Jun 9, 2007

A plan to snuff out darkness

Stanford students want to light up Third World lives with LED technology

By Kristina Peterson / Daily News Staff Writer

The future clients of two Stanford business school students have no Blackberrys, mutual funds or pinstriped suits.

Most of them make just $1 or $2 a day.

Sam Goldman and Ned Tozun, founders of d.light design, hope to sell them low-cost, light-emitting diode lamps, known as LED lamps.

"Every penny we add to the cost wipes out thousands of customers," said Tozun, a Saratoga native and president of d.light design, which plans to sell LED lamps to people in homes not supplied with electricity. The World Bank estimates there are 1.6 billion such people in the world.

Officially launched just two weeks ago, d.light design is the brainchild of Goldman and Tozun, who both graduate next week from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business.

The fledgling five-employee company won two local business competitions last week, earning enough money to start market tests of its "Forever-Bright" lamps in India, begin producing several thousand of the lamps in China and move the company into a Sunnyvale office.

"We're manufacturing in one country, distributing in one country and designing in another," Tozun said. "I think we can pull it off, but it's complicated."

The "Forever-Bright," in its third iteration, grew out of ideas the two students got in a design class called "Extreme Affordability."

Goldman, the company's CEO, said rural villagers in Southeast Asia spend a disproportionate chunk of their small incomes on lighting and power.

In rural India, for example, many poor households spend as much as 10 to 15 percent of their income on energy, most of which goes to buy kerosene, according to the World Bank.

Goldman and Tozun said that while in Southeast Asia in December, they saw people pay a lot of money to have a local entrepreneur with a generator charge the car batteries they use for electricity.

"Most people who don't have electricity are within a few miles of villages that do," Tozun said.

But the generator operators charge a hefty fee and the batteries die quickly because they're not meant to be totally drained and then charged at rapid speeds, they said.

"There's nothing in the middle between kerosene lamps and a huge car battery hooked up to a fluorescent light," Goldman said.

That's why he and Tozun hope their light fills the void. Priced at between $10 and $12, the lamp runs on a high-capacity battery specifically designed to charge safely at quick speeds without degenerating, Tozun said.

At its brightest setting, designed for uses such as sewing, the lamp is the equivalent of five kerosene lanterns, he said. And it causes none of kerosene's harmful side effects, including pollution and respiratory difficulties, Tozun said.

Goldberg admits the company's focus on improving impoverished lives is "not the norm" at the business school, but says it may be part of a growing trend. Other students at the school are becoming involved in micro-finance and sustainable business, he said.

"It's shifting more toward social entrepreneurship," he said.


E-mail Kristina Peterson at kpeterson@dailynewsgroup.com.