Just ordered it up. Thanks! Any good ideas on where to invest to capitalize on the coming LED revolution (other than giants like Philips)?

I believe the only pure play public LED lighting company in US/Canada is CLRK. There are lots of private companies and a few big public ones. CREE is an interesting bet at the chip level. They haven't done so well in the stock market but their chips are all over the place. Many of the important players are in Asia.

The website and newsletter Compound Semiconductor has this list of US companies in solid-state lighting, compound semis, and some related jeans-and -shovels plays:

http://www.compoundsemi.com/news/stockchart.html

I agree with the suggestion of CLRK, but it will be a medium-term IP portfolio play, and could be out-maneuvered. Most of the action is and will be overseas, building on semi fabs. But ultimately this may be a tough spot for making money in public companies, because as soon as a big application hits (backlighting in cell phones and instrument displays)it can rapidly be commoditized. This is a situation where investment in "tool users" may yield better than one in "tool makers". For example, DAKT got a nice, if hyperventilated, run out of large-screen video displays based on LEDs, and there are other companies gaining competitive advantage in niches like runway lighting, signals, signage, and so on. But even these first cousins won't hold up too well long-term against commoditization.

Perhaps it's a little early for any but the most adroit investor to put money down while we wait for the apps that combine a radical re-think of form (flat and flexible) and economics and some wild card like nano-. Glowing paint, anyone?

When are white LED's going to start being manufactured for widespread consumer use in home lighting?

I think the best answer is that the timing is still very uncertain. My best guess is that we are at least 10 years away from 1st gen devices, and widespread market adoption could easily be 20+ years, given the multitude of details that need to be worked out like power sources, the tendency for light to fade rather than burn out, the need for new fixturing, and so on.

The fact that the end user’s cost-benefit experience over the device’s lifetime varies in ways that differ greatly from traditional lighting devices complicates the market’s value perception.
A bright LED’s significantly lower operating and maintenance costs than those for tungsten-filament and fluorescent bulbs offset the LEDs’ high initial cost. As attractive as that observation
might be on a spreadsheet, it makes for a hard sell in a consumer market in which a “price-first, everything-else-second” mindset dominates.

Complicating the high-volume rollout of high-output solid-state lighting devices is the fact that light-fixture manufacturers have not historically considered thermal management of the bulb in their designs beyond providing sufficient convection to ensure that a tungsten-filament bulb’s high operating temperature presents neither
a fire hazard to surrounding materials nor a burn hazard to people operating the fixture. Fixtures for bright LEDs,however, require some thermal planning if the resulting design is to optimize the LED’s light output and operating life.