It’s even better when we can say that the Europe leads the way, which is definitely the case for the Embedded Software Engineering Kongress. The organisers of this event, MicroConsult und ELEKTRONIKPRAXIS, confidently tell me that, with over 600 visitors expected for this year’s event, is the leading embedded software event in the world.

If you want to participate in the ESE Kongress, you need to submit an abstract online by 14th May.

As Johann Wiesböck, Editor in Chief and Publisher of ELEKTRONIKPRAXIS tells me, "Software is the future…"

OK, Elektronik Praxis are not the first or only magazine to do editorial video interviews (as opposed to paid-for interviews). ED Europe and ECE have both done this very successfully. Elektronik Praxis, however, effectively turn a part of their booth into a TV studio, and because they are not having to visit different stands, they should be able to create even more content. Check back on Napier News after the show, when I’ll review the video that all the different publishers created at Embedded World.

So who were the winners and losers? Well not surprisingly the raw readership results are less flattering for the three Weka titles than La Elfa, although unsurprisingly even this study still shows M&T as the title with the highest reach. Elektronik Praxis does well, beating Elektronik to have the second-highest reach. Elektronik Industrie is another winner, “beating” D&E. In this study respondents are asked about the pan-European titles, which don’t score well, although EPN gets the highest readership (who says product books are dead!).

So what does this mean? Well like all studies this one isn’t the perfect solution to media planning – like all the others it provides useful information, but also can’t be the perfect answer. Even if the surveys were perfect, we still wouldn’t plan a media schedule by blindly chasing the highest reach (and there should be a special mention for Elektronik Informationen, which was the first title to contact me about the study, and to highlight the positive conclusions you can draw about the title from the study). Why not contact me for a more detailed comparison of the two surveys?

I don’t cover all the website redesigns on Napier News, but thought that the E Praxis site was interesting for a couple of reasons. Firstly the site naviation – drop down lists of [quite a large number of] categories – do make it very easy to go straight to useful relevant content. Also the social networking side of the site seems to have been de-emphasised, although I believe all the functionality remains. E Praxis were a leader in adding social networking onto their website, but it looks like engineers don’t need or want social networking on a magazine website. Maybe it will happen, but I guess that the audience of magazine sites are simply too small and too focussed to sustain social networks.