State of the trade show

Wanted to give my homies at RTC a shout out about the upcoming schedule of EDA Tech Forum Events announced last week, primarily because I wanted to point out that this is yet another evolution of marketing that I think we are facing.

With travel budgets being cut dramatically, it's getting harder for engineers to get justification to go to many of the traditional shows unless they can show relevance.  Organizations like RTC Group and Techinsights are trying to provide that justification, but in very different ways.

Techinsights has made a strong effort to compartmentalize their big event, ESC, so that attendees going for specific purposes can find what they are looking for more easily, and vendors can better target the right customers.  This way engineers can go to the bean counters and say, "Look, just what we need."

RTC, on the other hand, is taking the conference to the street where you live with multiple sites and very specific topics, and with major sponsorship with stakeholders in the technology niches.

Both approaches have merit.  In Techinsights I think their effort in building community for ESC online is very relevant for the time and helps focus attendees who have time to work the community aspect.The problem with that is the online community is not well promoted and doesn't integrate well with the tech approaches the community is now using.  RTC taking the show right to geographical arenas helps overcome the travel issues, however, they are lacking a strong social networking solution.

Then we have Xuropa that could solve both of their weaknesses.  Anyone think about a partnership?