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There’s a lot of doom and gloom out there for those providing technologies into the electronic design supply chain.  And you hear of VC’s shying away from this field, but there are some out there that are getting funding:

• GateRocket: $3M (Today)
• Nusym Technology: $8M (Last week)
• Envivio: $25M (Last week)
• ChipX: $4M (August)

I know of one more up-and-coming EDA company that closed an undisclosed bridge round in June and is now going through a strategic-investor round B.

Many VC’s suffer from the herd mentality and are solely focused on CleanTech, BioTech and consumer internet.  But there are clearly some that understand the real challenges and opportunities in our industry and see a path to making a return on their investment.

As with other industries, we’ve been heading towards some significant changes for a while.  And for the first time in a long time, it’s not going to be solely a move to a new geometry that’s driving the new challenges.  Financial pressures are weighing on business models and geographic pressures are pushing on the way products are marketed, sold and supported.  Where there are challenges there are opportunities.

We at Xuropa are focused on resolving those business challenges - so you can be rewarded for solving the technical challenges.

If you’re looking for help in getting your technology out to a wider audience and overcoming these challenges, we’d like to hear from you.  Sign-in and click on “become an exhibitor“.

Do you know of anyone else closing funding?

Posted under industry

As an engineer, the measure of your experience is in what you’ve done and what tools you’ve used.  It’s crucial to your career that you not only keep ahead of the learning curve, but ensure that people know what you’re good at - what you’ve used and how well you know a technology.

This is where rating a product can help your profile within the industry and help the community at the same time.  While writing a review is a clearer indication of your abilities, we don’t always have the time.  Rating a product can be done in just a few minutes.

Why rate a product:

• Show future employers your depth of experience

By rating a product you’re showing that you’ve used it enough to have a good understanding of what it can do.  Its pros and cons.  More than that however, it also gives an indication that you have an appreciation of higher level concepts beyond the functionality of a technology - “Quality” could be considered a subjective metric, but we know good quality when we see it and it is good to work with people with a good appreciation and high standards of quality.

• Give guidance to fellow engineers

Other potential users of a product appreciate what another user thinks of a technology.  Everyone is busy, and so the rating of a product by a fellow engineer can help someone in the community.

• Give vendors feedback

Technology vendors also appreciate objective feedback on how their product is perceived in the field.  They need to know how their product is being used and where they can improve it to better meet the requirements of the users.

With just a few clicks you can promote yourself, provide the community input and give vendors feedback to improve their products.

Sign-in to the Xuropa Platform and click on the “Rate a Product” button on the left hand side.

Posted under Features, career

Already the web is alight with the chatter of the new browser from Google announced yesterday - Chrome.  There are a few things that bother me about this though.  The most important are productivity and the user experience.  Both of which come down to the same thing - standards.

Long ago, we in the electronic design industry learned the many advantages of creating, implementing and supporting standards. We realized that the point at which different products intersect is not where the value resides.  In addition, to make this point in the system standard increases “ecosystem” productivity and ultimately the value of the entire system.  Everybody wins.

In the world of web-based system and application development a great deal of productivity is wasted in building and testing software to execute to specification within the two leading browsers IE (our least favorite) and FireFox.  While competition is a good thing, and maybe we needed another 800lb gorrilla in the room to bring all of the standards together, to release a product that is beta 0.2 (!!!!) through a channel as powerful as Google’s is irresponsible.

To bring the security (already an issue discovered with Chrome), compatibility and user experience overhead to the web when Google has the resources to bring the industry quality and increased productivity is again irresponsible.

Google needs to take a stronger leadership position and start being “the adult in the room”.  They have the resources, the leverage and the war chest to deliver a product that can do that - they don’t need a 0.2 beta to “gain traction in the marketplace”.

Posted under industry