What about the Embedded Conference 2008 in Nurnberg ?

Hi Antonio,

Antonio Pasini schrieb:

I go every year. Meet there all the people in one place and get some news and infos. Since I work 20 km away it is a must but if you have to travel far I must say you can get all the relevant stuff from the web. Just the personal contact is a plus there.

Andreas

On Jan 17, 1:28 am, Andreas Schweiger wrote:

Hi Antonio,

IMHO the best show of its kind in the western world and I am neither joking nor overstating. During the years I was part of exhibitor staff at different embedded trade shows in Europe and many in the USA. In the 90's the Embedded Systems Conferences in California were still bigger events but while they faltered, the Embedded World was growing every year. My previous company (US-based with ties to Europe) did exhibit at all the shows during the good years, when the years of trouble came, the only show that was still on, was the Embedded World, even as a US company we did not exhibit in the USA any more but still in Nuremberg. It is the most technical of its kind, most exhibitors have highly technical staff at this show while e.g. Electronica is much more of a sales show (too many suits and ties there). If your definition of Embedded includes terms like microcontrollers with embedded flash, emulators, RTOS (not necessarily Windows or Linux), evaluation boards... there is nothing to beat the Embedded World. If you can make it, go there but hotels mostly booked by now. The organizers managed this year to have the show in a different week than the BIO.. something show that was overlapping in the past and generated a huge mess with hotels, taxis, public transportation... The Embedded World has its own, non-pverlapping spot now and things should be better his year. On top of all that, Nuremberg has a very pretty old town with nice restaurants and bars ;-)

An Schwob

I used to attend the Silicon Valley ESC occasionally back in the

80's and 90's. These days they seem to have priced themselves out of the market for small or one-person companies like me. $2095 for an advance all-access pass is just too much--especially if you add in a week's lost engineering time. I suppose that a few critical seminars might help me recoup that week, but the up-front cost for travel and conference (about $4000 total with cheap travel and hotels) just isn't in the budget. For that price, I can get some pretty spiffy dev kits and mid-level compilers or PCB layout software.

There's also the fact that the seminar topics just don't seem to change much from year to year. Even when I worked for a larger company with a travel and education budget, there didn't seem to be much point to attending more than once every three years.

Back in the 80's the conference exhibits also provided a way for small developers to meet the chip and board makers and get the latest data sheets and books. No point in that now, as you can get all the data sheets off the internet. Even that incentive to attend the free exhibits is gone now.

I might consider just attending the exhibits if there was an ESC in driving distance. My MCore and Codewarrior T-Shirts are starting to look a bit the worse for wear! ;-)

Mark Borgerson