Home lighting latest technology.

Home lighting the latest technology to go wireless:

Melbourne-based technology startup LIFX has the not-so-humble goal of reinventing the light bulb.

Founded by 40-year-old Australian inventor Phil Bosua, the company sells a $129 multi-colour LED light bulb that’s almost as easy to install as a regular bulb. It screws into existing light sockets, but rather than being turned on and off at a light switch, it’s wirelessly controlled from an iPhone or Android phone.

Far from the traditional white or yellow hues of a regular light bulb, the LIFX has access to a palette of more than 16 million colours. From the free app, users can manage each LIFX light bulb in the house, set the colour and brightness of bulbs individually or as a group, and set up lighting effects such as music visualisation (where the light pulses in time to music) and candle flicker.

ess than a week after it made its debut on the crowdfunding site Kickstarter in September 2012, it had raised $1.3 million – well above its original $100,000 target – making it one of the most successful Kickstarter projects to date.

Since then, the company has shipped more than 100,000 bulbs to about 70 countries, and its goods can be purchased online as well as through retail partners such as Best Buy in the US and Harvey Norman in Australia.

As with many great ideas, Bosua first came up with it while he was drinking beer with a friend.

‘‘A friend of mine told me he was renovating his house and needed to put a light switch in without having to cut up bricks and run a wire down the wall,’’ Bosua says.

‘‘He said, ‘You’re the inventive type – do you know any way you can turn your lights on and off wirelessly?’’’

Bosua’s first thought was that it could be done with a smartphone, but when he did some research he discovered there was nothing on the market. This, he says, was literally his light-bulb moment.

Technology analyst firm Telsyte forecasts that the smart lighting market in Australia will exceed $100 million by 2017. Over the next three to four years, it’s expected to reach mainstream status, driven by falling prices and centralised management platforms that leverage iOS and Android.

‘‘In the past, if you wanted to do home automation, it would be very expensive. You’d have to put in cabling, you’d have to rip out walls,’’ says Telsyte managing director Foad Fadaghi. ‘‘Today, the cost effectiveness of wireless and cheap Wi-Fi components has made it a lot easier to adopt home automation systems. What we’re seeing now is the democratisation of smart home technology.’’

LIFX has stiff competition from larger players in the smart home technology category. Multi-national technology company Philips released the Hue smart LED bulb one month after the LIFX hit Kickstarter, and beat the Melbourne start-up to the market by more than a year. At $249.95 for the starter pack (which includes three light bulbs and a bridge that needs to be plugged into a Wi-Fi router) and individual light bulbs for $69.95 each, the Hue is also cheaper than the LIFX.

Belkin, one of the leading providers of do-it-yourself smart home automation gadgets, will soon be releasing an even cheaper smart LED light bulb that hooks into the company’s WeMo ecosystem of smart power switches, motion sensors and webcams. The starter pack will cost $169.95 and include two smart light bulbs and a bridge to plug into the Wi-Fi router. Additional light bulbs will be available for $49.95 each.

But Bosua isn’t sweating his competitors. At the recent international 2014 Edison Awards, LIFX beat the Philips Hue to win the gold medal for smart systems in the consumer goods category.

Last week LIFX also secured $12 million in Series A funding, bringing the company’s total funding to $16.6 million.

‘‘We’re thinking within the next two to three months all of the features we originally promised on the Kickstarter project, such as timer scheduling and auto-increasing and dimming lights, will be completely built, and then we’ll be able to start rolling out some of the other really cool things that we’re working on,’’ said Bosua. ‘‘We’re also going to release different form factors, and we’re really far down the prototype stage of a LIFX light switch.’’