Ever thought an editor didn't understand your product?
OK, so Electronics World has not really been an influential UK title (hopefully the appointment of Svetlana as editor will change this), but it's pretty sad that the previous editor felt the need to proclaim his lack of knowledge when he left. Phil Reed has moved to be editor of Creation International, a media title, and is said to have commented, "I'll get to go to huge international exhibitions and loads of press do's - but more importantly - I can actually understand what I am writing about!"
It's good that this really is not typical of electronics editors. The European editors generally really know their stuff, and a few can be pretty scary, with encyclopaedic knowledge of even the most obscure branches of electronics.
Creation International, was originally published as Creation by London-based Townhouse Media, which closed in 2003.
Svetlana to edit Electronics World
Svetlana Josifovska, formerly the editor of IEE News is to edit Electronics World, a newsstand publication that has been running for many years, and was formerly, and probably best known as Wireless World.
Reed to launch "Asia" version of ECN
Having launched ECN China, Reed Electronics Group now plans to launch ECN Asia, which will cover Korea, Taiwan, India, Singapore and other S.E. Asian countries. The magazine will have a circulation of 27 000, and be published in English, Trad. Chinese and Korean.
Electronic Embedded Systeme will close
After weeks of speculation AWi has confirmed that Electronic Embedded Systeme will close after the October issue this year. Given the crowded German magazine market, and the continued recession in the electronics industry, it isn't surprising that the situation could not be sustained.
Google desktop search - what does it mean for advertisers?
The hype last week was all about the desktop search tool launched by Google. It's currently not showing ads related to desktop searches, and with no capability to index networked drives, the tool is unlikely to have a huge impact on the marketing in the electronics industry in the near future. Longer-term it continues the trend of some online channels limiting the control of advertisers on where their ads are placed. Already Google adwords appear on any website that chooses to participate in the scheme. The rapidly-growing IntelliTXT system from Vibrant Media places your ad on a mix of sites that are categorised by Vibrant Media as being appropriate for your industry.
Perhaps this is good news for the electronics media? Specialist electronics titles, can accurately identify an target audience that is specific to electronics advertising.
CIE France to be relaunched
CIE France is going to be relaunched. The changes will be announced at a meeting in Paris on 20th October. Although the changes are still confidential, we would expect the magazine to follow some of the recent changes in other Reed titles: beefing-up editorial, with EPN-like CEO interviews; some minimum levels of editorial (as has been promised by EW), and a makeover of the look of the magazine.. CIE's pan-European sister title, EPN, will also have the front cover look updated in November.
PSDE to launch email newsletter
Conveniently in time for Electronica, Power Systems Design Europe (PSDE) has announced that they will launch an email newsletter, starting with 3 weekly "Electronica Product Showcase" issues on 20th/27th Oct and 3rd Nov. consecutive e-newsletters entitled "Electronica Product Showcase". They claim an impressive opt-in circulation of 22,100 "power engineers" across Europe.
Of course there are opportunities for sponsorship (let's be honest guys, it's advertising!), contact Napier for more information.
How to get covered in Electronic Design
Although this is very specific to the American title Electronic Design, rether than the European sister title (which only takes around 1/5 of its content from the US publication), we thought you'd be interested in this recent interview with the editor explaining how to get coverage in the magazine.
Euro DesignCon 2004 preview
Euro DesignCon 2004 is the European sister to the popular DesignCon event in the USA. The event will be held in Munich on the 12th and 13th October 2004, and is likely to attract a strong audience of ASIC and SoC engineers.
Call for Papers for D&E Power Design Forum
Abstracts for the D&E Engineers' Forum covering Batteries, load technology and power supply design are due by 29th November. Abstracts can be supplied in either German or English. The annual event will be held on 17th March 2005.
IEE trials publication for schools
In a move that reflects the financial strength of the IEE, this UK Engineering Instition is testing a new publication aimed at 11-15 year-olds. Currently titles "Flipside" it is planned to support this magazine with funding from charitable foundations, as well as significant financial input from the IEE.
UK: the centre of the Internet?
With shameless patriotism, we thought we should highlight the news that the largest Internet hub in the world is located in the UK. The London Internet Exchange (LINX) now transmits more data than any other independent Internet hub, with peak rates of up to 55Gb/s claimed by the organisation.
European Microwave Week preview
European Microwave Week will be held in Amsterdam from 11th to 15th October. The organisers expect this event to attract 4000-6000 visitors, with around a quarter of these signing up for at least one of the four conferences. The conferences are the "34th European Microwave Conference", the "European Conference on Wireless Technology", the "European Radar Conference" and the snappily-titled "European Gallium Arsenide and other Compound Semiconductors Application Symposium". With Europe recognised as a centre of excellence for RF and microwave market, we believe this year's event will be yet another success.
Interactive marketing exhibition launches UK show
The organisers of the US show AD:TECH, have announced a UK event. AD:TECH London will run from the 28-29th Sept 2005. A similar event will also be held in Shanghai in Nov 2005.
Fall Processor Forum preview
The FPF (formerly known as The Microprocessor Forum) opens on 4th October. This event for the ultra-geeks of the industry has a strong theme: multi-core processors are in, whether you are building servers, desktops or embedded systems. The techhies will want to check out the preview.
French consider legaility of DidTheyReadIt
Napier News covered DidTheyReadIt on 9th June. The French Data Protection Authority, the CNIL, has also recently looked at the service, and have been highly critical of the service. As European Data Protection legislation is similar from country to country, this may have wider implications.
Online advertising up again
The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has stated that online advertising grew by over 40% year on year for the period April-June. Paid search continues to see the biggest growth. Although there are no figures specific to electronics, clearly the online advertising continues to grow strongly in our market. In Europe, however, the online market is still dwarfed by print advertising, with only a few strong sites achieving high readership, and typically only one dominant editorial-driven site per country.
Rumours of Google launching a browser
The Internet is rife with rumours of Google planning to launch a web browser. It's even on the BBC website! If it really does happen, it's likely that Google will attempt to display related advertising alongside the webpages you are viewing (in a similar mannner to GMail). This will mean that marketers will not only have to try to understand the mysteries of Google adwords, but also raises the possibility of trying to construct bids to get your adword advert displayed alongside competitors' websites.
Industry awards ceremony goes from strength to strength
Having now recovered from the event last Thursday, I felt we should mention how the Electronic Design Industry Awards has continued to go from strength to strength. Although the awards ceremony overran a little on the night, leaving the comedian with a tough audience, everyone we spoke with really enjoyed the event. With more entries, more attendess (and definitely more wine being drunk!) the awards are an important event for the whole UK electronics industry, from design through to production and test. Finally congratulations to VMETRO, who were finalists in the Test Solution of the Year category with their excellent Vanguard analysers.
Chatbot wins again
Sadly there is an annual competition for the most chatty "chatbot" on websites. Alice won the competition in New York City last weekend - the third time in five years. Look forward to more and more websites using chatbots that look cute, but just can't quite answer the questions you have because they aren't in the FAQ.
A strong UK trade show!
The organisers of Chips and Tools UK, are reporting that visitor registrations are significantly above expectations, reversing the general trend of decling trade show attendance. The success of this event supports the view that it is small, highly focussed shows, particularly those with technical conferences, that will be successful in the future.
Amazon search engine launched
A9.com, the search engine from Amazon.com has been officially launched. It's main results are delivered by the Google search engine, and A9 uses Google's adwords advertising, so really doesn't change the search landscape too much for the electronics industry, which typically has already bought in to optimising for Google and buying adwords.
Features designed to attract users include: web and image search displayed side by side (both provided by Google), book text of more than 100,000 titles from Amazon.com’s Search Inside The Book™, movie information from the Internet Movie Database, and reference information (encyclopedia, dictionary, etc.) through GuruNet.com. Much is made of the engine's ability to store details of past searches and deliver results based upon them, aiming to provide "customised searching" capabilities to all users.
What do people look at on a website?
How do people read sites like eetimes.co.uk and elektroniknet.de? Wouldn't it be really cool if we could track the movement of people's eyes as they read electronics websites to understand what advertising works best?
A company called Poynter Online actually does this, and has posted a report about their latest Eyetrack III study for everyone to see! This really is worth reading: it found that when viewing news sites such as cnn.com, on average 68% of readers looked at a banner ad in the left hand column, 55% looked at a top banner, 34% looked at an ad on the right hand site and only 14% saw banner ads at the bottom of the page! Doubleclick suggests that ad click-through rates are typically less than 0.5%, anything we can do improve the performance of online advertising must be good!
Optimism or pessimism in electronics? It's all a matter of opinion!
At Napier we keep a close eye on market forecasts for our clients. We've probably heard all the jokes about the reliability of analyst forecasts. But we had to smile when we saw the very different ways that the recent SIA report was interpreted. David Manners told readers of Electronics Weekly "Chip market on track for 28% growth" - surely great news for the industry. Electronic News, however, reported "SIA: Chip Sales Growth Slows". As both titles are published by Reed Electronics Group, does this mean that European are more optimistic than Americans? Incidently David Manners is a frequent contributor to Electronic News.
Meeting American CAN-SPAM legislation
European legislation has historically been more restrictive in protecting privacy than the laws in the USA. Occaisionally marketing managers think that anything they do in Europe is bound to exceed demands made by America law. This is not always the case, particularly in the case of the "CAN-SPAM" laws. Clickz has published a simple guide to meeting this legislation that should be required reading for anyone sending marketing emails to recipients in the USA.