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The folks over at Ignite Social Media have done us another great service this year - they’ve collated and published their Social Analysis Report of geographic, demographic, and traffic data from various social networks around the web.

Of course, the list in the report is not complete (there’s not Orkut, for example - and I’m pretty sure there’s a network or two in Japan that have incredible stats, but are not listed here), but anyway here they are for your enjoyment.  You can get the full report here.

For those of you that are wondering about which social network to leverage to get into a particular geography, I’ve taken the geographic distributions and mapped them into a table below.

Here are some interesting observations and questions:

• There are only four truly global properties: Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and Youtube
• The survey appears US centric in its viewpoint and sampling
• What is the dominant social network in Japan?
• What is the dominant social network in China?
• LinkedIn and Plaxo appear to follow the english speaking high-tech population and its dominant outsourcing partner India (although LinkedIn isn’t as strong in the UK as Plaxo)
• I thought that Hi5 was the dominant Spanish speaking social network, but it does not appear to be very strong throughout the diaspora.
• I don’t see a social network with a distribution that falls along religious lines.  Unfortunately, this may happen in the not so distant future.

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Posted under marketing

Maybe it was just me, but the energy level at the 47th Design Automation Conference was higher than it’s been in a number of years.  It could have been a combination of things - general signs of an exit from The Great Recession; the M&A activity in the industry; a new market approach from Cadence got everyone a-buzz; and everywhere I went I heard discussions about Cloud Computing (and it wasn’t just because I was stood there ).

Bernie Meyerson, vice president of innovation at IBM, made a keynote speech on Wednesday that was wide ranging, but spent a great deal of time asserting that Cloud Computing is the future of IC Design.  Richard Goering wrote this up nicely on his blog here.  You should take a look.  The full keynote video is here, pick up what Dr. Meyerson had to say about the Cloud at around minute 38:00.

A crucial point to emphasize from Dr. Meyerson’s speech is the real issue at the heart of the computing challenge facing all industries, not just electronic design - IT resource overhead.  While it is tempting, as engineers, to focus on the technology of cloud computing (performance, upload time, latency, security, etc.) it is this business aspect of the equation that is the driver.  ie. The Total Cost of Ownership of data centers is out of control - driving a company’s balance sheet in the wrong direction.

If you missed the panel “Does IC Design Have a Future in the Clouds?“, don’t worry.  It was videoed and should be coming online soon.  For me, it was great fun to participate with a tremendous amount of interaction with the audience.  To the point where the Chair (Raul Camposano) had to cut off questions from the floor.  (He almost cut of Harry “The ASIC Guy“, but he was saved by the crowd.)  Richard Goering mentioned on his blog that he will put up a post about the panel soon, but in the meantime, you can catch a write-up of some of the highlights over at EETimes by Nicolas Mokhoff here.

If you were at the show, what were your impressions?  If you weren’t able to make it - did the various online channels get you what you needed?
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Posted under Xuropa, industry

Just yesterday, I introduced you to one of the winners in our Do More With Less contest. Today, I’d like to tell you about the Grand Prize Winner, Sigasi.

Shortly after we announced the contest back in April, I had a great conversation with Philippe Faes who is the CEO of Sigasi. I had called him because he had not indicated on his entry form which tool he would like to put on Xuropa if Sigasi were to win the contest. That was when he surprised me by saying that he did not really have a tool in mind.  “I just believe in what you are trying to do and I want to support it.”

Sigasi’s winning entry into the contest, How to Sell EDA Tools In Liechtenstein, addresses one of the problems that Xuropa is trying to solve … how a small company with limited resources can sell into a global marketplace and compete with the big guys. Philippe saw that we were trying to help guys like him, so he wanted to help us. No strings attached. We did not even need to give him a prize.

Well, as it turns out, Sigasi was the grand prize winner. After some discussions, Philippe came up with a great idea.

“How about showing our tool working together with the Xilinx tools?”

This was something we had wanted to do for some time, show how tools from multiple vendors can work together on the cloud.  And now we had a chance to show that it was possible. Philippe and his team did all the work and today I can announce that the Sigasi-Xilinx Lab is available on Xuropa!

Philippe is coming all the way from Belgium to attend the Design Automation Conference in Anaheim, volcano permitting. There’s no Sigasi booth on the show floor, but there’s a Sigasi booth on Xuropa and wherever Sigasi goes next week, Xuropa will be with them.

If you are attending the conference, follow us on Twitter and we’ll announce where and when you can meet with Philippe. If not, you can still visit Sigasi’s virtual booth on Xuropa. And try out their tools while you’re there.

We hope to see you, one way or the other.

Posted under Xuropa