The dust has now settled and the team is getting back in the swing of things after a busy week at ESC Boston. I meet a lot of smart people at the show who are pushing the limits of size and performance in the embedded design industry. I never know what conversations to expect when exhibiting at these shows, but I believe I’ve been hanging out with design engineers enough to finally hold my own in geek speak. I had a chance to walk the exhibit floor to see what the next big thing is going to be. Here are some of my favorites:
I was really impressed with this shopping cart device called the Concierge from bSquare. It is an MIPS®-based device that runs on Windows CE and uses Adobe Flash Lite. It allows you to upload your shopping list while telling you what aisle a product is on, how much it costs and keeps a running tab of what you have in your cart. Here’s the case study on the development of the product in case you are interested.
Green Hills Software made a big splash at the show (as they always do) by showcasing their INTEGRITY® RTOS. Industry-leaders in defense are using the software in the Joint Strike Missle Program for the Norweign Air Force, as well as a rail automation and safety in Germany. Green Hills even makes a RTOS to support the Intel® Atom processor E6xx series. What I like about INTEGRITY is it is operating systems agnostic with the ability to host Linux, Andriod™ and Windows® in secure virtual machines.
I had a chance to talk to the Allegro Software team about their Media Server application. It’s a fully compliant UPnP AV server product that runs in both PC and Mac environments. It streams media content over networks (like music, movies, pictures, etc.) between consumer devices. In the picture, Larry is streaming content on his phone to the LCD television near him.
The Perforce team walked me through their Configure Management System software. At first I was having a hard time keeping up with the tech talk, but I finally got it down with this analogy– Let’s say Pixar is creating Toy Story 18. They obviously want to leverage the development work they put into creating the characters’ likeness and want to take 80% of the code and design from Toy Story 1. Well with new releases comes changes, updates and fixes in multiple versions. Perfoce streamlines all of the versions and wraps a big bow around it. The best part—they are letting you download it on their site gratis for two users to try it out.
The one question that keeps popping up at these shows is why is Dell here? Let me throw out the most honest answer that comes to mind. We are on the ground talking to engineers like you to listen and learn. ESC Boston was no exception. And my follow up to the answer is this—why wouldn’t Dell be here? We have been helping engineers create PC-based products for over 12 years. You can read more about that in my last blog.
The Dell team was on our toes the entire show. Josh Neland, Technology Strategist, held a classroom session discussing the remote management capabilities of PCs in industrial environments. In case you missed it, I suggest you check it out by downloading the presentation here. Josh also showed off Dell’s industrial PC, the Dell™ OptiPlex™ XE, in this video from ECN. I personally had a great time hearing what other companies such as Intel and TI are doing with Twitter in the embedded space. Eric Mantion from Intel closed out the Twitter panel with some funny geek jokes,(which I am sure you can get a hold of if you contact him). Follow all of the panel members on Twitter @SarahMatDell, @Chris_Gammell @patrickhopper, @Geek8ive and @adrianvalenz.
Finally, I want to mention the friendly, down-to-earth people I met at the show, vendors and attendees alike. We held a reception event at Poe’s Kitchen at the Rattlesnake where the Dell team was able to talk to engineers first hand on how they are creating the next-best thing. I look forward to what’s to come from all of these talented people and look forward to catching up at the next ESC.
embedded, embedded system conference, ESC boston, Events