Page 26 - EE|Times Europe Magazine - December 2020

26 EE|Times EUROPE

MARKET & TECHNOLOGY TRENDS
My Take on 2020: Tech Industry Needs to Learn

from Gaming

By Nitin Dahad

f you ask me what has changed the most
for me in 2020, there is one thing that’s
head and shoulders above everything: the
Ielimination of travel.
The main reason for people in my profes-
sion to travel is to attend conferences so that
we can report on the latest industry trends
and developments, visit companies when they
have something to demonstrate, and learn
more about product or business announce-
ments at press briefings.
This year, before the first lockdown in
March, I’d attended CES in Las Vegas;
HiPEAC, the High Performance and Embedded
Architecture and Compilation conference,
in Bologna, Italy; and embedded world in
Nuremberg, Germany. In between, there were
many press briefings, mostly in London.
When you go to conferences, you hardly sleep. During the day, you year, on a tight deadline, we quickly found a solution. The engineer
attend talks and scheduled meetings, and you bump into people — in me found some attachments and Bluetooth accessories online for
often completely serendipitously — with whom you have impromptu my smartphone that enabled me to create a professional studio in my
conversations and briefings. At night, you start writing the stories. home, all for just a few pounds. It’s really amazing what’s possible for a
Then you do it all again the next day. When events started going virtual modest outlay of time and money.
— first press briefings, then conferences — it seemed like a godsend So what does any of this have to do with the headline I chose for this
at first: We no longer had to travel but were able to obtain the same article? As the CEOs at the electronica roundtable said, even after the
information. We were getting a bit of our time back. restrictions imposed as a result of Covid-19 go away, there will be no
To start with, the virtual events seemed just like PowerPoint on wholesale return to all the old norms. Travel is one aspect of business
steroids, but then they started improving. The first ones that made that is likely forever changed. Companies and staff have become used
an impression on me were a Teledyne e2v press briefing in Grenoble, to handling meetings more effectively and collaborating with teams
France, and the Inside Quantum Computing conference in New York. around the world, without having everyone in the same physical place.
When the online content started getting better, I started noticing other But in a world of virtual meetings and events, there is still some-
gremlins, like the TSMC European press day: There was nothing wrong thing missing. In my view, virtual platforms can get you maybe 80% of
with the content, but a couple of “veteran” journalists (I was one of what you need. Often, the sparks for new ideas or innovations come
them) found the login process very clunky, and the entire audience from those serendipitous conversations in conference halls and office
heard one of us swear as we tried to get in. corridors. For me, the centralized venue and compressed time frame of
But the idea that we were getting our time back, now that we were a conference, with multiple stakeholders gathered in the same place,
spared the rigors of travel, proved to be an illusion. Because everything encourage those impromptu, insightful conversations that give me
was now virtual, we just started packing more and more into a day, one a clear picture of what’s really going on. And there’s real value in a
event after another. Back-to-back briefings, embargoed press briefings hands-on demo, with explanations of key technology breakthroughs
— we were juggling more per week than we ever would have handled from a product manager or engineer.
if we’d had to show up in person. There was so much information to Having attended some virtual exhibitions, I’ve found them to be very
process that it’s a wonder our heads didn’t explode. ’80s: Click on a PDF on the virtual booth for more information, or on
I admit that the events have gotten much slicker over time, and a link that takes you to a video. Contrast this with the lifelike experi-
we have become smarter at managing the volume. I especially enjoy ences the gaming industry has enabled. Games like SimCity and virtual
many of the roundtable briefings, which involve a small number of worlds like Second Life have created virtual experiences that border on
executives. I think I gleaned quite a lot from the electronica 2020 CEO real ones for gamers. Advanced games on PlayStation and Xbox create
roundtable. It would have been even better if it had been interactive. lifelike experiences within all kinds of environments.
At AspenCore Media, we have also delivered virtual events, and we’ve Now, imagine if that lifelike experience was created for electronica,
become better at them as we’ve done more of them. In particular, the embedded world, or CES. Maybe there would be much greater value for
keynotes at our Embedded Forum and Power Electronics Forum, held attendees, as you could potentially interact with avatars or real images
during electronica, turned out to be quite interactive; the of people superimposed onto the virtual booths and conferences.
question-and-answer sessions made it feel almost as if we were there in Maybe the technology business-to-business world needs to learn
person, engaging both with the audience and with the speakers. from the consumer gaming world — and give us some real experiences IMAGE: SHUTTERSTOCK
There’s also the aspect of necessity being the mother of invention, at all those virtual meetings, conferences, and briefings. ■
or innovation. When asked to deliver a video interview to an event in
China for the “Silicon 100” report created by AspenCore earlier this Nitin Dahad is editor-in-chief of Embedded.

DECEMBER 2020 | www.eetimes.eu