http://www.deepdarc.com/2010/11/27/hack … as-lights/
50 Addressable bulbs for $60-120 makes the blinkm type products seem very expensive. [edit: I do not mean to insult the blinkm stuff - its very cool and seems much more flexible, but for certain projects it may be more complexity and cost than needed]
How they work (see link for more detail)
Bulbs each have a microcontroller and communicate on a sequential bus
Bulbs are assigned one of 50 addresses on start up
Any bulb can have any address, multiple bulbs cab share any address
the simple method of assigning addresses allows more than 50 bulbs
After start-up addressing, bulbs are commanded by their address
Bulb colors are set individually in 12 bit RGB
Bulb brightness (a sort of multiplier) is set globally at 8bits of resolution
To summarize these are cheap, very cool, and pretty easy to work with as indicated by the article.
It would be extremely cool if Sparkfun could get the bulb components, or strands/lengths of the bulbs to sell with out the consumer parts on the ends.
I think it would reflect well on GE too, but who knows how they would feel about it.