commbasics

If one company finally decides to go strategic, it will dominate not only their niche, but will be come the de facto thought leader. Publitek recently released its second annual report on “ Who’s winning the social media battle in the Semiconductor industry ,” with an expanded list of selected companies.  The good news is more companies are getting into the social media game with vigor.  Even better news is the amount of primary engagement (likes and follows) obliterates the belief that engineers don’t use social media with more than 30 million Facebook likes of posts in one month for the top five companies alone.  You could discount as much as half of that as bogus traffic from clip farms and even a significant number of corporate hacks boosting their numbers, but that means millions still are attributed to customers. The bad news of that last point is companies are still, by and large, ignoring that potential channel of conversation with the customer.  One comp...

Got a note from Bill Barron about a new venture between Electronikpraxis and Hearst Business Media.  The two publishing companies are joining forces on Embedded Designer , an online publication to be unveiled at Embedded World in Nuremberg, Germany in March.  This will be the German language equivalent of the US site .   The embedded technology industry is one of the few that is drawing interest of B2B publications, United Business Media, included.  UBM's Embedded Systems Conference (driven to success by Paul Miller ) has become a bicoastal phenomenon with continue year-to-year growth when other conferences are struggling to break even.  And Embedded World continues to draw a great deal of interest worldwide. You can say the reason for this interest is because embedded is such a vibrant industry.  But publishing companies and conference organizers are not in it for altruistic reasons.  The industry is still investing marketing money...

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...