Following up on my earlier “LabVIEW on TV” post, I wanted to share with you a grass roots effort from a group of our AEs here in Austin who refer to themselves as Waterloo Labs. Our AE department is full of recently graduated engineers and computer scientists from some of the top schools around the country. Once they get more acquainted with our products and technology, they tend to find very creative ways to experiment with it. These guys are taking it one step further. They are combining our cool technology with their interest in movie making and multimedia, and creating their own web-based version of a MythBusters-like show called Waterloo Labs. I urge you to check it out – it’s pretty cool, in a geeky sort of way.
We spend a lot of our time in Marketing trying to figure out ways to penetrate the hardcore programmers of test and embedded systems out there with our graphical programming story. We are constantly looking for ways to make more credible arguments with benchmarks, case studies, and code examples to convince experienced programmers that LabVIEW is a valid alternative.
A different approach is to go after the next generation and get kids excited about our technology before they ever get “stained” with the traditional approach. We experiment with a lot of ideas to try to get kids interested in technology in general, and LabVIEW more specifically. Also, because our tools are so widely used, we have to learn how to market through the channels that are emerging – YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, etc. We do a lot of experiementing to see how we can get people interested in our tools beyond the traditional marketing approaches. These Waterloo Labs guys are driving right down the middle of all of this – and its all driven from their own interest and passion in the technology and the media. Their latest video has more than 200,000 views.
It’s interesting to talk to the crustiest, most entrenched, hardcore programmers who are so set in their ways that they swear they could never switch to LabVIEW even if they wanted. These sames guys are the ones who light up when you tell them that their kids can program robots with LabVIEW. Perhaps more cool videos like Waterloo Labs is what we need to be doing.
The last night of NIWeek, after the annual Wednesday night NIWeek party, I was reminded of the real reason you should consider coming to NIWeek next year. We stumbled into a bar on 6th street sat and watched an amazing blues guitar virtuoso jam out for about 3 hours of some of the most ear-splitting, face-burning, mind-blowing guitar pyrotechnics I’ve ever seen to a “crowd” of about 9 people for no cover charge. There is something really cool (and tragic) about seeing a talent that good in a place that small. It was awesome.
So talk about all of the great networking and coding techniques you can pick up here when you are convincing your boss to come next year, but keep artists like Eric Tessmer in mind. (and don’t forget a really good alarm clock – those Thursday morning keynotes are great)
NIWeek 2009 is in the books, and NI as a whole is recovering from our annual NIWeek hangover. A few thoughts looking back at the week:
1. Attendance was stellar – we actually saw a slight increase in attendance over 2008 numbers. For those of you who were able to join, a big “thank you” for investing your time and energy by coming to the conference. We recognize that any kind of expense is going to be looked at very closely in these tough times.
2. Graphical System Design as a concept seemed to get its legs at this NIWeek. The notion of using LabVIEW beyond its test and measurement roots as a system design platform was evident throughout the conference. The tremendous activity around robotics was the strongest testament to this. Not just the technologies and success stories, but the people who showed up who are involved in this area was impressive – Dean Kamen, Ellen Purdy, Dr. Dave Barrett… (more on that in a separate blog entry – it’s justified).
3. The future of LabVIEW is bright – for the first time in awhile, we shared some of the new technologies that we are developing in LabVIEW and there was genuine interest and excitement from the users. In particular, we are doing some things to address some core issues with the product and language in the short term (next year or two), as well as starting to reveal some of our 3 to 5 year plans that will have an even greater impact. It’s always exciting to see the amazing solutions from our users each year at NIWeek. It’s even better to see the smiles and fist-pumps from users when you let them know where we are going to confirm we are working on the right things. (I’ll have to figure out how I can post on some of this stuff for those of you who were not able to make it to NIWeek).
4. The Austin Convention Center re-affirmed its position as the coldest building in North America. I think the HVAC system there alone could cure our global warming problem.
… more thoughts to come…. Anyone who was there, feel free to tack on with your own comments.
NIWeek 2009 – Getting back to the (deeply technical) basics.
That was one of our goals for NIWeek this year. In the past several years, we really pushed the envelope into application areas with the Summits – mini-conferences within NIWeek – on topics like RF, Sound and Vibration, Vision, Robotics, etc. These have been great at attracting experts from these areas and having more topical discussions about trends and techniques. However, we still believe that NIWeek at its core is about LabVIEW and what you can do with it. This year, we made a concerted effort to “go deep” and deliver very technical presentations at the conference. Two areas where we got a lot of great attendance and feedback were on the LabVIEW Scripting session and the LabVIEW for large applications.
The scripting session had over 180 people in attendance. Scripting refers to the set of APIs you can use to edit or generate VIs – use LabVIEW to create macros if you will. You can learn more about it at our LabVIEW APIs community group. We also highlighted some pretty cool uses of scripting in a video we showed during Jeff K’s keynote. Check it out:
The LabVIEW for Large Apps sessions was standing room only as well. It covered all the tools and techniques for using LabVIEW in a large, team-based environment for large projects, including topics like:
Posted by pasquarette 
Posted by pasquarette 
Posted by pasquarette 
