Who? What? Why? Where? When? and How?


Embargo: not to be read for ten minutes


Steve Rogerson’s round-up of last month’s news and events, including some that may have slipped under the radar


I


knew you couldn’t wait. I have never been a big fan of embargos. My view is that if someone has something to say, then say it, and be done with it. But life in this business means that the marketing people want to control everything and therefore want all the press to make announcements on the same date. There are though a lot of myths about embargos. For example, I remember once a company complaining that two different publications had broken its embargo. I had to point out that, unless they’d published simultaneously to the microsecond, then that was impossible.


An embargo, you see, can only be


broken once. It can’t be put back together and broken again. Once an embargo is broken anywhere in the world then the embargo no longer exists and everyone else is free to publish.


Life begins at 40 says Anglia president


L


ast month Anglia Components celebrated its 40th anniversary. The anniversary celebration was held in the company of an invited audience of over 100 suppliers, staff and industry guests. Bill Ingram, currently the company’s President, founded the business in his home in 1972. Today, Anglia employs over 150 people supporting a line card of franchises including Analog Devices and ST, two of the world’s top three analogue


semiconductor manufacturers. Anglia has formed a series of market focussed business units: Anglia Lighting in 2007, Anglia HiRel in 2010, and Anglia Embedded which recently


42 October 2012 The subject came to my mind due to a


recent pre-Electronica briefing I went to in Germany recently organised by a PR company. They had half-a-dozen of their clients there all talking about what they would be doing at Electronica, with most of the information under embargo. The one that caught my eye was the


presentation from Silicon Labs that had an embargo of 1.05pm GMT on 3 October. Very odd to be so specific, I thought, but I discovered there was a strange logic. The hour will coincide with the stock market opening in the USA and there is always a string of announcements at that time, so by being a few minutes later the announcement is more likely to stand out.The problem with this is if other companies take up the idea, then everyone will be announcing at five past the hour, so some will then get to ten past, and so on.


added Advantech, a leading supplier of single board computers (SBCs). Steve Rawlins took over as CEO in 2006, and now manages the operation on a day to day basis.


In a speech at the event, Bill Ingram said, “I am as excited about Anglia’s prospects today as I was 40 years ago when I formed the business. Anglia’s business has grown by 40% over the last five years, posting consistently strong year on year growth despite the ups and downs of the market. We’ve a great track record of growing quicker than the industry –


Maybe it will get to the point where nothing is ever announced as everyone waits for each other.


Silicon Labs also gave us all a little


present – a chilli cooking kit, with spices, bandana and wooden spoon to bring a bit of Texas to Europe. Maybe nobody told them the significance of giving a wooden spoon this side of the Atlantic. I did, however, make use of the kit, and a very nice chilli it was too. Free gifts seemed to be the order of the day for that event, with pens being very popular. I won’t criticise that as a gift choice – though I am very tempted – because I know that, if I do, the next press conference I attend where they don’t give a free pen will be the first one to which I forget to bring one. Mike Bray, marketing manager of RS Components, was having none of this ‘bribing’ journalists lark. He opened up his presentation with the words: “We aren’t going to give you any free gifts, just facts.” Well, it was the company’s 75th birthday, so maybe they were expecting us to give them a present.


My bad taste award for the month also


comes from this event, held just a short time after the death of astronaut Neil Armstrong. Hans-Peter Lüdeke, a field applications engineer at Murata, couldn’t resist describing the company’s latest power supply as “a small step for mankind but one big leap for Murata”. Bad taste yes, but it made me smile. There was also a free pen on offer at a Maxim press conference in London last month, but this was special because it contained the company’s new logo. One journalist looked at it with a shocked expression on his face. “Quite tasteful,” he said, “surprisingly tasteful for an analogue company.”


This, Maxim claimed, was its first ever


press conference in Europe (the second was the day after in Munich), and it opened with the startling announcement that the company had changed its name from Maxim Integrated Products to Maxim Integrated, hence the new logo. Despite many words about how they wanted to emphasise the integrated nature of the business, to me it seemed a lot of hot air about a pointless name change. At least it wasn’t under embargo


something that we are continuing to maintain under Steve’s leadership. It is the outstanding team that gives Anglia its future.”


Components in Electronics


You could be forgiven for not quite understanding what is going on in these two pictures, but that would be a shame because what you are seeing is a new world record, and one recognised by the famous Guinness book. And before you say you didn’t know there was a world record for lots of little multi-coloured light, I’m afraid you’d be wrong, because that is exactly what this is, the new world record for the largest light picture, with more than a million LED lights over an area of 750,000 square metres, about the same as one hundred football pitches. It knocked for six the previous record of just over 50,000 LED lights. But what is it? Good question, and one that is clearly not obvious from the pictures. It is actually a full-scale plan of Oltin Yo’l GTL’s proposed new energy plant in Uzbekistan. I wouldn’t like to see their electricity bill as apparently they needed 320kW to power the lights. No wonder they need a new energy plant.


www.cieonline.co.uk


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