Usually, when we attend a major conference, we run a “pre-conference” piece ahead of time – just to whet your appetite. This time, however, we decided to try something new. We are, after all, a new media publication. We want to show off some more of that new-media capability by covering this year’s ARM Developers’ Conference by webcast rather than by feature articles.
The idea started simply enough – On October 2nd, we celebrate Embedded Technology Journal’s second anniversary – a landmark event to be sure (at least if you work in one of our offices). With all the editorial feature article focus going to us for one week (that’s right, it’ll all be about us this time), we thought we should find a different venue for our conference coverage. Also, the typical tradeshow/conference event for us is a blitz of briefings – we typically talk with twenty or so experts from various companies, universities, and technology areas, and then try to assimilate the results into a single feature article that brings you the essence of the event. Sometimes, this over-distills the information into a tornado of triviality. “We talked with twelve different experts at this year’s conference, and all agree that many embedded designs will be moving to multi-core processing soon.” woo hoo. Tell me something I didn’t know…
The webcast format seems ideal for this kind of duty. We can bring you actual presentations, segments of presentations, interviews with presenters, presenters segmenting their presentations into interviewable sections, separate analyses of the sessions, segments where we present… OK, you get the idea – and all in a format that’s random access (kinda like the conference itself), so you can choose just the parts that interest you. If this works out (and we’re counting on you to tell us that by offering comments on the discussion board – click the link at the end of the article), we’ll be expanding our conference coverage and covering many more events this way. If it doesn’t work out – well, you’ll have front row seats at technology journalism’s equivalent of the Apple Newton, Quadrophonic Hi-Fi, BetaMax, and the mini-disc.
If you tour over to the “webcasts” section of our newsletters or front page, you’ll see that our conference coverage is already in full swing with pre-conference interviews and other streaming festivities. We’ll be updating the coverage just about every day, so check back often for updates. We’ll also be right on top of the feedback channel, so be bold with your comments and suggestions; it’ll help us tailor future coverage to meet your needs.
We’ll also be making a major announcement of our own at the conference. (We wouldn’t want to be left out, after all.) While we can’t say exactly what it is (without scooping ourselves), we can disclose that it rhymes with “new pub.” Oh, wait, it is a new pub. OK, but we’re not telling more than that. You see – it’s a time of big change in our industry, and we need to continue our expansion. We’ll tell you more during the event.
Well, we could go on here with miles of virtual ink telling you what to expect from this year’s ARM Developers’ Conference, but that wouldn’t really be what we’ve advertised here, would it? We suggest you jump on board right now by clicking this link: http://techfocus.acrobat.com/armdc
