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51st Design Automation Conference (DAC) in San Francisco have come out and, if they are anything like past reports, the numbers are, in the least, moderately steamed if not entirely cooked. The latest numbers on the 51st Design Automation Conference (DAC) in San Francisco have come out and, if they are anything like past reports, the numbers are, in the least, moderately steamed if not entirely cooked.  I found a site that does independent audits of trade show attendance and found that the numbers reported by the Electronic Design Automation Consortium ( EDAC ) are between 50 and 1000 participants higher than the independent audit numbers. In reality, the EDA “official” total attendance of 6,701 attendees — if accurate — is slightly under the 6 year average of 6,795.  DAC is not growing.  It’s flat.  There is one definite trend that’s showing a decrease, and that is exhibitor support which has come down steadily from 3400 exhibitor support staff down to 2500 th...

Time for my annual review of spin metric from the Design Automation Conference (DAC), this year held in Austin, Texas for the first time.  Last year I called the conference attendance as flat.  I'm calling the same for this year. This was a controversial decision and caused many companies in the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) industry to stay home from the exhibit.  But the final news release put on a big smile and said the event "exceeded expectations."  That it did.  Most everyone I talked to said it would be a "ghost town." "deader than a doornail" and other less than happy predictions.  It was not as bad as people thought.  It was not as good as some people say. It is unfair to compare Austin's effort to San Francisco's last year.  It's better to compare it the San Diego the year previous because of the similarities in logistics.  San Diego and Austin are a lot cheaper to put o...

The numbers came out for the 2012 DAC attendance and, as usual, the organization reported "record breaking numbers," but still wasn't putting it in context. Total attendance for 2012 was 7,388 up from 6,350 last year in San Diego.  That's great.  But it's still down from 7,996 in 2009 when it was in San Francisco last...and during a worse economic period.  Subtracting booth personnel, exhibit only and full conference participation was 4,684 and in 2009 it was 5,299.  Booth staff was up this year by about 100 over the 2011 conference, but everyone really noticed the massively reduced floor space.  In 2009, DAC took up Moscone North and South but the whole show was spread out liberally over only the south hall this year.  And there was a nice size bowling alley between the meeting suites in the center. So as I pointed out last year, DAC remains flat, at best.  There was, however , a phrase that had never been used before in t...

Just got the latest newsletter from Gabe Moretti. He opens with an overview of #DAC and gives a pretty good critique of the weak attempt to bring attention to embedded software at the conference, but about midway through he blames the media's lack of attention to the industry on parochialism.  He specifically calls out United Business Media's scheduling of ESC Chicago at the same time as DAC. "Finally, has anyone noticed that ESC20 is taking place in Chicago during DAC?  Once again the EDA industry falls victim of parochialism, and the greed to make money at the expense of both users and vendors.  People at UBM certainly knew the DAC schedule.  So couldn't they schedule ESC20 around DAC?" Let's call a spade a spade here. #EDA doesn't get attention from the media because they make no effort to explain themselves or their reason for being.  The attitude that "a good product sells itself" is stupid marketing, especially...

At the Design Automation Conference a couple of weeks ago, one of the big topics of discussion was the use of "Cloud Computing" and one the up-and-coming player in that field is Xuropa.  I did one of my live video interviews with James Colgan, Xuropa's founder an CEO, regarding how that is affecting the bottom line for the industry.  The real kicker came at the end of the interview where James talked about the hard evidence of benefit for the concept... and that got truncated when the bandwidth gods shut down the broadcast.  So here's what I got and after you watch it, I'll tell you tomorrow what the bottom line was. Watch video live on Vpype Live Broadcaster

Big news all around today.   Denali and Cadence merge and New Tech Press will go to DAC this year with live video broadcasts on line. Yep, today we reached agreement with Vpype , the social video startup for partial sponsorship of live (and later archived) interviews with technologists and industry leaders at the Design Automation Conference in Anaheim, beginning June 14. Here's the catch: You won't be able to see the live broadcasts unless you have a Facebook account.  You'll have to wait until the archived interviews go up on the Vpype site, New Tech Press, and the NTP network partners, like Electronic Products , as well.   The offer of sponsorship came after I started a series on the Use of Social Video  a couple of weeks ago on Facebook that will be continuing indefinitely and will probably be expanding to multiple weekly events on other subjects. So this is a heads up on both of those opportunities.  We had about 10 people in the audienc...

The hot news today is that the EE Times Group of United Business Media (UBM) has purchased the DesignCon conference for a bargain price of $1.4 million.  Yikes.   I've always enjoyed DesignCon because it's technical content is just outstanding and very diverse... and I know I'm not alone in that belief.  Most editors I talk to prefer going to DesignCon than DAC for that reason.  (That's not to say DAC doesn't have good content so put your pitchforks down.)  The big difference between the two conferences is that the former is targeted toward what is going on inside the industry and the latter to what is going on in academia.  Plus dealing with the constantly moving circus that is DAC compared to the consistent location of the Santa Clara Convention Center makes planning and costs a lot easier to control. But I've also felt that DesignCon's marketing has been about at par with what DAC has always done and as a result, the emphasis never changes: DesignCon is...

I recently discovered Jim Collins' latest book,  How the Mighty Fall , and like all his stuff, it both depresses and encourages me.  Collins has made a bunch of money showing companies how to be great, but this book takes a look at why they fail and he wraps it up pretty succinctly in five stages. Hubris born of success Undisciplined pursuit of more Denial of risk and peril Grasping for salvation Capitulation to irrelevance or death The depressing part of what he describes is that many sectors of the technology industry is firmly in stage 4 with many entering into stage 5.  The encouraging thing is that Collins says you can escape the cycle by simply going back to what made you successful in the first place. And I'm further encouraged by seeing several companies figure that last part out all by themselves.  There is no magic to our recovery.  We just have to learn a little humility; learn that engineering, marketing, sales or charismatic leadership...

Couple days ago I asked for some help in figuring out the DAC numbers and one of my readers let me to an article by Kevin Morris at the FPGA Journal about the same thing, but getting into the discrepancies with much more depth.  Answered all of my questions (thanks Kevin) and like I thought, it took an engineer. But far into the article, Kevin said something very insightful: " EDA has ignored the majority of electronic designers in the world - who are not doing ASIC/SoC design. Probably 95% or more of the people designing electronic systems in the world today are not designing ASICs, but are instead using FPGAs and commodity processors on custom circuit boards. With a few exceptions - EDA has not invested heavily in serving this 95%, but has instead put the bulk of their development resources into supporting the high-flying 5% doing nanometer IC design." He was making the point that if trade shows and conferences like DAC, DVCon, DATE, etc. are going to survive they hav...

OK, just so everyone knows, I thought DAC this year was pretty good.  I met a lot of interesting people and got a pretty good handle on the state of the EDA industry (really bad but with several bright spots and hope for the future. Then the number started coming out.  I'm not a math whiz.  In fact, I suffered math anxiety all through school, so this stuff makes my head hurt, and I need the help of all you engineering types out there to help me figure this out. The preliminary numbers for DAC 2009 were 5135 The final numbers reported for DAC 2008 were 4828 The preliminary numbers for DAC 2007 were "over 5100" (no definitive number was reported that I could find). The news release from DAC July 29 said DAC 2009 was up 12 percent from 2008 and 3 percent from 2007. So you engineers, correct me if I'm wrong.  For 2009 to be 3 percent higher than 2007, either 2007's "5100" has to be below 5100, right?  3 percent of 5100 is approxi...

I just finished four days of audio podcast recording at the 2009 Design Automation Conference and, in accordance with my contrarian nature, I thought there were a lot of good things.  Let's look, first, at the numbers.  Officially, they are up, but they don't add up, and when you look at the show floor you know things were going south.  I talked to 10 companies, who didn't want to be quoted, who admitted that if thing don;t turn around in 6-9 months, they will not be back at DAC next year. And yet, in all of that there was hope.   Bob Gardner of the Electronic Design Automation Consortium talked to me briefly about the changes they will be making in promoting the show.  The details were sketchy but just the fact that they are looking at doing something different ... anything different ... is a move in the right direction.  The DAC committee worked hard to present some new and interesting "knowledge niches" in the conference (tha...

Real interesting first day at DAC.  Free Monday seemed to bring people out of the woodwork in the morning  and traffic seemed to die out after lunch, but it wasn't for lack of trying on the DAC committee's part.  The DAC Pavilion was generally filled whenever I wandered by and the organization is trying mightily to deal with the issue of what to call bloggers.  Essentially the philosophy is a work in progress but there are some cutbacks.  John Cooley was "upset" that there was no food in the press room, but other than Paul Dempsey and John Donovan it looked like we could all cut back on the pastries. I could have had a full access pass if I asked for one, but I only needed to get interview rooms so I saw no need... even though the bag would have matched my orange tie as Georgian Marzsalek pointed out.  Some members of the press were upset that the default access was exhibits only, but as I have said, we all have to be flexible in the...

Covering the Design Automation Conference without limitation. The Design Automation Conference kicks off tonight with the EDAC reception.  I'm going to the conference this year for the first time as a registered member of the press.  How this happened has been well documented and discussed over the past few weeks and will continue to be, but I've said enough about that.  What I haven't talked about is the why. When I began my career as a professional communicator, it was in the form of a print journalists for weekly and daily newspapers.  The biggest difference I've seen between then and now, is the reliance on news releases as the beginning of news stories.  30 years ago, news releases were only for filler.  When you were laying out the paper, and you had three inches of space, you through in a rewritten news release.  You NEVER EVER printed a news release verbatim in any form.  EVER! What made up the core of coverage was ...

I've received a bunch of angry and a few cordial emails about my supposition that DATE was either dead or not long for the world.  Grant Martin of Tensilica even made a comment on my post yesterday pointing out how valuable the content and meetings were for him at DATE.  Some people pointed me to Peggy Aycinena's rambling review of DATE (that I had begun to read but stopped after I saw the first comment complaining that she hadn't really talked about the content.)  So, for the record, I know that the content in technical conferences like DATE, DAC, Semicon, etc. are all outstanding stuff.  I know that the chance to meet with colleagues face to face is important. That's not the point. Back in 1995 I started writing a State of the Media report for clients to let them know where editors had moved to, what they were promoted to and what new publications they should be looking at.  In 1998 I started noticing that magazines were starting to strugg...

By Joe Basques Frivolous - self-indulgently carefree; unconcerned about or lacking any serious purpose – Dictonary.com I’ve had three very similar conversations with three different colleagues this week.  I’ll spare you the specifics, but the conversations went something like this… ME: Hey, with DAC just around the corner I thought I would check in and see if you needed any help with your marketing plans and preparation. THEM: No, unfortunately we’re not doing anything in that area.  We’re planning on putting out a press release and that’s about it. ME:Well, you know that’s not going to produce any results, right? THEM: Yeah, we know, but it’s what we’re going to do. These guys know they should do something in the area of communications but they're not sure what. They do what they always do, without any real thought or purpose, even though they know it will be inefficient and ineffective, hoping to raise company profits. Companies are doing things the way they hav...

Was going to do part 2 today but Forresters popped up with some REALLY interesting statistics  today. In short, 91 percent of technology decision makers are reading blogs, watching video and lurking on social media like Facebook.  Almost 70 percent are doing this for business purposes.  Almost half are creating their own sites.  We're not talking about 20-somethings, but real, mature business people. It's noteworthy that surveys show that these buyers don rate social technology highly in surveys, but do count on peer opinion to make decisions.  What they don't consider is they are getting those opinions off social technology they participate in. What this means in the context of our question: "what does social media do?" is that if you are not making social media an integral part of your marketing, then you are behind the curve... way behind.  So rather than asking about what it does, you should be asking why your are not doing m...

A guy whose been kicking around the EDA industry for a LONG time, Dan Nenni , just launched his own blog.  On Linkedin, he calls himself an "independent consulting professional" which means he's a hired gun for small companies.  I've bumped into him a couple of times over the years and I'm glad he's discovered social media as a tool for self promotion.  Hope it gets him a steady cash flow and helps him reinvent himself. In his first post, he takes on what needs to change at the Design Automation Conference, which promotes the EDA industry and while he has ideas that have been lobbed at the organizers for several years, I was disappointed that he didn't look at the potential of social media to accomplish the same thing... at much lower cost ... with much higher results.. Dan makes some excellent points about the value, or relative lack of, inherent in modern trade shows.  It's expected that investment in even technology conference...

Ozzie, my bizdev homeboy, has been busting my chops for a few weeks over making some comment on our experience at the Design Automation Conference (DAC), so I'm giving in and talking about it. For the past year I've been talking about some new models for journalism that include the adoption of video/audio podcasts, social media, a variation on pay-for-play coverage (that we call objective advocacy™) and cooperative reporting. We've been working on developing video interviews and have one currently running on YouTube, not to mention the interviews I've done on this blog for the past year.   We've had some enormous initial success with text articles as well … all outside of the electronic design automation (EDA) world.   We went to DAC reluctantly with a lot of pressure from several marketers and PR folks to create video podcasts of four or five companies. I say reluctantly because we all know that EDA marketers don't believe in supporting the information infrastr...

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...