RonAmok!

On March 31, 2007, The Electronic Design Automation (EDA) Industry took one small step for a vendor, and one giant leap for the industry, as Synopsys published the first EDA vendor-sponsored blog called Magic Blue Smoke. Whimsically named after the mysterious blue smoke that emerges from a failing integrated circuit, the blog was designed to cover an ultra-niche topic — low power ASIC design.

The move was unprecedented because for the first time, an employee could publish content to the corporate website without being hamstrung by the least-common-denominator wisdom of a committee. Even more impressive was that the blogger was chosen from the applications engineering ranks, as opposed to a marcomm seat-warmer who couldn’t tell the difference between an electron and an electric blanket. And since he works side-by-side with Synopsys users, helping them tapeout their multi-million transistor chips, Godwin Maben was the perfect choice to write this blog.

His first post was published with little fanfare. Entitled Vt Cells Spacing Requirements, Godwin adopted an academic approach to his writing, one that he’s continued through today. 72 weeks, 44 blog posts, and 101 comments later, Godwin has become a very popular figure within the low power ASIC design community. How do I know this? Well, under full disclosure, I used to work for Synopsys. In 2006, I convinced the VP of Marketing to bring New Media to Synopsys. Between February 2007 and May 2008, I was Synopsys’s New Media Evangelist and Godwin’s blogging coach.

Over the past 72 weeks, Synopsys has quietly added seven more blogs to its stable. Together, they’ve produced 227 posts and gathered 260 comments.

* * *

I first heard of Tom Diederich on March 21, 2008 through a Web Strategy by Jeremiah post that announced him as Cadence Design Systems‘ new Social Media/Web Community Manager. I remember looking at the calendar and immediately firing off an email to upper management letting them know that the clock was now running. Synopsys had just about a one-year head-start on Cadence in the Social Media space and it was going to be interesting to see how Tom and Cadence would approach the task.

On July 14th, just five short weeks ago, Cadence became the second EDA vendor to adopt New Media technologies. And they did it in true Cadence fashion — in a BIG way. Instead of playing it safe and dipping a toe into the water, Cadence cannonballed off the diving board, splashing their new community all over the front page of their newly designed website — a virtual “Shock and Awe” campaign for electrical engineers!

To be fair, when I first looked at the website, I was skeptical. It took me a while to grasp what Tom had orchestrated.

The Cadence Community consists of three parts: blogs, forums, and resources. The forums and the resources were easy enough for me to figure out, but I had a hard time getting my head around the blogs because of an interesting twist that was put on them.

Synopsys had chosen to match a blog with a blogger, such as Godwin and his Magic Blue Smoke. But Cadence did something a little differently. They charged 33 bloggers to write for 9 different categories. At first this looks crazy, but after a month, a pattern has developed and I can see the method to their madness.

A Cadence blogger writes a post on a subject that he or she is qualified to speak about. Before posting, the blogger tags that post with one of the 9 categories, thus ensuring that the blog post is filed appropriately. By using this system, Tom has created 43 individual RSS feeds for his customers to choose from (9 categories + 33 bloggers + 1 ‘all blogs’ feed) Therefore, if I only want information on Functional Verification, I subscribe to that category’s RSS feed. Or, if I want to just follow the writings of an old acquaintance (More disclosure, I used to work at Cadence too!), all I need to do is subscribe to Adam Sherer‘s feed. It took me a little while to figure out how to take advantage of this flexibility, but now that I understand it, I’ve setup my feeds accordingly.

Note: I do however recommend that Cadence create some example “use models” to help new users, who may not be as well versed in RSS, take advantage of this flexibility.

So, how is this new community working? Well, last week, Tom released a one month report card, letting us all know the answer. He says:

Since our July 14 launch – that is, in just 30 days — 6,534 people have registered, and they’ve contributed almost 1,000 posts. Pretty good!

Pretty good indeed based on some of the publicly available numbers that I’ve tracked from both companies websites. Let’s compare apples to apples.

I think that Tom has understated his progress:-)

In just five weeks, Cadence is producing blog content at a rate four times that of Synopsys. If Cadence’s blogging engine continues cranking out content at this rate, it’ll soon swamp the good work that Synopsys has been doing for almost a year and a half. Conservatively, even if they drop off a little as the enthusiasm wears off, they still have Synopsys beaten by sheer volume.

Of course, we can’t forget quality, which I believe Synopsys still has an edge with. Its strong 1.15 comment-to-post ratio demonstrates an active audience compared with Cadence’s 0.55. This lower than desired ratio may have some explanations though: 1) The Cadence blogs are only a month old and thus still building their audiences, 2) the bloggers are still finding their voice, or 3 (which is MY pet peeve) only registered members are allowed to leave comments! I don’t know the details, but I’m willing to bet that Tom fought for open comments and decided to lose the battle so that he could win the overall war:-)

I’m also expecting that the 33 bloggers will start stratify over time, as the long-term bloggers separate themselves from the crowd and rise to the top. A blog-by-blog analysis shows that of Cadence’s 33 listed bloggers, 7 have never written a post, 10 have only written one, and the highest number of posts from a single blogger is nine (might as well give an “attaboy” to Gerald “Jerry” Grzenia ). Management of these bloggers will greatly enhance the quality of the posts.

Lastly, although I’d like to compare the Synopsys Forums with the Cadence Forums, there’s really is no comparison. Launched at the same time as Godwin’s blog, the Synopsys forums continue to languish, as 259 registered users have only contributed 141 posts in 72 weeks, compared with Cadences 6500 registered users creating 1000 posts in the last 30 days. I gotta believe that the Synopsys User Community feels like General Custer at Little Big Horn.

I’m very excited that Cadence has raised the New Media bar in EDA. The more EDA vendors that jump into the mix, the better informed their mutual customers will be. Right now there are only two players in the game: Synopsys and Cadence. Are you listening Mentor Graphics or Magma?

Great job, Tom! It’ll be very interesting to see how, or if, Synopsys responds to your challenge.

Tags: New Media Evangelist ronamok synopsys cadence magma mentor eda blogs forums metrics measurements comparison community business-to-business b2b

I have a huge advantage when it comes to New Media research and it’s not because I have a big budget for analysis from the likes of Forrester and Gartner. My advantage is derived from the fact that I am the father of two Net-Gens.

A Net-Gen is one of the two billion people born between 1977 and 1997. What makes them special is that they only know a world filled with networked machines which they use on a day-to-day basis. My two “little” Net-Gens were born in 1990 and 1993 respectively, and having them in the house is like having my own New Media research lab. Whenever I want to know what’s going on “out there,” all I need to do is observe my Net-Gens. And they never steer me wrong.

A couple of weeks ago, while raiding the refrigerator (an occupational hazard of the home office) I noticed my son Bryan sitting on the couch watching television — or so I thought. Closer inspection revealed that he was doing something incredibly different…

…like simultaneously playing a video game WHILE watching a sitcom!

To be more specific, he had set the television into split-screen mode. In one screen, he piped a DVR-time-shifted sitcom. In the other, he played a video game on his Wii.

Rather than bothering him, I did what any self-respecting New Media Evangelist would do; I grabbed my video camera and started shooting. As I stood there, with the video camera whirling away, I had a thought.

Soon, Bryan and his peers will be purchasing cars, houses, and patronizing various businesses. And that got me to thinking about the information that businesses create. I thought about the obsequious business marketing drivel that emanates from Marcomm, or the Sominex-laced-cookie-cutter press releases baked by PR. I wondered how such specious content could compete with snack-sized-time-shifted-simultaneous infotainment.

The Net-Gen won’t demand content that apeals to them, they’ll just ignore the stuff that doesn’t. I wonder how today’s businesses will make the adjustment?

I created this fifty-four (54) second video as a result of my thoughts. Enjoy and feel free to pass it around!

Nothing like the rantings of a Traditional to spur your New Media Evangelist to type through the pain of two stainless steel traction pins impaled through his left pinky.

Elizabeth Lee Wurtzel wrote a piece in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal entitled The Internet is Ruining America’s Movies and Music. The piece is packed with too many gems from the Traditional’s Handbook to list, but here are a few of my favorites:

Today’s music industry is either moribund or dead, depending on whom you ask. Downloading has destroyed it, and no one in the business is smart enough to figure out how to fix it.

Downloading hasn’t destroyed the music industry, the music industry has self-inflicted its own head-wounds by adopting a very dangerous business attitude: that the industry itself is more important than its own customers. The same people who willingly bought a song (or an album) in every new medium (vinyl, eight-track tape, cassette tape, Compact Disc, and now the DRMed MP3 file, etc…) have decided that they won’t play that game anymore. iTunes has proven that people will pay for music, but they want it in a form that’s portable across all of their digital media platforms — instead of the music industry’s preference that you buy a copy for your phone and one for your home stereo and one for your car and one for your computer and one for the dozens of other media inventions that nobody can conceive of today. However, instead of listening to their customers and offering them new products and services (like a normal business would do), the Music industry reverts to its monopolistic ways, choosing to treat its customers like thieves — which in hindsight sounds exactly like someone who isn’t “…smart enough to know how to fix it.”

…47% of our gross domestic product involves intellectual property (IP) transactions, and about 6% of our national worth — $626.6 billion annually — is from our copyright businesses. These are the segments of our economy that are suffering, or stand to do so, as a result of the Internet. The Internet, glorious as it is, should be thought of as the plague of postmodernity.

The Internet is no more a plague today than smoke signals, carrier pigeon, printing press, vinyl records, telegraph, radio, or television were to their respective times. None of these technologies were welcomed with open arms by their respective societies either. And copyright? We’ll get to that after this next statement.

Entertainment is such a crucial part of the American way of life — because of the jobs it generates, the fun it engenders, the goodwill it creates world-wide — that the potential for its undoing is a national emergency that ought to at least merit a congressional panel or governmental alarm. The U.S. was meant to be a nation of commercial creativity. It is our birthright. It’s what we do.

Our birthright isn’t creativity; it’s freedom. Creativity emerges from freedom. But just for the sake of argument, let’s work with Ms Wurtzel’s conclusion. If creativity is our birthright and we need some congressional panel to sound a national alarm, why is the Federal government pulling out all the stops to kill creativity through inflated copyright laws?

Article 1, Section 8, paragraph 8 of the US Constitution makes it the government’s responsibility:

“To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;”

The first copyright laws set these “limited times” to fourteen (14) years with the ability to renew for another fourteen (14), for a grand total of twenty-eight (28) years. Over the past 200 years, though, the content creators have lobbied and won multiple limit-extensions, stretching it to the author’s life plus seventy (70) years.

Let’s think about this for a second. The founding fathers wanted us to protect copyrights for inventors for twenty-eight (28) years. Today, we are protecting their rights for 2.5 times that amount after the author or inventor is dead. Or, looking at it another way, let’s say that a twenty-five year old woman creates a video documentary in 2008 and lives ’til the ripe ol’ age of ninety-five. That work won’t enter the public domain for someone to build upon, in essence to “innovate” as Ms Wurtzel says in her peice, until 2148 — which is absurd in today’s digital Read/Write world. Today’d copyright laws have totally upset the balance that our forefathers attempted to achieve between the economic needs of authors and the innovation needs of our society. They must be updated in order for our economy to continue to thrive.

And now that any old anybody with opposable thumbs can operate a digital camera, international markets have found they favor the locally produced fare over yet another sequel to “Rush Hour.” Bombay prefers Bollywood to Hollywood.

Putting aside the fact that Bombay was renamed to Mumbai in 1995, why wouldn’t citizens of “the city formerly known as Bombay” prefer stories told in their native languages, using their own cultural references? Are we to believe that America is the only country of beings with opposable thumbs that are capable of telling great stories? Is it our birthright to hold a monopoly on the world’s audio-visual entertainment? Evidently, some people think we should:

Hegemony is over.

Yes, by its very definition, hegemony is indeed over. We’ll actually have to compete from now on.

The World is Flat. The Economics of Influence are forever changed. And until the recording and movie industries understand these things, they’ll continue attacking their customers and then lobbying Congress to provide air cover. As a result, Congress will continue to gather lobbyist funds while feeling good about protecting the rights of copyright holders — while systematically stifling the innovation society requires to take economic advantage of these new technologies.

Some pioneers are working very hard to solve these problems without reverting to featherbedding. For example, checkout the innovative things that Kevin MacLeod and Jonathan Coulton are doing for music. Or, follow the future of digital entertainment through the exciting work of machinima creators such as Phil “Overman” Rice. If you wanna read some great insight into new media business models for content, read Tim Street. And lastly, if you’d like to learn about work being done to update copyright laws, follow the work of Larry Lessig.

We haven’t solved the problems created by our new media technologies, but I’m convinced that the pioneers mentioned above will guide us well. Until then, the Traditionals will continue to miss the point entirely.

Tags: Elizabeth Lee Wurtzel riaa mpaa copyright US Constitution Kevin MacLeod Jonathan Coulton machinima Overman Tim Street Larry Lessig