customers. And some are bad. And here I don't mean them just making good or bad products. But rather their general attitude to either maximizing profits at all cost (including at customers' cost) or simply affording to be naturally good and protective for their customers. And it is quite shocking to see how often very good businesses (=successful companies) simply cannot afford themselves to be good. Dealing with them is always a game and every mouse click on their web sites is a potential trap. Digital subscription businesses are generally in this "bad for customers" category. Not looking too far the first that comes to mind is Amazon. Last year Ars Technica featured a story about their “labyrinthine” Prime cancellation process named internally Iliad, referring to Homer's epic about the long, arduous Trojan War. Prime has been super easy to enroll in and designed to be super difficult to get out of. I personally expe...

We have talked a lot about Bluetooth NLC since the launch of the standard in September 2023. There are many dimensions impacted by this latest wireless lighting control standard. And the importance of it has already been correctly recognized by the policy makers and global market players world wide. There have been good interviews - with Bluetooth SIG's Damon Barnes and myself published - which I believe do a very good job explaining what Bluetooth NLC is and how it impacts connected lighting. DesignLights Consortium (DLC) has recently released a request for proposals for consultants to help define a clear pathway to adopting connected lighting for energy efficiency programs in North America. They nail the problem, which was the short term thinking in the past: In many present lighting retrofit projects, the extremely low cost of incentivized uncontrolled LED lighting is a major deterrent to networked lighting control (NLC) adoption. If uncontrolled LED lighting had no incenti...

Being deep in commercial / industrial lighting, one of the key selling point is return on investment (ROI) and benefits of significant energy savings over multiple years. With LED lights, which additionally are equipped with Bluetooth Network Lighting Controls (NLC) , these benefits are super obvious. The ROI, depending on where you live (=what are your electricity prices), is between one and three years. Then everything that comes after are your savings. Not counting the better light quality. And while nobody expects even a modern light fixture to last forever, a ten-year lifetime is something naturally assumed. Warranty periods for industrial light fixtures are also somewhere between five and ten years. And it would not be a surprise if they lasted much longer. And they do. After all it is all solid-state, no burning tungsten wire in a glass bulb. Enter consumer lighting products (typically: LED light bulbs) and the situation is entirely different. Light bulbs struggle to live even t...