This won’t be your run-of-the-mill FPGA Journal Article. In fact, it won’t be an FPGA Journal article at all…
After seven-and-a-half long years, FPGA Journal will be opening its doors wider. If you’ve followed our history as a publishing company, you’ll know that we started FPGA Journal back in 2003, then followed that with Embedded Technology Journal in 2005 and IC Design and Verification Journal in 2008. Throughout those years, we have grown enormously, and, in 2010, our three publications were read by over 200,000 engineers in (according to Google Analytics, anyway) 220 countries. To those engineers (in other words – to all of you), we provide feature articles, news stories, technical papers, webcasts, videos, and a thriving community where engineering is celebrated as the noble, exciting, fun, and world-changing activity we all know and love. That’s a huge leap from our humble beginnings as a simple, one-topic e-mail newsletter.
Today, we are excited to announce our biggest achievement ever – the beta launch of Electronic Engineering Journal (EEJournal.com) – certainly our most ambitious effort to date. EEJournal will be a broad-based electronic engineering publication, with everything you’ve told us you love about our current publications and more. Our editorial style and objectives will continue to be as they have always been – analytical, objective, informative, and fun. Our priority will always be to serve you, the professional engineer, with the information you need to do your job – presented in a way that respects you as a professional, but also as a human being.
EEJournal will be a daily/hourly publication, whereas our previous publications have been weekly/daily. The front page of EEJournal will have a new full feature article each weekday, all the day’s industry news stories, a rich selection of sponsored technical papers, webcasts, videos, and other resources, and several updates per day in our newest column, “Fresh Bytes” – our fun new feed of fascinating factoids and techy tidbits. If you haven’t checked out our beta version of Fresh Bytes yet, now is a good time. It’s a veritable fountain of nerdy goodness.
EEJournal will also feature the concept of “channels” – so you can easily filter your browsing down to specific areas of interest. Initially, we have two categories of channels (which you’ll see on the top menu). We have “Design” channels that feature design areas like FPGA design, embedded design, Electronic Design Automation (EDA), and a “Career” channel that focuses on the human, social, and education aspects of engineering. The other group of channels is “Markets/Industries” and these will spotlight specific vertical segments like Communications, Consumer Electronics, Industrial, Military/Aerospace, and others. If you visit these today during beta, you’ll see that we’re just getting started categorizing our thousands of pages of content into these channels, so check back often as we fully power-up this channel concept. In exchange for your patience and feedback, we promise to be patient during YOUR next beta test.
Every Friday, EEJournal will feature our new “Fish Fry” – a weekly video/podcast hosted by our own Amelia Dalton with a fun and insightful wrap-up of the week’s electronic industry news. Fish Fry features news stories, interviews, analysis, commentary, and a few bits just for fun. It’s a great ten-minute decompress after a stressful week. Fish Fry has been in beta for a couple of months now, and our audience response has been great. TIP: Every week, Amelia also offers a cool nerdy giveaway. So far we’ve given away books, robots, wireless watch development kits, and more. This week, in fact, one of the giveaways has caused a serious haiku smackdown on our forums. It’s on the front page of EEJournal.com – go watch one and tell us what you think.
Speaking of Amelia Dalton – her popular Chalk Talk webcasts are being upgraded – to High Definition. Very soon you’ll see the first of our new Chalk Talk HD webcasts. Like the long-running original series, Chalk Talk HD will be a series of informative tech briefs on a variety of topics – all from Amelia’s familiar chalkboard. With the advent of Chalk Talk HD, the chalkboard is upgraded to stunning high-definition, and it will also be available for the first time on your choice of mobile devices, including iPhones, Android devices, and iPads.
Our e-mail newsletters will continue just as you’ve always known them. You can subscribe or unsubscribe to them individually, so you get just the e-mail you want and no more. Every Monday, we’ll publish IC Design and Verification Journal Update – edited by Bryon Moyer. Tuesday, FPGA Journal Update – edited by Kevin Morris; Wednesday, Embedded Technology Journal Update – edited by Jim Turley; Thursday, our popular Journal on Demand newsletter with new white papers, videos, and webcasts; and Friday, our new EEJournal Update newsletter with a broad-based wrap-up of the week’s coverage. Europe editor Dick Selwood will continue to bring us his unique perspective from the other side of the pond, and we’ll feature many guest articles and opinions over the course of the year.
The social media experience on EEJournal is very important to us as well. In the coming weeks, you’ll see a complete re-vamp of our forum areas – with an easier-to-navigate format and an even tighter direct integration with our editorial content. Our readers are some of the best experts in the world on a variety of engineering-related topics, so we encourage you to jump in and participate in the discussions, ask and answer questions, and make your voice heard. We already have a thriving community of regular contributors, and, with the addition of your voice, we will have one of the most active communities in the industry.
We constantly hear from you about the design of our publications. For us, the aesthetic experience is a crucial part of who we are. We want to deliver the information you need – in a format that’s beautiful, intuitive and elegant – with a tasteful helping of style. Of course, since we’re advertising-funded, there will always be an engineering trade-off between purity of design and advertising, but we always try to make that tradeoff in a way that respects you – our audience, while giving our advertisers the visibility and results they deserve for their sponsorship and support.
In the area of advertising, you will notice a clear distinction between us and other industry publications. We will never waste your time with a roadblock ad that forces you to wait through a commercial message or click through an extra page view to get to the content you’re seeking. We have never run pop-ups, pop-overs, pop-unders or PopTarts. We respect your time and your experience, and these types of advertising do not. In return for this respect, you’ve always given our sponsors some of the best response rates in the industry. We think that says something.
Most of all in this exciting new phase, we want to hear from you. Please drop us a note in our comment and forum areas. We promise to read each and every one, and to do our best to deliver to you absolutely the best experience of any trade publication in the industry.
Thanks again for your loyal support!
