My son would most likely be an engineer.  He’s already shown a number of traits that leads me to that conclusion:  For his age, he’s very advanced in math and science; He loves building things; He loves being recognized for his work; etc.  And yes, there’s another trait: He loves things that are “free”.  He would spend $10 to get a $5 thing for free!!

To a lot of people, acquiring something for free is in itself a reward worth more than the thing itself.  People most often associate a higher value for something that’s “free”.  But this it true as long as it’s tangible - i.e. it’s a “thing”.

On the other hand, if you offer your opinion for free, it is taken as just that ….  Many years ago, I learned that doing pro-bono consulting as way to get engaged with a client and then grow it into a consulting contract later just doesn’t work.  A consulting contract would only happen if the client sees value in your services.  Once you’ve offered it for free, the value perception of the service is almost entirely washed out and hence it’s almost impossible to recreate it to a point that it’s worth paying for.

Lesson learned: Always combine your pro-bono consulting with a free “thing”!  Make sure there is a deliverable at the end where your value is captured.  If it’s a report or presentation, deliver it in a nicely bound printed on good quality paper.  If it’s something that required a lot of time and heavy thinking, make it large and heavy.  In either case, present it with a big final bang (invite board members, make several copies, etc.).

Once your have the free “thing” delivered, it’s much easier to move to the contract negotiation.

Original post in 1@Market

Posted under business, career, industry, marketing

OK.  This one’s a bit controversial, and I don’t necessarily subscribe to it. But…. someone whom I respect greatly as a high tech executive made that statement in a coffee conversation last week, and I thought I’d be interesting to share his point of view.

Posted under business, career, industry, marketing

The internet used to thought of as “cyberspace”.  Being online simply meant being an anonymous consumer of information.  But that was then!  The internet of today is identity-centric and social.  Internet users create blogs, upload their information to social networking sites, share ideas and contents, and they do it from their computers, iPhones, cellphones, etc.  This is what I refer to as “worldwide web” moving to “social web”.

There is a generational element to this as well: Web 2.0 (i.e. social web) is still hard to fathom for some baby boomers, but at the same time, there are larger and larger groups of baby boomers starting to post photos, opinions, etc. on the Facebook, for example.  They’re beginning to see how social the internet can be.

People in (or using) Web 2.0 have already internalized what doesn’t yet seem as a business practice by others.  Unfortunately maturing industries like EDA and semiconductor look at Web 2.0 as “social”, and hence constantly raise the question “why do we want to socialize with our customers” or “why would our customers socialize amongst themselves?” — They take the word “social” quite literally.

It’s not necessarily common business wisdom to bring customer experience into aggregators (such as Digg, Yelp, Ning, Xuropa, evenFacebook, etc.).  With these aggregators, even though things happen far away from a company’s destination site, it’s the engine of social discovery that generates astronomically more awareness than the destination site would ever create, and yes, it also generates huge volumes of traffic to the company’s destination site.

A simple example: Netflix opened up their database through an API last October.  Through this API other companies (e.g. aggregators) can access titles, ratings, queues, etc. information from Netflix. By “socializing” the Netflix experience, Netflix now gets 20+M film ratings every single day.  Does it really doesn’t matter where (which website) these titles are rated?!  It all benefits Netflix.

It’s time for EDA and semiconductor companies to see how they can benefit from Business 2.0.  EDA and semiconductor technology is the most advanced ones and those industries solve the most difficult challenges on the technical side.  Yet, they have totally missed the boat on what other industries have already accepted as common business wisdom.  They need to “socialize” their user-experience, create awareness, and turn that into revenue.

Posted under Xuropa, business, career, industry, marketing

I had lunch with a friend of mine last week - one of the best recruiters I know.  Obviously due to not many companies hiring, as effective as she is, she is not having an easy time getting paid for her services these days.  She was however bragging about a company that she’s still working with.  When I asked her how that company is doing, she responded saying “well, they had a great CES.”

I hear that all the time.  ”We had a great CES” … “We had a great DAC” … “We had a great SEMI” ….. And I always wonder what that really means.  To me it’s very comic because in none of these phrases the word “great” is defined, so no one is really wrong about the statement and it totally depends on their perspective and more importantly their (sometimes low) standards.

At the same time, I have heard a few VP’s of sales quoted saying “there are two types of leads: my contacts, and useless ones!”  I actually found that statement more ludicrous than the “we had a great CES” statement [No wonder sales guys get such a bad rap!].  This statement is merely an attempt by some sales VP’s to explain why they can’t start sales engagements with people they don’t already have a relationship with.  All a good sales guy needs to start an engagement is a phone number and phone.  Nevertheless, the industry is full of sales guys who constantly sell themselves based on their rolodex - and unfortunately the industry is also full of VC’s who buy that [stuff].

What everyone seems to miss is something that I have been using in my consulting practice.  There is a difference between “leads” and “touches”.  Most people who visit your stand at the trade shows are “touches”.  ”Leads” are those who 1) have understood your value proposition, and 2) would (at some point) fall in your target segment.  In consumer marketing, the difference between the two is rather small: value propositions are easier to understand, and based on demographics it’s relatively simple to know when and how to approach the lead.  In high tech marketing, the difference between the two is so large that it could cause startups to fail or larger companies to totally miss the market.

Unfortunately most marketing executives measure the success of a trade show by the number of “touches”.  Touches cannot be counted on as whether a target audience is grasping your value proposition and more importantly how it all translates into sales activity.  For the most part, the more gimmicky your stand is the more touches you’ll have.  Touches just represents how many people came to the stand (for whatever reason).  It could even include a lot of your competitors.

The real challenge is knowing shortly after a trade show who the leads were.  This requires knowing every touch’s profile, behavior, and experience.  If you knew someone who came to your stand was in the market for similar products, you’d immediately know that he or she is a lead.  This information is however not readily available till months after traditional trade shows.  So I personally believe the value of traditional trade shows gets diluted as more and more people (high quantity) attend them and as it becomes more and more difficult to know about the attendees (less quality).

What comes into picture is new technology.  With online communities and their trade shows, the profile, background, experience, (purchase) behavior of visitors is readily available.  These modern (online) trade shows also enable a wider reach, a 24/7 approach, and lower cost.  A good example of these online community and trade shows is Xuropa.  Xuropa has created a community of the individuals and companies in the electronic design ecosystem.  It also hosts many trade show style stands, suites, and labs for companies to offer a view into their technology - but the real difference is that companies can easily see who the visitors are and quickly qualify the right ones from a touch to a leads.

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“We had a great Xuropa” - people around the industry will soon be saying!

Posted under Xuropa, business, career, industry, marketing

To quote Shakespeare’s Richard III, ”Now is the winter of our discontent”, or at least, we’re hoping that it doesn’t get much “colder”!  While pundits do say ”it” will still get worse before it gets better, the current economic climate will not last forever.  So, ever the optimist, the longer we’re in it, the closer we are to the end!

However, in this period of job (in)security, we’d like to announce that Xuropa has just opened two ”Job Centers” within the Online Electronic Design Community.

• Career Center: Seeking Career Positions - where to post a description of the ideal job you’re looking for
• Career Center: Seeking Professionals - where to post a description of the professional you’re looking to hire

It’s perfectly FREE for anyone to list positions that are open and for job seekers to post their ideal career move.  Just go to one of the Job Center Online Booths and make your entry in the Forum or browse the positions and professionals as the forums become populated.

Once you’ve made a post to the Forum you’ll be automatically updated with any responses.  If you want to contact the poster, go to the posters Professional Profile and send them a message.  Email addresses are kept strictly confidential, but we facilitate you making the connection.

Note however that we do not allow any anonymous postings.

Of course, this ties in closely to your Professional Profile on Xuropa.  Ensure this is current either manually or by importing your LinkedIn profile.  Also, make sure your list of specializations and skills is up to date.  LinkedIn doesn’t cover these aspects of an electronic design professionals background, so you’ll need to do this manually.

Good luck, what ever you’re looking for!

Posted under Community, career, industry

One of the advantages of the software-as-a-service SaaS (or even a more broad Web 2.0) business model is that the starting costs could be relatively low and even with a few (good) engineers it’s possible to reach a revenue-generation point in a short amount of time.  However, what do you do so you are able to profitably grow after you hit the first-revenue point?

Posted under Xuropa, business, career, industry

I visited Facebook last week.  I’ve gotten a lot of emails asking me about how my visit was so I promised everyone that I’d do a blog post about it.

It was a very interesting experience.  I went there to see a friend who is working in the R&D group.  What I saw there was a great feeling of team, bright individuals, innovation, energy, and openness.

It reminded me of EDA in the late 80’s — at least my experience in VLSI’s software group.  VLSI was a renegade semiconductor company which started the ASIC model along with LSI Logic.  Everyone viewed us as they view Facebook today: “This is all cool stuff, but how are they going to make a profitable business out of this?!!

At that point, VLSI only hired the best from the best schools (as Facebook does today).  We were mostly in our early 20’s (as Facebook today).  We worked together, had lunch together, partied together, shared housing together, even dated (as in Facebook today): Work was more than just work (and in fact to this day some of my closest friends post-college are those I met at VLSI).  As my friend and I had lunch in the Facebook café (yes, it was free food!), I noticed a lot of similarities with those days in EDA.

As it always happens, EDA matured (as semi had before that) and companies became “corporations”.  Work became just work.  It really makes me wonder about the whole dynamic around corporations: less entrepreneurial, closed, paranoid, ….  I always wondered, for example, why don’t corporations use Macs.  Macs are better (performance), must safer, cost compatible, and open.  My thought: Macs just don’t fit the bill because they’re just not “corporate”.  As it turns out, corporations are also having a hard time today dealing with Facebook, or social networking in general - Facebook is not “corporate” either.

In the mid 90’s, corporations were struggling to deal with “this internet thing”.  A lot of companies were limiting employees access because they feared employees would just waste their time browsing.  I used to hear that argument all the time.  Could you imagine if someone would limit the use of the internet at work today?  All employees (and management) would be up in arm asking “how’d we get our jobs done?!!”

So 15 years later and now corporations are questioning Facebook.  They’re looking for ways to limit employees time on Facebook, or other social network/media for that matter.  Instead they can be greatly leveraging it.  There is an insightful article in FastCompany magazine this month about how Cisco is embracing social network within the company to dramatically invigorate innovation and leadership.  It’s a bold move by John Chambers (Cisco CEO), one that requires openness, something not typically “corporate”.

Cisco’s vision is highly appliable to electronic design companies.  Xuropa is enabling professional networking dynamics built around technology-networking (a la social-networking) focused on the entire electronic design supply chain.  Xuropa’s platform is something that electronic design companies can leverage (just as Cisco’s already doing using other social/professional networks), to revitalize innovation and leadership, and significantly impact the bottom line.

Back to Facebook:  We, as high tech professional, have been taught to believe that someone needs to have a need first, and then we’d create the solution — and more complicated the solution the better.  As I talk around the industry, I run into people who are upset (and even belligerent) about why Facebook is getting so much attention.   “What are they trying to solve?”, I’m often asked.

What I find Facebook’s genius to be is that they (most likely by luck, and perhaps because they just didn’t know anything different) identified a trend (that people spend more time on the web than TV, phone, radio, writing letters, reading books, etc. combined) and created a fairly simple platform to enable what people would usually do on TV, phone, etc.  They didn’t wait for a problem, they just closed their eyes and imagined “what if …”.  That is really the genius behind the Facebooks, the Nings, and the Xuropa’s.

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Posted under Xuropa, business, career, industry, marketing

I remember throughout my career, every time the economic situation was tightening, I kept hearing from my bosses and other executives to “do more with less”.  And needless to say, every time I heard that phrase, I found it extremely insulting.  As if I wasn’t already doing more with less?!!  To me it always sounded as if I was being told I was getting fewer resources (and perhaps needed to cut people), more work is getting piled on me, and that it really doesn’t matter what the quality of the results are.

What people don’t realize is that one **can** instead focus on getting more (even with fewer resources) by doing things better.  And doing better doesn’t necessarily mean doing more.

So how would you just do better?  The key to the answer if finding how to do better with less.  In my opinion, doing so relies heavily on how open you are to adopt new ideas.  Doing better with less means not necessarily doing the same but instead finding ways to fundamentally create a **positive** change (and not necessarily change for the sake of change).

Let me clarify with an example: Let’s say you spent $5,000 on a trade show and collect 500 leads.  500 for $5,000 leads may be a great or mediocre outcome depending on the industry, the trade show itself, etc.  so take that just as an example.  There are tons of ways to try to do better with less - one example being just improving the booth messaging (more clear, more targeted, more interesting, etc.) and hence spending $3,000 to shooting to get 600 leads  However, do get the more dramatic value is to step out and think about why you’re attending trade shows in the first place.

In my consulting practice, most clients are going through severe cost/benefit analysis, especially on trade shows.  What is driving this re-evaluation is the change that is taking place in sales and marketing in general.  Up to recently, marketing was what I refer to as “broadcast” marketing - the vendor(s) as well as users closely associated with the vendor(s) broadcast an integrated message to a target audience.  In the last few years (predominantly since 2004), sales and marketing is taking on more of an “engagement” model.  Marketers are not engaging target audiences in discussions and make their (still integrated and campaign-driven) points through communities, discussions, and blogs.

If you think engagement marketing only applies to consumer market, you’re fooling yourself.  In 2005, when I was VP of marketing and business development at Calypto, I was pitched by our PR agency to start looking at blogs as a way to reach our audiences.  My reaction was that I was being **pitched** for more services and ultimately being asked to spend more money with the agency (which I’m sure was partly the case).  So I dismissed the idea quickly.  Blogging was probably too early for the deeply technically rooted electronic design industry, but I do acknowledge that I wasn’t being open to doing things “better”.  Three years later, and I see evidently that smart marketers, even in the electronic design industry, are turning into leveraging communities and blogs to reach their audiences **better** (and doing it with less resources).

Another example: Virtual trade shows have been around for a couple of years now - but they’re built on the conventional broadcast marketing paradigm.  Virtual trade shows **could** probably allow you to do more with less.  However, there are key new technologies out there to accommodate the shift to engagement marketing.  One great example is Xuropa.  Xuropa is a new community (with all of the bells and whistles), built around the electronic design community, which enables user-user and user-vendor discussions, engagement, and even collaboration.  It not only provides for broadcast marketing, but these days we’re dealing with a whole new set of sophisticated users who dislike being broadcasted to and would rather prefer to have an active voice with their vendors.

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Bottom line:  There are many ways to approach the “need to do more with less” pep talk.   However, to “get the most” you might need to step out of the box and look for new ways and technology to exceed your objectives.  Doing this might also avoid turning off your employees by the pep talk, and instead motivate them and bring new energy during the budget crisis.

……

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Posted under Xuropa, business, career, industry, marketing

As we continue through our career we acquire skills and specializations along the way.  This is what builds up in an interesting way to form what we generically call “experience”.

How do you capture this experience within a description of the value you could bring to a new position or project?  After a few years into a career the list can get pretty long and there are nuances that are hard to capture.

For example, it’s been nearly 20 years since I programmed in assembly language.  I’m not a developer, but that experience gives me a good appreciation of what someone in my team would have to go through (if they were unfortunate enough to still be using assembly of course).  Ultimately, a static resume can only take you so far.  And a textual description is cumbersome to wade through.

Your Skills and Specialization Inventory

The Xuropa Professional Profile offers the solution.  Using a self guided tool within the My Profile section you quickly build up your inventory of Skills and Specializations.

Specializations

1. Select the field within which you developed the Specialization: Semiconductor, IP, EDA, Software, or System.
2. Select the area: Engineering or Business
3. Select the domain of your expertise
4. Select whether the specialization is still current or not.

Even if a Specialization is not current, it’s important that it’s taken into consideration.  A business background built upon engineering experience is very valuable.  But no one’s going to ask a sales person to dive in and start writing Verilog.

Skills

The same goes for Skills:

1. Choose the domain: ex. “languages and protocols”
2. Select the sub-domain: ex. “protocols”
3. Check off all of the protocols you have a skill with (or HAD skills with)
4. Select the number of years you used that skill for
5. Select if the skill is current or not

Now when you view your Skills and Specialization inventory you will see everything that you’ve done or used over the years in a simple table.

You will see that this effects your Community Map considerably as well.  All of a sudden you see that different people within the community are now represented as closer to you than before.  This tool shows you close associations and can indicate someone that you have a lot in common with and should connect to.  They could be someone you should have on your team for the next project!

Thank you Cary Snyder for the inspiration for this post!

Posted under career

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