Hive Lighting, Inc. of Los Angeles, CA recently won first prize and a $25,000 cash investment in the Seventh Annual “Survivor” business pitch competition for Southern California entrepreneurs, held by Tech Coast Venture Network last week at Chapman University in Orange, CA.

Hive Lighting produces a line of lamps for the film, television, digital, and stage production industries that, according to its website, utilize single-point plasma sources that last “10,000+ hours, are flicker-free, [provide] universal orientation, and produce full, even spectrum 5600 CCT daylight balanced light with a CRI of 94.”  According to Hive Lighting’s CEO, Robert Rutherford, Hive’s products utilize 50%-90% less energy than conventional filament-based lamps.

Hive Lighting is a portfolio company of the LA CleanTech Incubator, and the company’s win at TCVN’s “Survivor” event comes soon after the company took top honors and $20,000 at the California Clean Tech Open in October.  The company also won “Best New Lighting Technology” awards from CineGear Expo and TVBEurope’s “Best of IBC Awards” earlier in 2012.

A search of the USPTO database finds one published patent application (U.S. Pat. Appl. Publ. No. 2012/0230030) assigned to Hive Lighting for hexagonal-shaped modular light housings that can be interconnected together to “form a tesselation array” (i.e., a two-dimensional array of lamps).  Looking at the figures of this U.S. patent application, the origin of the company’s name is clear.

A check of the patent application’s status shows that the company had requested that the USPTO not publish the patent application, but the non-publication request was not recognized by the USPTO because it was not signed properly by the patent attorney filing the application.  An electronic signature (or “S-signature”) was used, which requires a first forward slash, then an alphanumeric identifying sequence, followed by a second forward slash (e.g., /Bruce Itchkawitz/).  But apparently, since the filed S-signature did not include the trailing forward slash, it was not recognized by the USPTO.  (Just another reason that I use a handwritten signature wherever possible, not an S-signature.)