Embedded World North America - Was It Worth It?

Embedded World has taken place annually in Nuremberg, Germany for the past 20 years. This year, they decided to expand to North America. Finding the German show to be really productive for us over the past 4 years, we decided to try our luck in Austin.

Not many people think about how firmware gets flashed into devices in the factory. Unfortunately, this includes the hard-working engineers designing new products. Many times, they assume their contract manufacturer has a refined system for doing this. But after visiting a LOT of SMT lines around the world, we can confidently say, "No, they don't." We are changing this. Every day, thousands of devices are being flashed with the help our our cloud-connected Production Line Tool (PLT). The PLT is our secret to lowering the cost to flash and test boards dramatically below legacy systems. Showing our flagship product at Embedded World gives us a place for people to experience it the way a line operator would use it.

We do Embedded World because it is the only show where we meet engineers who are making decisions about their electronic products and looking for better ways to build and test them. You don't go around checking out embedded components when your product is done, so we connect with people who are doing new things. Embedded World North America (EWNA) had largely the same profile of visitors as the one in Germany except that nearly everyone was visiting from within America. The show was much smaller. By the semi-official statistics, there were 32,000 visitors in Nuremberg this year versus 3,500 in Austin. The booths of the big microcontroller companies: NXP, Microchip, Renesas, ST Micro, Infineon, Nordic, etc. were much smaller at this show as well. An advantage of the smaller show was that we were not diluted. We ended up with twice as many visitors in Austin as we had in Nuremberg and we've already received orders from people we met at the event.

The Austin Convention Center is slated for a massive renovation to make a bigger and better exposition hall downtown. Next year, EWNA will move to the Anaheim Convention Center, November 4~6. We have booth no. 3067 reserved already. It was not the case the first couple of years but now the show is truly delivering business to us. As long as we scoop up more sales than the cost of the show, we will keep joining Embedded World. See you in Anaheim!