I will present some of the recent results from our group which utilize light-matter coupling on the nanoscale to manipulate the coupling of electronic excitations (namely, excitons in quantum dots and quantum wells) with trapped light.  I will show how this manipulation can yield interesting physical effects at low temperature, such as flying and mutually interacting mixed light-matter quasi-particles (polaritons), or useful devices at high temperature, such as sources that send streams of single photons in a particular direction which can be then collected with an efficiency close to unity.