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 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!

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.

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.