Marius van Bergen, COBstr

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT Technology tends to improve as it matures. That's certainly the case with LED displays marketed as being transparent. The first generations looked okay from the front, but the back sides were big metal grid arrays that often looked like hell. That's improved a lot with newer generations, but the technology now has competition in the form of displays that are embedded in foil or film. I was intrigued by some online posts recently from a Dutch company called COBstr, which is the sales and marketing front end of a Chinese manufacturer focused on displays that use Chip On Board technology. That's the COB part of the name. COBstr markets super-skinny displays that use the transparent material as the surface, either adhering to window glass, or laminated the material inside the glass.  The product has a foil layer the peels off and allows the display to be stuck to glass and then if needed, pulled off, rolled up and reused. I had a good chat with Marius van Bergen, the company's founder about the roots of the product, his Chinese manufacturing partner and the distinctions and benefits of COB versus other LED technologies. TRANSCRIPT Marius, thank you for joining me. Can you tell me what COBstr is all about? Marius van Bergen: Hello, Dave. Thank you for having me. COBstr, COB stands for chip-on-board. Now, chip-on-board technology has been around for a long time in the lighting industry. But my business partner is in China and was the first one who has been doing this for LED displays. So she's the one who's filed patents, and she made some mistakes, but she’s a woman that I have a lot of respect for because it's tough in China to make it as a company without help from the state and when you have to fight the big dogs. But she's very impressive regarding technology, which is not my core business. I'm just a person who studied Chinese and who knows China a little bit. But we hooked up about 10 years ago, and we've been going to the ISE and trying to get a little bit more renowned, and the thing with COBstr is not very easy to do. The big dogs are Absen, Leyard, and LEDman, they're all trying, and we do a lot of R&D for some of the big boys because they don't really master the technology. But it is the only way, that's the way I interpret it anyway, it's the only way forward for the LED industry. It doesn't matter if you look at it from a sustainability point of view or if you look at it from an economic point of view, there's just no way around it because you skip an entire step in the production process because you don't have packages, which makes it a cheaper technology theoretically, I have to add theoretically, because if you are a big company and you can buy LED packages in bulk, then, of course, you have some price advantages.  So what's basically happening is with a chip on board, you're able to apply a lot more LED light emitters to a surface without having to do the packaging, and you're skipping an entire step and also speeding up the process. Is that an accurate way of describing it? Marius van Bergen: Yes, it is, and the package manufacturers, which are also usually very big operations, don't like us very much because if we don't need a package, we don't need their product. The big advantage and that's basically what our R&D has all been about, is that you reduce the number of components and the vulnerabilities within a display. So is your company kind of the sales front end for a Chinese LED manufacturer, or is it a partnership where you're co-developing something, and it's coming out of the Netherlands?  Marius van Bergen: Manufacturing is in China, so it's a business partnership where they concentrate on the Chinese markets where I'm a little bit involved as well because that's a different story, maybe I shouldn't get into that, but I basically start with marketing and business development in Europe. That's my main responsibility.  I got i