The promise of making a laser from indirect bandgap semiconductors, then gathering investors, then losing the investors' money goes back to the Sixties at least.
Some scientists showed off SiC blue LEDs in the '60s that shown brilliantly like laser light, but were not the read deal. The real blue room-temperature laser had to wait for Nakamura and a direct bandgap material.
Doping, adding nitrogen, and adding defects to the lattice to produce more light is nothing new. Look at your stop lights. It's working there, but don't count on these indirect materials suddenly turning into lasers. No need to hold your breath.
A quick scientific note. Photons have a lot of energy, but not much momentum. You get hot on a sunny day, but not blown over by the sun. Electrons fall almost directly down in the bandgap diagram to produce light. This makes direct-gap semiconductors useful for lasers. The trick one can use is to provide momentum-shifting impurities to the lattice of an indirect bandgap crystal. The electron creates a photon by dropping directly down, but some other mechanism shifts the electron momentum to create an overall diagonal transition. It's not efficient, but it works.
