commbasics

    The past couple of posts I've thrown out a few "what-ifs" regarding how we place a value on information and whether competing on control of the information is a productive effort     Of course I was setting everything up for this post, which is something I've been hinting at for months as we've negotiated and discussed a bunch of stuff.  We're ready to let the cat out of the bag officially.  Starting this week Footwasher Media has begun a collaborative program working with Hearst Electronics Group on a “Collaborative Journalism”program with Premier Farnell as the sponsor.  We will develop and share original content developed by Hearst's electronic industry publications, Footwasher Media's www.newtechpress.net, and Premier Farnell's element14 website.  It is not a PR program.  It is not a marketing program.  We don't push products or services and we don't represent a...

Traditional media is struggling to survive for the most part for the simple reason that people think information should be free, and they work hard to make sure that it is free by using the internet to circumvent having to pay for content.  Sometimes searching for that free information can be difficult with all the paywalls and firewalls that publications put up to block it.  EE Times is famous for not allowing most of it's content to see the light of Google searches, to the point that it is often hard to find their content within their own search engine.  But at least they have the reader captured, right? Not so much.  There are a lot of readers for EE Times... and for Electronic Products... and for all the publications that compete for eyeballs.  When the truth is told, pretty much everyone who reads one of those publications is reading the other.  They have to to be able to find what they are looking for because they really want information....

A few weeks ago I sat down with engineers over coffee and different times and talked with them about the issue of searching for information on the internet. I discovered that, universally, they were frustrated by the process but didn't really know what could be done.  What they said ties into things I've heard about engineers and how they process information and explains a lot. They start with a question about a particular topic, so they type in a search term.  The term brings up hundreds of links, most of which are press releases or contributed articles trying to get them to buy a particular product and only tangentially addressing their question. They click on link after link; inputting new search terms and finding more links, until they finally find enough information to get started.  "It's time consuming and, more often than not, counter productive," one state emphatically.  It is also they only option they have. The traditional media do...

A few months ago I wrote that life was not all goodness and light in the Cadence marketing world , but that seemed to be a false prophesy with the presence of EDA 360 all over the Design Automation Conference in June.  Today it was announced in EE Times that Cadence marketing wunderkinde John Bruggeman had abruptly left the company , as the company reorganizes its marketing effort once again. Kinda reminds me of what I was saying even earlier about what happens when engineers make marketing decisions. So it seems that Cadence is moving away from the big vision to expand their markets and go back to "the Cadence that wants to keep building increasingly complex tools for a shrinking and unrewarding market," as EE Times editorial director Ron Wilson said. Then again, maybe we are seeing preparation for the sale of Cadence.  Could be...?