commbasics

I finished, John Cooley's latest reports about an hour ago and have been cogitating on his comments on engineers and Twitter (EE Times reported June 21 that 85 percent of semi design engineers don't like it). John said: "I thought this article was interesting because it also pointed to the  key reason WHY I don't like Twitter    -- my work requires long periods of uninterrupted concentration or I'll mess up what I'm doing." My initial reaction to this point was, "That's valid.  After all you need to learn how to be disciplined enough to know when to and not to pay attention to the conversation, and when to respond, before you can find value in social media." But then he said: "With Twitter you get endlessly pelted every few minutes with random, mostly useless tweets and retweets. "Running IE8 on my netbook is way too sloooow. Chrome is much fasssssster." "Go Red Sox!" "Getting on the plan...

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

A couple of weeks ago I talked about marketing assumptions or, in the vernacular, "drinking the Kool-aid."  It's been rolling around in my head and I thougt I'd take it a little further, especially since this is this week's lesson for my tribe.  The lack of accurate data is the source of failure for most companies and social media programs.  The good news is adopting effective social media practices solves the bad data problem for both. Most companies begin with some good data that assumptions are based upon and direction is decided.  What causes failure is when ll future assumptions are based on the original data and subsequent anecdotal evidence that validates the original assumption.  That's a recipe for failure or, in the least, a continually contracting market. It used to be that companies would invest in some level for real market data, but falling revenues at all analysis firms shows that time has come to an end.  For ...

I want to write something about Twitter... and a lot of other stuff, but before I do I have to establish a concept that I've come up with. This blog has always been about the concept of mass media: what it is, how it's used, where it's going.  We all pretty much know that mass media is information sent to large groups of people and we identify it in traditional forms of broadcast and print.  Sometimes we look at Google, Yahoo, Bing and any other kind of search engine as a threat to mass media, but in reality it is just another form of it.  Google still pushes out a bunch of information to a munch of people so it is still mass media. What makes online mass media the same as traditional media is that the goal is to get a response from 1 percent of the audience.  For example, in EDA, if you sent out a bit of communication to an audience of 10,000 people and you got 100 leads and maybe one sale, you would have more than paid for the effort. But social net...

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...

Technology, no matter how great or innovative, does not make a product successful. Marketing is the key. A mediocre product with good marketing will always beat a great technology with mediocre marketing. The Microsoft operating system is not the market leader because it is superior to UNIX or Linux, but because Microsoft is a superior marketing company. Intel beat down the Alpha chip not on the basis of superior technology but because of the $100 million "Intel Inside" marketing program (possibly the greatest example of market leadership ever). If good technology won the war, then everyone would have a Macintosh on their desktop. Every survey produced on the value of marketing (Advertising Council, Centre for Public Relations, Colombia University, to name a few) indicates that companies that spend 10 percent of their revenues on marketing lead their industries. Those same surveys show that successful technology companies spend a maximum of five percent of their revenues...