Colin Holland is now editing MCU DesignLine, expanding his remit as the guru of all things embedded at EE Times.  In another move, EE Times Group has appointed Ron Wilson as Director of Content/Media. Ron is returning to set the editorial direction for the various properties within EE Times Group including Embedded Systems Design Magazine, Embedded.com, the global Embedded Systems Conferences and all custom events, as well as leading EE Times Group’s global growth strategy for the Embedded System Conferences.

It’s great to see EE Times Group picking and making best use of great talent from around the world to produce the best possible editorial, and I hope that Ron will be able to provide a boost to exhibition side of Embedded Live in the UK, which has attracted a disappointing number of exhibitors to date.

Tags: Editors, EE Times, UK, USA

EE Times Group has launched their new EE Times (US) website, which now includes all the division’s different publications (Embedded.com, for example, previously wasn’t part of the EETimes.com site). Apart from some minor teething troubles – the heavily-promoted links to the tour of the new site didn’t work – the site is definitely a very impressive resource, and I think that the design will grow on me (I’m not a huge fan of the mix of rounded and right-angled corners on the home page).

European marketing professionals must ask, “Will a great EETImes.com mean I don’t need to do local marketing?” I certainly don’t think that this is the case. If we forget the hugely important factor of local language, I still believe that local websites will dominate the majority of online reading for engineers in Europe – at least for the time being. Habit, promotion through print publications and local content are all going to ensure strong traffic to local sites.

In the long term, however, I’m sure EE Times Group will try to grab more and more traffic from Europe, as well as the globe’s other continents. EE Times has the benefit of scale: the 21 topics within “Design” and 17 product categories is more than any European editorial team has been able to pull together (elektroniknet.de, for example, has 11 categories that span both design and products). Only time will tell whether the ability to produce highly specific content will be sufficient to attract European engineers’ eyeballs away from local sites.

Tags: EE Times, Online, USA

It’s great to see that really good editors are in demand. Colin Holland, who has shared his coverage between the US and European EE Times titles, has been snapped up full time by EE Times Group (the American publisher). I understand that Phil Ling will be named as Colin’s replacement as Embedded Editor for EE Times Europe.

Both these editors have outstanding knowledge of the embedded industry, and it’s great to see demand for such high-quality talent from EE Times (on both sides of the Atlantic). I’d like to wish them both the best of luck in their new roles. If any more details are forthcoming in the official announcement, I’ll cover them here on Napier News.

Tags: Editors, EE Times, USA

Anne-Francoise Pele has taken over as the new editor for the EE Times Automotive DesignLine – the one tied to EE Times US, rather than EE Times Europe. Whilst it is good to see EE Times Group strengthening their editorial teams around the DesignLines, it does appear that this is also another move in the EE Times v. EE Times Europe online battle, as EBP continues to publish the European Automotive DesignLine.

I’m not sure what this is going to mean in the long term, as it seems pretty clear that EE Times Group (the publishers of EE Times US) is trying to pull global traffic to their sites, and in Europe it seems that their biggest opportunity is to pull readers from EBP’s (the publisher of EE Times Europe) sites.

To be honest I’ve absolutely no insight into how the situation developed, but with the greater resources available to the American publisher, it’s going to be very difficult for the sites associated with EE Times Europe to maintain their traffic. I know traffic figures fell significantly after the switch to the electronics-eetimes.com – which isn’t surprising with such a domain name change – but it will be interesting to see if they can regain the previous high levels of traffic in the medium term.

Tags: Editors, EE Times, Online

Electronics Weekly and EE Times Group, the organisers of Embedded Live, have issued a call for papers. The conference and exhibition will take place at Earls Court, London, on 20th to 21st October 2010, and they hope to run more than 40 classes in 50-minute, 90-minute, 2.5-hour, or full day formats.

Abstracts are use by 7th May, and information on how to submit is available on the Embedded Live website.

Tags: Call for Papers, EE Times, Electronics Weekly, Embedded Live, UK

EE Times Group put on an interesting presentation during Embedded World to talk about their plans for the future, and clearly most of the future is online. They plan to launch a social networking community called EE Life (although to be honest it really seemed to be a revamp of their existing forums).

The focus for EE Times is clearly to reach people – particularly in Europe – through online activities. Of course the situation is confused by the fact that EBP, publisher of EE Times Europe, is effectively competing for the European online audience (and arguably the worldwide online audience). However, I was pleased to see that EE Times Group seems to be trying to identify new approaches that deliver value to both the audience and advertisers.

I was particularly interested to hear about some successes with webinars that require attendees to pay to attend. If EE Times can negotiate the path between ensuring that content delivers great value for money for the audience whilst still providing a platform for the company presenting (i.e. the “advertiser”), then this could be a great source of both revenue for EE Times Group as well as providing an engaged audience for the advertiser. The test will be whether EE Times has the strength to stop companies turning these events into puffy product pitches. I hope the approach works, and would expect to see other publishers follow suit.

It’s interesting that EE Times Group is openly saying that the time where all online information is free is about to end. Paid-for webinars are just the start of the content for which they will charge, and the group is following in the footsteps of some mainstream titles, most notably Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers. Although this isn’t going to make me many friends amongst readers, I think that paywalls for high quality information are inevitable. Of course the question is where the bar will be set: I guess the line will be different from one industry to the next – and suspect that engineers might be very reluctant to part with money for anything but the highest value content. I can’t see sites that simply use press release information and derive most of their traffic from Google getting paying subscribers, but it’s not clear whether curation of good content will be enough or if people will only pay for unique content that is written in-house and that adds substantial intellectual or technical value.

I guess the good news for publishers is that publications in our industry have – and still do – get paying subscribers. Examples range from Microprocessor Report, a publication I subscribed to when I was an engineer and that now costs more than $1500 for an annual international subscription to local language titles such as ElectroniqueS and Elektronik.

EE Times Group also gave a “sneak preview” of their embedded research study. Of course it’s great information – it always is. Like most people at the event, however I was disappointed that the slides were rushed through so quickly that it was impossible to take in all the data – I didn’t know whether EE Times Group wanted us to know the results or not! However it was great to see that FreeRTOS was included in the study for the first time, and can now claim to be “the world’s most popular RTOS”. FreeRTOS isn’t currently a Napier client, but what Richard Barry has done amazes me, and I’m more than happy to give him a plug!

Tags: EE Times, Online, Social Media

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.

Tags: EE Times, Online

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

Once you have launched EE Times Europe? Richard Wallace has decided that the right thing to do is to look for the Next Silicon Valley, and has launched a website of that name. As some of the larger publishers struggle with the transition from paper to digital, I’m convinced that there will be opportunities for small independent publishers to carve out niches for themselves. Richard clearly has the talent to do this, and personally I’m delighted that he is addressing the electronics industry around the globe, including Europe.

Tags: EE Times, Electronics, EPE, Europe, Online

After the decision by EE Times Group (formerly TechInsights) to hold on to ESD Europe, rather than include it in the recent sale of EE Times Europe and Microwave Engineering Europe, I was disappointed to see the recent decision to move to all-digital distribution and cut frequency. Initially a 10-issue 2010 editorial calendar was produced, then an announcement was posted on Embedded.com/Europe and a new media pack issued telling of the change of strategy.

The European website www.embedded-europe.com has been closed, with all content integrated into www.embedded.com. Although I can see the logic of this move it’s disappointing that European visitors to the site will have to search for local content rather than the site using geo-targeting to highlight European stories along with the global content, nor is the site offering a URL with a European-orientated feed of news. I’m told we can expect this to be added in the future.

The magazine has also switched from 10 issues to 5 issues in 2010, with entirely digital circulation, although I’m told that the editorial content will be specific to the European edition with minimal re-use of material from the US ESD. The layout will be changed completely, moving to a screen-optimised format on the Nxtbook platform similar to recent EE Times special editions. The layout is nice – similar to ED Europe in some ways, but offering full page adverts as well as leaderboard and MPU fractional ads. It’s great to see a publisher recognise the need to optimise the layout for the readers, whilst allowing advertisers to use familiar formats with high visual impact. We’re also promised special editions, which will be driven by sponsors.

The digital magazine circulation is a little confusing. The new media pack promises:

The digital issue goes to over 100,000 subscribers and will be seen by over 50,000 European web users.

25,000 ESD global digital subscribers via email link.
30,000 ESD Europe subscribers via email link.
50,000 EETimes and TechOnline European subscribers via email link.
50,000 unique European visitors to Embedded.com every month.

So in addition to the European subscribers, anyone currently receiving the digital version of the US title who is based outside of Europe and the US will get ESD Europe – i.e. they’ll get both the US and European digital issues. The EE Times and TechOnline European database will also be used to deliver unrequested copies, and there will be links to the digital title on Embedded.com.

So what circulation should we assume for the title? To me the circulation we can be sure is really valuable are just the 30K requested European subscribers. Although there may be other high-quality recipients, at this stage they’ve not requested the title and it remains to be seen whether the move to a large headline circulation is clever move, or whether it will just dilute the quality of the existing ESD Europe database.

ESD Europe has also quietly slipped in a rate increase (full page rates were $2100 last year, and are now $3000: an increase of about 40%). The extra circulation might go some way to justifying this increase, and there are no surcharges for flash or video adverts, but most advertisers I know value digital magazine less highly than print.

The European Embedded email newsletters will increase in frequency, appearing twice a week, which will hopefully increase loyalty to the brand, as well as ensuring the database is well maintained.

It will be interesting to see the success of the new publication. In merging ESDE and ESE, It’s not clear to me why there is value in circulating a European title outside of Europe, but if the format is as good as the EE Times specials, and with Colin Holland remaining in the role of Editor in Chief, I believe that the quality of the editorial and the easy-to-read layout will ensure good readership. From the advertising viewpoint, TechInsights acquired a significant number of UK-orientated advertisers who presumably will be unenthusiastic about the broader reach of the title, and may choose other UK, whilst global advertisers might question why they need to advertise in both the US and European brands to reach people outside of these two geographies. As a believer in the eventual move of most magazines in our industry from print to digital, however, I’m hopeful that ESD Europe will be a successful title.

Tags: Advertising, CMP, Digital Magazines, ED Europe, EE Times, Electronics, Email, ESD, ESE, Europe, IET, Newsletters, Online, TechInsights, UK, Video

Although there has been no official announcement, I understand that one result of the sales of EE Times Europe is that local sites will be dropped, meaning that EE Times will no longer provide news in French and German. Although the publication had a number of local sites, the dropping of the other sites (Israel, Eastern Europe, etc) is unlikely to disappoint as the differences between the local and European sites were minimal. Although the crowded German market is perhaps a good reason why EE Times might not gain a significant share, it’s disappointing to see yet another publisher pull out of France. It’s inconceivable that the French market can only sustain one publication, and I hope to be able to tell you of a new launch in France before the end of the year.

Tags: EE Times, Europe, France, Germany, Israel, Online

At last night’s Elektra Awards, Paul Briggs, Group Publisher for Reed Technology Group, announced that Electronics Weekly and UBM are to form a strategic partnership for the Embedded Systems Conference and Exhibition, to be held on October 20-21st 2010 at Earls Court. A couple of months ago this partnership would have been almost unthinkable, but with the sale of EE Times, it seems almost anything is possible.

Of course it is good news that there will be two major companies behind the event next year, and I really hope it works. It does, however, need some radical thinking. Neither company generated large attendances at events this year, and more worryingly they didn’t appear to be able to attract big name exhibitors who must sign up early to encourage smaller exhibitors and visitors to attend.

The move will presumably see National Electronics Week refocus on its core electronics manufacturing sector, which may even increase the quality of the visitors, although they will have to work had to secure strong support from the media.

Overall it’s a good thing that we have commitment to ESC2010, but if it is to be a success the organisers need to think radically. Today exhibition success is not about achieving a particular revenue per square meter of booth space. It’s all about getting big-name companies who will not only attract visitors, but also proactively market the event to their databases, and provide compelling reasons to attend, such as running classes on the show floor. I hope that EW and UBM can see the benefit of this, and are able to announce commitments to exhibit from several major manufacturers.

Tags: Awards, EE Times, Electronics, Electronics Weekly, ESC, National Electronics Week, Reed, Shows and Events