Using light instead of electricity to carry information around the globe is considered as the next 'technological revolution' as it enables high bandwidths and low energy consumption, a requirement for our increasingly 'connected' society. Up till now, the use of light as information carrier was limited to long haul data transfer as it can outperform the electrical alternatives in fabrication cost and energy consumption. On short scales, e.g. connecting different cores of a microprocessor, socalled optical interconnects still lack in performance and fabrication cost. Silicon photonics tries to remedy this by using the silicon CMOS platform used in micro-electronics to fabricate so-called photonic integrated circuits. In analogy with integration in electronics, miniaturization enables high volume and low-cost production with increased functionality. However, silicon has its limits in terms of generation and manipulation of light. Therefore, novel nanomaterials such as ‘olloidal quantum dots’(QDs) are combined with the platform: nanometer sized pieces of semiconductor crystals showing size-tunable and novel optical effects, excellent for amplifciation and generation of light. A rapidly advancing field, the next major breakthrough for this class of materials would be the development of continous wave pumped lasers, a goal that can only be achieved by investigating and optimizing the ultrafast optical properties of the next-generation of QD materials.