Napier NewsNews and comment about the European electronics media
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The IET has issued a call for papers for its System Safety conference that will be held in Manchester, UK on October 2010. Abstracts are due in by 1st April, with final paper submission by 4th June 2010.
Tags: Call for Papers, IET, UK
EP&Dee (Electronic Products & Design Eastern Europe) has added digital distribution and has started a push to grow its digital circulation. The title currently has a circulation of just over 6000, and the move to digital will help increase this without the high cost of print and postage that is incurred with international distribution. It will be interesting to see how the publication develops – the title is probably the only one to establish a significant footprint across several Eastern European countries, and the digital edition should grow this significantly, as well as allowing growth beyond its current reach across South Eastern Europe.
Tags: Digital Magazines, Eastern Europe
As part of the reorganisation of editors at Fiera Milano Editore, Antonella Cattaneo has been appointed Managing Editor of Automazione Oggi and Fieldbus&Networks, the magazines covering factory automation. Previously Antonella was at EO News, where she has been replaced by Filippo Fossati.
It’s frustrating to be told that the counts you need for a direct marketing campaign will take a day or two because getting counts is “not that easy”. Well credit to Findlay Direct Marketing, whose new website will give you immediate counts based upon your criteria, which can include job title, products specified, location, and other demographic information. By speeding up the process of getting counts, and making it very easy to see the criteria that can be used to segment their data (and the impact of applying the criteria), Findlay makes DM campaign planning a breeze, and I’m sure they’ll win some extra business simply because they provide the fastest and most flexible service.
Tags: Direct marketing, Findlay, UK
EE Times Europe has refreshed the layout of the website. The new design maintains the familiar EE Times look, so readers should not have any major problems with the new site.
At the same time EBP has quietly shifted from the EETimes.eu domain to surprisingly unwieldy electronics-eetimes.com. The old local domains such as eetuk.com route to individual landing pages, although the content on these pages is the same as the site’s home page. This presumably allows EE Times to easily reverse their decision to drop the local sites.
Quite why the European site has chosen to switch domains hasn’t been made public. A quick whois lookup shows that the ownership of all the “old” domains has not been transferred to EBP, suggesting that perhaps they didn’t gain control over these domains when acquiring the rights to publish EE Times Europe.
A quick search on Google for “EE Times Europe” brings up results from the old eetimes.eu in first place, eetuk.com is next, and then results from eetimes.com appear. The new domain electronics-eetimes.com makes its first appearance at seventh in the SERP. Searching for “EE Times” didn’t produce any results from the new domain until the third page.
Of course this is early days for the domain and the old eetimes.eu domain continues to redirect to the new domain, so I don’t expect any immediate problems other than perhaps email newsletters getting caught in spam filters until recipients whitelist the new domain. The long-term implications, however, are interesting. Presumably EBP is trying to increase the total traffic to the EE Times Europe site, rather than focusing specifically on growing a European audience. Whether this is what advertisers want remains to be seen. I’ll also be watching to see if EE Times Group decides to do anything different with the “old” domains.
I’m delighted when publishers see new technologies as an opportunity rather than a threat, particularly when they use that technology to launch new media products. A great example of grabbing these opportunities is the launch of Electronics-video.com, a new site that provides a YouTube-like resource of videos that are all relevant to our industry.
I’m a great believer that video will be an increasingly important medium for B2B technology marketing. Like any other medium, however, distribution is the key to success. Although there is good distribution through some of the existing publications, as well as other sites such as Dev-Monkey that are focussed on video content, I think Electronics-video.com fills a glaring gap in the market: attempting to provide a resource of all relevant video content along with basic curation into channels, and have been talking to the site owners for some time about the idea.
In addition to allowing anyone to upload relevant videos, the site also allows users and publishers to pull videos from YouTube. This approach makes it really easy for marketers to post once on YouTube and then pull in the video to Electronics-Video.com. By avoiding the need to upload twice the site saves time and will – I’m sure – encourage more people to upload video.
Given that much of the content will be available on other sites, Electronics-Video.com needs to deliver just one thing: views! If the site can deliver a reasonable number of views, and if the various paid-for promotions that the site plans to offer result in a significant number of views, then I’m sure it’s going to be a great success. I’m optimistic about the future of the site – in fact the first two vendor channels are both Napier clients!
Tags: Electronics-video, Online, Video
I was sad to see that Total Telecom has stopped publishing the print edition, although it was some consolation that the website – totaltele.com – will continue.
Tags: Print Publications
It’s not often I write about media packs, but the new EDN Europe media information is worthy of comment. The circulation is up to 19K – it’s great to see the number of readers recovering after what seemed a rather hurried transition to all-digital distribution. The new media pack is also the first I’ve seen in our industry with embedded video. I think that the magazine did a pretty good job on the videos – managing to include useful information that might otherwise have not made the document, whilst avoiding a tone of desperate pleading for adverts!
To be serious for a moment, I have been very impressed with the way that EDN Europe has incorporated video into their digital editions, and I’m also a huge fan of the Ceros platform they use. Not only does it produce a great rich-media document that opens quickly, but I can also download a very workable PDF version of the media pack.
Tags: EDN Europe, Reed
With Embedded World only a week away, it was great to get some positive news about a couple of events. The Embedded Masterclass has more workshops planned for 2010 than last year, they have moved the southern leg of the event to the new Hilton at Reading because they needed more space, and the organisers tell me they think they may even exceed last year’s record attendee numbers.
Engineers in Scandinavia are looking forward to a new event, S.E.E. (Scandinavian Electronics Event), which will be held in Stockholm from 13th to 15th April 2010. The event is planned to be held every two years, and I’m delighted that there are still event organisers prepared to create new shows.
It looks like the first S.E.E. will be a success as the organisers tell me that around 250 companies will be exhibiting! They also have some great new ideas for the show, including areas where stands are not allowed to have high separating walls, creating a very open environment. They have also chosen to place seminars and special exhibitions and displays right in the middle of the show, on an “activity street” that cuts through the middle of the exhibition. Putting the seminars and activities that draw visitors in the middle of the hall is really important to draw people past the exhibition stands, and can only help increase the meetings on exhibitors’ stands.
Tags: SEE, Shows and Events, Sweden
Congratulations to Filippo Fossati, who has just been appointed editor-in-chief of EO News – the second time that he has held this role. Filippo is going to be a very busy man, as this new appointment is in addition to his current role as editor-in-chief of Elettronica Oggi, Elettronica Oggi Web, and Embedded magazine! It’s great to have such outstanding editors as Filippo in our industry, and I’m amazed as how much work he can get through – producing three great magazines and a website. In fact I wonder if four editor-in-chief roles is some kind of record!
Tags: Editors, Elettronica Oggi, EO News, Italy
In December Electronics Weekly and EE Times Group announced they would partner on a UK show in 2010, and that show has finally got a name: Embedded Live. In our industry it’s nice to get a simple name that is real words and not an abbreviation. Although the UK is probably the toughest market in Europe for trade shows, I really hope that the combination of EW and EE Times group will be strong enough to make this event a success.
Tags: EE Times, Electronics Weekly, Shows and Events, UK
The latest ABC figures are out (ABC issue annual figures, whereas BPA audits are published when the audit is completed), and I’m pleased that many titles continue to invest both in circulation and audits. It’s particularly pleasing when smaller publishers, who don’t have a huge circulation machine like some of the bigger publishers, are able to get good audited circulations. Perhaps the best example of this is MMG, whose title Electronics Sourcing UK is now 98.09% requested, with 86.37% of these readers have requesting ES within the last twelve months. Congratulations to MMG and all publishers who recently achieved an ABC audit.
Tags: Electronics Sourcing, MMG, UK
