As soon as I got
back from LA and
Robotica, it was time to
head north to San
Francisco, the site of this year’s West
Coast Embedded System Conference.
From humble table-top hotel show
of yore, ESC West has grown with the
embedded market to become, as oldtime
TV impresario Ed Sullivan
would say, “a really big show.” So big,
it finally outgrew its home in San Jose
and had to make the move to “The
City.”
“The City,” as in the city where
panhandlers like suffering
SOMA (south-of-Market-Street)
start-ups courting a VC politely
say, “Hey, while you’ve got
your wallet out, could you
make it $5 or $10?” In fact,
that panhandler could be a
recently downsized entrepreneur.
Easy dot.com, easy dot.go.
On the other hand, SF offers
plenty of fine sights to see and
restaurants to sample.
Amazingly, the Circuit Cellar
crew ended up in a decent hotel
for only $139 a night. It’s true
www.circuitcellar.com/online CIRCUIT CELLAR® ONLINE June 2001 1
The Embedded System
Conference always provides
a lot of food for thought, and
Tom shows us that this
year's event was no exception.
Having outgrown San
Jose, San Fran is now
home to ESC, with a whole
new wave of applications
opening up. Voice recognition
gear was probably the
hottest item on the scene,
along with web-enabling and
listening chips. Will the spoken
word replace keyboards?
Watch and listen
for the answer.
parking was extra, an astounding $35
a day, but it was actually a bargain
compared to the absurdly high prices
of the overheated south in Silicon
Valley proper.
But best of all, SF’s Moscone
Convention Center is much more spacious
than the Civic Center in San
Jose. If attendance appeared to be
down, it was not surprising considering
the economy, the change in
venue, and compressed schedule from
the last West Coast show. I personally
welcomed the fact that there was
room to breathe in the aisles. No
more having your booth in a tent in
the parking lot either.
Enough of the travel log. No matter
where the show is held or the state of
the economy, as long as silicon keeps
marching on, embedded is where the
action is. Check it out.
’NET BET
Is it safe to say that anything and
everything with an electron moving is
a candidate for web- enabling? The
only way to find out for sure is to try
it and see if folks buy it.
How fast and how far the Internet
penetrates the embedded realm is a
simple matter of Econ 101. The less it
costs to get on the web, the more
designers will give it a whirl. There’s
a huge interest in products and strategies
that lower the I-way toll.
Tom Cantrell
Escape to SF
a
SILICON
UPDATE
Photo 1— The BlueTarget design from Smart Network Devices
combines the brains of Hyperstone and the Bluetooth brawn
from Cambridge Silicon Radio.
AI
