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Great - another acronym.  As twitter grows I expect more of these to come along.  Anyway, I saw it this morning on Harry Gries’ blog, and it stands for “Yet Another Social Network”.

Harry painstakingly gathered tweets from a thread and tied them all together into an interesting conversation.  You would not have got this conversation if you a) had not been “following” every member of the conversation and b) not been on Twitter at the exact time it was going on.  So, thanks Harry!

I put a pretty long comment on Harry’s blog, but there’s a point I’d like to emphasize.

JL Gray was wondering if “we” needed another social network when it came to Xuropa.  Of course, my answer to that is - he’s right, we need a professional network.  At the same time he was making that comment he added that using Cadence tools on Xuropa was “cool”.  And that’s the whole point - using the actual Cadence tools with no downloads, plug-ins, or license agreements is very cool.  But more to the point - it’s useful.  Xuropa is about providing a community that is useful and specific to your career and work.

Within a Xuropa Online Lab you can use the tools and ask questions of the tool’s application engineer directly; read the manual, or watch a video about how to use the tool.  At the same time, if you want to twitter about it, great!  Write a blog post, wonderful! Write about it on someone’s “wall”, knock yourself out!  Each of these social networks has its purpose and focus (or not).

Here’s a video introduction to one of the Cadence MIPI Labs on Xuropa:

This is what Xuropa is about.  Connecting engineers with technology.  The rest is up to you.

Posted under Community, Features, Xuropa, 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