Bright lights, Sin City: How a small Montreal LED company lit up the spectacular Las Vegas Sphere

financialpost.com:

Music is a deeply personal subject. There are those who swear The Beatles are the greatest band of all time, but others who would consider that claim utter malarkey. Some don’t care about music at all, so they don’t stay abreast of who is currently hot or not, perhaps because they are too busy to kick back and crank tunes.

Fred Jalbout is a member of this largely non-musical tribe. An indefatigably cheerful entrepreneur, he came to Montreal from Lebanon in 1981 to study engineering. He didn’t know a soul in Canada, and neither did his younger brother Bassam, who joined him a few years later to also study engineering prior to the siblings co-founding Saco Technologies Inc. in 1987.

The small, privately held company would emerge as a big-time player in the decidedly un-rock-and-roll world of industrial control panel design and manufacturing. The Jalbout brothers did the panels for the nuclear power plant in Pickering, Ont., and they counted Hydro-Québec and a host of other utility companies across North America among their clients.

This is U2 we are talking about — and if we can get U2, can you imagine the opportunity for us?

Saco’s panels were modular, easy to install and repair, but what gave the panels an edge over the competition was their programmable LED display screen. The screens could display any colour under the sun, and in a range of intensities, too. In the world of 1990s’ industrial control panels, this was revolutionary stuff.

Word got around, so much so that in 1997 the brothers were invited to Dublin to demo a prototype of an LED screen, measuring approximately two feet by two feet, for a famous Irish rock band that non-musical Fred had never heard of.

“I swear to God, and it is too bad for me to say this,