commbasics

A little over a year ago I interviewed Brian Fuller, then editor in chief of EE Times on the state of the media.  It was the kickoff of my podcast program and one of the most downloaded podcasts of State of the Media - both parts. Brian threw us all a curve a few weeks later by resigning from EE Times and resurfacing a couple months later as the vice president of media strategies at Blanc and Otus in SF, a few blocks from the Times building he used to work in. I decided it would be a good idea to catch up with him and see if his views of media have changed... they have.

I've had my head down for the past few days with green power clients, VCs and media moguls and missed some pretty big news.  In case you missed it too, Brian Fuller broke the news that Junko Yoshida has stepped down from the Editor-in-Chief position at EE Times to go back to covering international news, with a special focus on China.  This is good news for her.  Yoshida is a GREAT reporter and now she has the freedom to do what she does best.  Not sure what it means for EE Times, however.  The still have Rich Nass and Patrick Mannion heading up Embedded.com and Techonline, and they are more than capable of sharing the top spot for the Times, but finding an eventual replacement  for the slot will be tough, even though there are a lot of good news people out on the street now. Why so tough?  Because running a major B:B publication news room is like being on the Titanic while Palestinian terror groups are deciding who gets to be first in the l...

Found this while looking for something else.  Seth Godin gives me hope.

New Tech Press Biz Dev home boy, Ozzie Wallace has started a Facebook Group called "Marketing like it is1999 " and we're opening it to everyone.  If you haven't tried Facebook, or signed up and can't figure out what the big deal is, this might give you a reason. This blog, along with several others, has been maintaining the conversation about the changing state of the media and how it affects business.  It's time to bring it all together and this is where we're proposing to do it. You have to be a Facebook member, but it took Ann Mutschler at Reed did it in less than a minute.  It's time to get it, folks.

David Meerman Scott  has discovered a very good reason for not embracing effective web marketing strategies.  I have to say, he has a real point.  I never thought I'd find a way to link camel sales with the semiconductor and EDA industries, but they apparently have a lot in common. Ron Ploof has a link to this same post,but has a bit more to say about it.  'Nuff said.

Was watching a video on Jeremiah Owyang's site, and it ended with a statement that we "need to rethink copyright, authorship, identity...ethics..."  That's pretty much what I've been doing for several years now and have only, in the past 12 months, started to put into practice. The assumptions are always there.  "That's not journalism." "That's not ethical." "You don't ask the tough questions."  So I've started at the end and begun asking the tough questions.  What is journalism?  What is Ethics?  What is a tough question? Not getting a lot of real answers.  What I'm starting to find out is, in the midst of this very real sea change in how information is disseminated, parsed, consumed and created, we have assumptions, not answers.  Journalists have relied on the advertising departments of publications to insulate them from the decision processes that make up their eth...

I've learned a lot this past week in the people I ran across at the Design Automation conference.  I mentioned a few of those encounters earlier this week.  Things like the impending collapse of the Japanese media due to the same pressures facing media in the US and Europe.  But it wasn't the journalists that surprised me but the conference attendees, industry watchers and the investment community. John Cooley himself made the comment that EDA companies, particularly the larger companies, are no longer interested in making good technology.  "They're interested in business... in making money."  Investment banker after banker told me the same thing: the financial model is broken and there's nothing worth investing in or even buying. Yet, all the analysts said EDA is a crucial technology industry.  "They just can't seem to tell their story," one explained on condition of anonymity. And all the story tellers are go...

I was not able to schedule my DAC time to attend the Birds of a Feather meeting of EDA bloggers, nor could I make the marketing panel on the use of new media.  I'm looking to JL Gray at CoolVerification to give me the lowdown on that, but he's already helped.  His post earlier this week on the event  kinda told me what to expect.  First Rich Goldman of Synopsys, a fine fellow actually, is one of the panelists.  Synopsys recently fired its blogging guru, Ron Ploof  as being unnecessary.  There is also Limor Fix from Intel, and the DAC chair, Monika Maeckle, VP of new Media at Business Wire and Rhonda McGee, director of research, at Reed Business.  Not a blogger in the bunch.  I can see Monika as having something to say because BW has a lot of interesting tools to measure new media ... though they are not cheap.  But I'm not sure what value the rest have.  I was thinking most of the panel belongs in the audience...

Did a marathon trade show sprint (isn't that a mixed metaphor?) at the Design Automation Conference in Anaheim on Monday.  Drove down Sunday night in time to see the big empty room for the EDAC reception, and spent a couple of hours talking with investment bankers, VCs and entrepreneurs about how lousy the business (Electronic Design Automation) was.  (Interesting to note that the CEOs of two of the leading companies, Synopsys and Mentor Graphics , were interviewed by EE Times about how great everything was.  Apparently everyone else is delusional, or the two CEOs didn't get the message.) The reason for going down to the site of "the happiest place on earth" was to do some video taping of start-ups and set up some article interviews for the New Tech Press network, talk to a couple of people and then jump back in the car and head home to get some work done.  Twelve hours on the road out of 36.  Yuck. But all that time on the road gave me a chance to catch up on my po...

Brian Fuller let the cat out of the bag today about EE Times abandoning the print news weekly format for the thought-piece magazine format. It could be that there will still be weekly publications for a while, but Fuller expects it to drop to a monthly, and much smaller.  That will reduce print costs dramatically and make the book more profitable and with a great editorial staff. But that means marketing people in electronics and design have no other choice but to compete on the web for news coverage... and from different sources than they are used to working with.  This is actually good news for those who are ready to think strategically in communications, which ain't many companies. So it's bad news for everyone who still thinks they can market like it's 1999. Companies that will succeed in press relations will be able to place their product and technology in the context of the larger world.  Companies working to make small changes to highly specialized a...

Chris Edward's has an incredible post at Hacking Cough  re: "the currency of news" where he talks about an AP-commissioned report on news consumption. He makes a great point that what people tell researchers about how they read news is often very different from what they really do, and the truth is that most people avoid reading whatever makes them uncomfortable. This is confirmed by a quote from Limor Fix of Intel in the DACZine and few months ago. "First of all, we want something else. We are now reading the news on the Internet. We are interacting with people on Facebook. I want it short, I want it on my Blackberry, I want it real-time, and I want to hear conflicting opinions from my social network. I don’t want to read an article that is two pages long that is last month’s news. The players that will survive will be the ones to give the new type of information ." This is not a person who spends a lot of time gathering and pondering information, especial...

I met with an former colleague, James Colgan ( video link here ) who has started a new company offering online, virtual trade shows.  The company is called Xuropa (zhure-OH-pah).  Yeah, I know, it’s been tried, but James is trying to approach the concept as an add-on to real-life trade shows, rather than a replacement for them.  The previous efforts failed primarily because publications and trade shows weren't struggling like they are today.  From what I’m hearing from potential exhibitors, Xuropa may be a concept whose time has come.   The site, www.xuropa.com , has been launched and has a few introductory opportunities you may want to check out  and the first five vendors who send an email to  exhibit@xuropa.com get a free booth.

Just got a note from Paul Miller about the acquisition of EDA Ltd., the nascent Embedded Systems Show in the UK and the only and print components of ESE Magazine.  The news release is below.   This gives TechInsights a foothold into the embedded industry in Europe that is currently dominated by the Embedded World Conference in Nuremberg, Germany, something UBM has wanted for some time.  While the acquisition is not huge in comparison to some of UBM's other acquisitions it brings an interesting level of competition between conferences in the Old World around technology that is, arguably, dominated by Europe: namely Embedded Design. And since TechIisights sees a lot of it's future in that industry, this makes a lot of sense.  It also comes without some fairly heavy baggage, i.e the Design Automation and Test Exposition that bounces annually between France and Germany.   That conference, which has been run by EDA Ltd. has become extremely unprofitable...