May 2008

I’m delighted to announce that Mick Elliott, who spent 40 years on Electronics Weekly as journalist, editor and publisher, has become media advisor to Publitek. We’re confident that his enormous experience will help us improve our services, both to the media and to our clients. When I met with Mick a few weeks ago, it got me thinking about the age profile of people in our business. I can’t substantiate this with research but it appears to me that the average age of editors in the electronics industry continues to rise. Of the new appointments announced here this month, only Vanessa Knivett, (TechInsights), is going to lower the number a bit. Wolfgang Patelay (TechInsights) is probably going to hit the middle ground somewhere and John Taylor (Electronics, UK) is going to push to it back up again. I don’t know Paul Buckley (TechnInsights) personally, but he’s been around a while too. What puzzles me is why the trend exists. You’d think that in a relatively young, vibrant industry like electronics, publishers would be looking to bring in fresh, young talented engineers and turn them into technical journalists – but perhaps it’s simply that the pool of journalists is shrinking and it’s cheaper to hang on to the people you have than pay out the redundancy money. Having been in the electronics PR/media business for 25 years, it’s nice to see some of old faces actually coming back into it. I’m particularly pleased to see John Taylor coming back to Electronics magazine in the UK – he was always great fun to work with. But where will the electronics media business be ten years from now if it can’t attract some younger talent? Brian Harding – no spring chicken himself - has responded to Paul Miller’s opinion piece that was published in last month’s Publitek Media News – see the SOAPBOX. Onto the news - starting with the UK, for once!

Datateam’s magazine, Electronics, has appointed John Taylor (60) as editor from June 4th. Present editor, Paul Marsh, is returning to his native Scotland and is leaving the industry. John has a long pedigree in electronics publishing. He was editor of What’s New in Electronics and Managing Editor of Electronics Times in the UK. He has been running his own consultancy for many years but relishes the new challenge.

Web: http://www.datateam.co.uk

Electronics Weekly’s Jobs Service has now re-launched with a more accessible search interface. Readers can register for jobs by email in order to receive relevant jobs without visiting the site. CVs can be searched by employers, and there’s a new careers advice section to help look for new jobs.

Jobseekers will be able to search the latest jobs, apply for jobs as soon as they are advertised, register for ‘Jobs By Email’ alerts, use the Career Advice section to check out the pay, prospects, players and key talking points of their industry careers in 2008, and find out if the company they want to work for is recruiting in the “Who’s Recruiting” section. They can also post their CVs and make them searchable for recruiters.

Web: http://www.electronicsweekly.com/jobs

The IET and Electronics Weekly are jointly organising a Programmable Hardware Systems Conference on the 8-9 October 2008. The event, which will include an industry dinner, is to be held at Savoy Place in London. The two-day conference will explore the latest developments in design methodologies, software tools and hardware architectures including FPGAs. Delegates will be able to join sessions covering such topics as power efficient and low power design, FPGA versus configurable processors, multi-core processors as well as the latest in design tools. The conference will include a table-top exhibition.

Web: http://www.theiet.org/phs

TechInsights has launched three DesignLines to directly support European designers working in the power management, industrial control and automotive application spaces. DesignLines, part of TechOnline. Each DesignLine delivers how-to design articles, new product information, blogs, forums, technical papers, and new content on a variety of engineering topics relevant to the application of the technology space it covers. Industrial DesignLine Europe will be managed by Dipl-Ing Wolfgang Patelay. Patelay has a wealth of experience in test & measurement, ASICs, programmable logic and power supplies with 25 years experience in the electronics market as a writer, editor and editor-in-chief at some of the most recognised publications in the German market.

Vanessa Knivett will manage Analog DesignLine Europe. Knivett comes to Analog DesignLine Europe with ten years of experience in technology journalism.

Paul Buckley, editor of Power Management DesignLine Europe, began his career in journalism with Morgan-Grampian where he was the Special Reports Editor for Electronics Times based in London. He has been writing for many years on a wide range of technology subjects including electronics, computing, communications, software and power technology.

Three more European DesignLines, including an automotive site, will launch late in the summer.

Web: http://www.techonline.com

Once again, Markt & Technik will produce a daily newspaper for Electronica from 11th to 14th November. It claims an on-site and off-site distribution of over 60,000 copies and all 15 editors on Markt & Technik will contribute. 50% of the articles will be in English. Advertising closing date is October 17.

Web: http://www.elektroniknet.de

The First Edition of “LED Driver ICs: Worldwide Forecasts” provides a detailed roadmap of the successive application segments that will push growth for solid state lighting between now and 2013. The market for high-brightness LED driver ICs is increasingly diverse and presents significant growth opportunities. The dollar market is projected to grow significantly faster than unit sales. The higher dollar growth rate is a reflection of high growth rates for higher-cost LED driver ICs such as those used in LCD backlighting, signs, and automotive applications, compared with lower growth rates for lower-cost driver ICs used in mobile phone handsets and other portable applications.

“Among other important and surprising results, the report finds that 2008 will be the first year that the use of LED lighting exceeds the use of neon in general-purpose channel letter signs in North America,” stated Jeff Shepard, President of Darnell. “The single largest opportunity for growth in the next five years will be in the various applications within the Signals, Signs and Billboards segment. That segment is already the second-largest unit segment,” Shepard concluded.

Web: http://www.darnell.com/promos/53LEDApplicationsAnalyzed.pdf

State-of-the-art advances in energy harvesting, thin-film batteries, and related power management solutions are on the agenda at the Second Annual nanoPower Forum (nPF ’08) on June 2 – 4, 2008 in Irvine, California. Session topics will include kinetic energy harvesting, low-power system architectures, system integration issues and more. The Exhibition Area will include demonstrations of the latest thin-film batteries and energy-harvesting devices. Join us for a Reception on Monday evening and Lunch on Tuesday in the Exhibition area.

There is also a post-conference seminar on “Designing for Ultra-Low-Power Wireless Sensor Applications, Powered by Energy Harvesting.” Media sponsors are Electronic Design, Microwaves and RF, RF Design and Power Electronics Technology. Organising sponsors are Darnell Group and PowerPulse.net

Web: http://nanopower.darnell.com/registration.php

18 months on from its lauch, SupplyFrame.com claims to be attracting over 6 million page views per month, based on promoting the site primarily in the US. It is now coming to Europe (rep contact: nickjwalker@btinternet.com). The site is an on-line component information service for the electronics industry supporting both product manufacturers and industry advertisers. For designers and procurement professionals, SupplyFrame provides a search engine to find technical information on millions of electronic components from thousands of manufacturers. Trust in SupplyFrame is based on a commitment to provide free, comprehensive, vendor-neutral technical content while respecting the privacy of SupplyFrame users by not requiring registration. Technical content, including the component datasheet, specs, sources, and cross-references, is provided directly from manufacturers and their franchised distributors. All use of the data has been authorised, and since it is free to provide data to SupplyFrame, all manufacturers maintain equal representation in searches.

Web: http://www.supplyframe.com

IIC-Taiwan is set to host High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) which is HDMI Licensing, LLC’s 2nd Annual HDMI Developers Conference at its Taipei venue on September 11, 2008. HDMI Licensing, LLC is an organisation founded by Hitachi, Matsushita Electric (Panasonic), Royal Philips Electronics, Silicon Image, Sony Corporation, Thomson and Toshiba Corporation to define a next-generation digital interface specification for consumer electronics products. HDMI technology combines uncompressed high-definition video and multi-channel audio in a single digital interface to provide crystal-clear digital quality over a single cable. The one-day HDMI Developers Conference will include presentations and technical sessions by executives and technical professionals from leading development, testing, and compliance manufacturers, and a business overview from a leading retailer. According to In-Stat, over 229 million devices incorporating HDMI are expected to ship in 2008. HDMI is expected to expand into product categories beyond home theater, including personal computers, game consoles, digital cameras, portable media players, with an installed base of nearly 1.2 billion HDMI-enabled devices projected by 2010.

Web: http://www.iic-taiwan.com

Electronic Design is continuing to lead the way in video presentations from recent shows and events. Interviews from last month’s ESC show are now online.

Web: http://electronicdesign.com/shows/ESC2008/index.cfm?AD=1&

EE Times-India is launching two new design channels: Embedded Design India (http://www.embeddeddesignindia.com) and Power Design India (http://www.powerdesignindia.com). Both launch on June 4. According to India’s Ministry of Information Technology, its semiconductor industry revenue is expected to reach US$45 billion by 2015, growing at a CARG of 30%. Embedded system design and power design are two of the fastest growing sectors.

Both Embedded Design India and Power Design India plan to feature over 1,000 articles on its launch day, including design tutorials, white papers, application notes, new product news, discussion forums and webinars.

Web: http://www.eet-india.com

Brian Harding, CTM Manager at Spectrum Group International, responds to Paul Miller’s comments in last month’s Publitek Media News.

I was a big-spending distribution client in the mid 1980s and had many conversations with magazine space reps along the lines of the one that Paul remembers in your Soapbox 2 article.I might even have been the client concerned. It’s true that my then company was appallingly inept at following up bingo leads and that was always a major frustration for me, but I was at least able to ensure that every enquirer got the response-pack promised in the ad, and had his details added to our prospect database for internally generated mail-shots The standard defence of space reps against the charge of low response rates was always; “what’s more important to you: quantity or quality”? It always seemed to escape the rep’s attention that the answer was then and is today, BOTH! Unless one committed to ultra-expensive market research the number of enquiries generated by a particular ‘spend’ - gauged against the publisher’s circulation profile of course - was the only immediately available indication of the success of a particular ad insertion or campaign. And if I remember correctly the rule of thumb in those days stated that, industry-wide, circa 10% of all responders went on to ultimately buy the product they enquired about or a similar product. So quality was always a subset of quantity and I’m sure, remains so in the Internet age.

Publishers have absolutely no business judging their own success on the success of their advertisers. Then, as now, closing the business depended on a whole raft of factors: Price, performance, availability, competition and even the personality of the vendor’s sales person are all major influencing factors over which the publisher has absolutely no control. Even today in the Internet age and in our now mature industry Paul and his colleagues would do well to concern themselves more with the quality of their circulation (database) and the number of click-throughs (the quest of further information, surely?) that they deliver for their clients before woolly metrics like, and I quote, “engagement” (time spent with message) and/or “immersive environments” (where engineers register, spend time with a company’s brand and request more information).