Further focus at CLEO 2013

It’s been a few weeks since we returned frocleo resized 600m the Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics 2013 and now that we’re settled back in to the daily routine, I thought I would give some highlights on the show. I was happy to be joined this time by our new Marketing and Communications Specialist, Angelica Perrone, who did a great job navigating the complex photonics market for the first time.

While the conference seems to be chugging along at a nice pace, the tradeshow has most definitely become a smaller venue. We were once again hosted by our strategic partner, Thorlabs (thanks, again guys!) and being in such a central location on the floor, we were able to get a good flavor for the pace of the show. Here are my thoughts:

Little, different, yellow, better

Okay, so it’s not yellow (although yellow lasers are cool), but the show is definitely getting smaller. I mentioned to a colleague that since the show is in San Jose for the second year in the row, it seemed like the barriers on either end of the tradeshow floor had moved in just a bit.

As far as different, the show is not like other photonics shows in that it is pretty focused in its applications. While there were some interesting talks on microscopy, this was a small portion of the material, with most others focussing on more laser-centric applications, as the title of the conference implies.

As far as better, I would say that for BMC, it was most definitely better for our new products:  The Reflective Optical Chopper(ROC) and the Linear Array DM.  We recieved more interest in these products over our legacy deformable mirror technologies. This is exciting for me as a product marketer and salesperson and even moreso as a member of a company that is always looking for new avenues for our technology. We see the ROC being useful for users who span from pure laser scientists to imaging engineers interested in chopping a beam at high speed with either a constant or variable duty cycle.  The linear array has already proven useful in pulse shaping applications as described in our whitepaper, which is available for download here.  Both products are available for purchase now.

Our Wavefront Sensorless Adaptive Optics Demonstrator for Beam Shaping (WSAOD-B)also generated some buzz. More and more applications which require wavefront correction are surfacing and need a solution without a wavefront sensor.

In all, it was a good show that has given me and my team work to do as we explore more exotic applications for our technology. I look forward to joining the show again next year and I hope to connect with all of you again in the near future!