Nice to see another "new" technology to compete with CFLs and LEDs.
Just looking quickly at it, it seems it uses about the same power as a CFL but has a better lifespan and it has instant on light. It doesn't yet match an LED in lifespan (for now, though the article says it can get 100,000 hours which is better) or power, but it's brand new and we'll see what happens. It does disperse heat better allowing it to better match the footprint of an incandescent bulb (not that it should matter much in the future) and it has a "more natural" light (meaning closer to an incandescent than an LED is).
Despite their inefficiency, old-school incandescent lightbulbs sure did put out a pleasant, natural-looking light. The folks at Finally Light Bulb missed that light, so they brought it back with an efficient, affordable bulb using technology Nikola Tesla once patented. The team visited Gizmodo's NYC office to show us the light.
The Finally Light Bulb is a drastically miniaturized induction light, a type used to light skyscrapers, tunnels, and warehouses. Induction lights use a magnetic field instead of the failure-prone metal filament of an incandescent, giving a lifespan that can reach 100,000 hours and slashing the incandescent's 90-percent energy waste. Unfortunately, industrial induction lights require a brick-sized box of electronic controls, which prevented the tech from reaching household fixtures for years.
Finally Light's R&D team spent three years trying to cram that box of doodads into the silhouette of the standard size A19 incandescent bulb. Founder and CEO John Goscha told us mobile tech advancement finally made it possible. "Thanks to the cell phone industry, [the components] have come down in size and have come down in cost. It's really the advancement of general electronics that made this technology possible today when it's never been possible before."
