BU’s ByteLight Team Selected for Highland Capital Summer Entrepreneurship Program
The BU ByteLight team of Aaron Ganick, Daniel Ryan, Travis Rich, Schuyler Eldridge & Simon Zhang were selected from a large group of applicants to participate in the Summer@Highland 2011 program! ByteLight was one of the semifinalists in BU’s $50K New Venture Competition, showing great promise for their creation of intelligent, energy efficient lighting and networking solutions. Based out of Boston University’s Photonics Center, and with the support of the Smart Lighting Engineering Research Center, ByteLight has developed an optical communications system embedded within LED lighting. By simultaneously providing energy efficient smart lighting and high speed mobile data access, ByteLight seeks to revolutionize both the lighting and telecommunications industries.
Traditional radio frequency (RF) based cellular networks are not equipped to handle the bandwidth demands of today’s mobile consumers. To address this challenge, ByteLight’s LED based general purpose lighting solution doubles as a high speed data access point. In their vision of the world, every light is a potential source of rich media content for mobile devices. This will provide high performance mobile data access to indoor environments, an area where RF providers have struggled to penetrate and a primary medium where mobile consumers access the Internet. In addition to providing lighting and data access, LED based lighting systems offer considerable advantages in energy savings and controllability. By simple bulb replacement, LEDs can offer over 2x energy savings over traditional bulbs.
In its fourth year, the Summer@Highland program is designed for university-affiliated entrepreneurs with an early business startup interested in rapid acceleration. Some of the criteria for the program include a leadership team with vision, passion, and drive, an initiative built around a breakthrough idea that is scalable with a large addressable market opportunity and a product/service that has the potential to be highly-disruptive in its area. The BU team will receive a $15,000 stipend and be provided with a complimentary space in a Highland-affiliated office. They will work full time on their initiative over the summer beginning in June.
