Our first year saw explosive growth in the “ecosystem” of embedded system development, including rapid expansion of open-source offerings for embedded design, increased competition in the commercial software, tools, and IP space, and a reckoning of the co-existence of open-source and commercial components within the same systems. We watched ARM and MIPS roll out new processor offerings, Wind River, Microsoft, and Mentor Graphics turn up the competitive heat on embedded device operating systems, and we tracked a wide variety of announcements from companies whose offerings accelerate the development cycle for device software and hardware platform development.
At Embedded Technology Journal, we view ourselves as an advocate and informer for you as a design engineer. We feel that our role is to examine the common aspects of embedded system technology and engineering that apply across problem domains and applications and to keep you up on the latest trends, techniques, and tools that will help you be more effective in your job. We also feel that it is our duty to keep you entertained as well as informed. There are plenty of publications that will just give you the data, reformat the press releases, or even publish with no original content at all. We want to do a bit more so you can have fun, and we can too. (The mariachi band will be knocking on your door any minute… You can let them in, it’s OK — we ordered them for you.)
Even if you don’t like mariachi music, we want to provide you with some insightful analysis of trends in technology, in the industry and market, and in engineering as a career. We have an opinion on most issues, and we’re usually not afraid to put it forward. Most of the e-mail we get from you tends to agree with us (it’s great to have a following of “yes” men), and the comments that don’t challenge us to respond and learn.
Year one is a trial period for a new publication – the time when you gauge the audience response to see if it’s worth continuing publication or whether you should fold up the tent and go back to writing about garden implements. (Have you seen the fall lineup of rakes and hoes?) Embedded Technology Journal has garnered more response than we had dreamed possible, with over 20,000 regular readers joining us in our first year and almost 10,000 subscribers to our weekly e-mail newsletters. The response from our advertising sponsors has been overwhelming as well.
Embedded Technology is actually the newest publication from Techfocus Media. Our big-brother publication, “FPGA Journal,” has been around for several years now, and frankly, it’s kinda tough being the younger sibling. You know how it is – the first kid learns to walk, and everybody’s taking video and blowing up 16X20 prints of them hanging onto a coffee table or falling down the staircase. The older kid learns to read and everybody wants to hear their newfound talent. Then, you come along as the new kid with a big number two on your forehead, and everything’s already been done. You start trying to learn to walk, and your parents get distracted by the TV while you quietly stumble into the fireplace. You start learning to read, and nobody bothers to point out that you’re holding the book upside down. It’s difficult to impress.
Over the next year, we have big plans for Embedded Technology Journal. In addition to today’s web page and e-news entrances into our content, we’ll be rolling out more diverse means for you to get to our articles and news stories, including RSS feeds and a few newfangled things we’re not talking about yet. (Hey, even publications need trade secrets.) We’ll also be increasing the number and frequency of webcasts, as the response to our early ones has been excellent.
We’d like very much to hear more from you! Our “comments” e-mail line is always open, and we listen carefully to readers’ suggestions about ideas and direction for our publication. In fact, we’ll be acting on several of those ideas over the next couple of months. We’re excited to have you along as we grow and evolve, and we value a two-way communication during that process.
Already, we see a big lineup of announcements coming your way before the end of 2006, and we’ll be here to give you our unbiased take on them. New processors, new development boards, new and exciting peripheral devices, new software and hardware development tools, and lots and lots of new marketing hype are on their way. Stay tuned as we help you sort through the noise to pick out what will work best for your next system design.
We’d also be remiss if we didn’t thank our energetic staff for their enormous effort in launching Embedded Technology Journal and seeing it through its first year. Laura Domela, Shirley Rice, Kayla Kurucz, Amelia Dalton, Rosemary Maguire, and Amy Malagamba have all worked tirelessly to get us where we are today. Now they’re all down at the bar having a drink, and I’m trying to figure out which button to press to publish a new edition. Hmmm… what does “reformatting drive C:” mean anyway?
