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This day has been a long time coming - we can now officially announce that the Cadence MIPI Verification IP Online Labs are up and running!  This is a real vote of confidence in the platform from Cadence, and we’re looking forward to announcing more activity in the coming weeks.

Below is the full press release.  (Yes, the press release is trailing reality…but that’s the web for you.)

Online Community Lowers Cost of Sales, Enables Effective Leverage of Field Resources Globally

San Francisco, California – July 2, 2009 – Xuropa^SM Incorporated today announced the opening of the first Xuropa Online Lab featuring technology from Cadence Design Systems (NASDAQ:CDNS).

With only a web browser, approved visitors to Xuropa Online Labs can access the Cadence Incisive® MIPI verification IP Components. Users can run simulations, employing them on example circuits at their convenience.

The service is free to Xuropa Community members and dramatically simplifies the process of evaluating EDA software products. Users can begin to test drive applications in minutes vs. the days or weeks it used to take to get agreements signed, software downloaded, and keys installed.

The Xuropa Online Community presents networking and learning tools in a professional environment and is dedicated to electronic design.

Addressing a Dynamic and Global Marketplace

“The better educated customers are about Cadence products the more likely they are to call us. Having our technology available through Xuropa Online Labs enables customers to move beyond the datasheet to view presentations and videos, and actually use the technology themselves – at their desktops, and at their convenience,” added Susan Peterson, Verification IP Marketing Director at Cadence. “With no installation headaches to deal with, the evaluation process becomes more efficient and effective for us and our customers.”

Physical trade shows and conferences present engineers with the opportunity to try out new technologies and discuss them with experts. The Xuropa community complements these events by providing the tools and the experts online all year round, accessible from all over the world.

“Generic online communities are generally consumer-centric and electronic design companies tend to get lost in the noise,” Xuropa CEO and founder James Colgan explained. “The electronics industry focus of Xuropa brings resonance and helps electronic design companies connect with their customers. The Xuropa Online Lab, featuring the Cadence VIP, exemplifies our goal – to economically bring technology to engineers so they can make better purchase decisions faster.”

Availability

Xuropa Online Labs featuring Cadence Incisive MIPI verification IP are accessible at no cost to authorized Xuropa members. Go to www.xuropa.com and sign-in for access – Cadence MIPI CSI VIP Online Lab or Cadence MIPI DSI VIP Online Lab. For information about how to create your own Online Lab, or any of the other Xuropa community products, please contact Xuropa at the address below.

About Xuropa Incorporated

Xuropa^SM Incorporated was founded in 2007 by veterans from the internet, IT, and electronics industries. With the goal of economically and effectively bringing together the constituents of different industry verticals to accelerate business processes, Xuropa offers a unique environment that integrates professional networking, collaboration, marketing, and product evaluation tools. Xuropa’s current area of focus is the electronic design industry. http://www.xuropa.com/

Posted under News, Xuropa, business, industry

In 199_ (and I’m not mentioning which year) I got my first product marketing job.  It was all I wanted to do after I got my MBA — I wanted to drive the definition and completion of products.  I was coming in from an applications (sales) engineering position right into product marketing, which I thought would give me a good view on what customers needed and what the product had to look like — and it did.  I started right away defining a feature list, prioritizing them, cost-analyzing them, getting customer feedback, drive the schedules, etc.  I quickly found out that product marketing is a thankless job: there are too many people to make happy (customers, R&D, sales, executives, partners, etc.) and there’s no way to make them all happy; and you’re constantly trying to connect all of the dots and pick up the loose ends.

During my first months of product marketing, one of the company’s more experienced marketers, pulled me aside, as he was leaving the company, and told me not to sweat the “small stuff” like features, etc. and instead focus my thoughts and work around positioning and the overall vision of how the product is changing the industry.  That “lecture” didn’t make any sense at all!  I had a lot of respect for him, so I did take note of what he said, but it really didn’t change the way I went about product marketing at the time.

As a few years have passed by and I moved up through the ranks and eventually became a  executive, his comments began to make more and more sense.  In fact, I have come to the conclusion than feature-driven product marketing only sets your product for long-term failure.  It makes you focus on incremental change.  It is very surprising that a lot of my colleagues and consultant, and some that I have the ultimate respect for (example), still predominantly push a feature-driven approach to marketing.  I do realize that pitching a feature-driven approach works much better with less experienced CEOs and it is a better “consulting sell”, but I’m not convinced if it’s what really creates differentiation for their client companies.  I’d go back to what my old colleague told me — product marketing provides a lot more value if focused on the overall positioning (i.e. how differently the product is solving the customer problem) and the long term vision of how it’s bringing non-incremental value to the customer (technically and financially).

One way to drive this point is to highlight that if someone in the car industry polled customers in 1900’s about how a car should look like, the customers would have all said they’d want a carriage with a horse that eats less and “defecates” less!

Posted under business, 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