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.
August 20, 2009 at 2:47 pm |
John — this is great. Here is their latest video as well as the code for the project (http://decibel.ni.com/content/docs/DOC-6106).
August 20, 2009 at 7:02 pm |
One thing I truly appreciate the Waterloo Labs crew is that they make everything open source (engineers foam at the mouth when they hear “open source”). If you navigate to their blog, you not only find cool videos and pictures; they also teach their audience how to build their crazy-cool apps. Thanks to these guys, I now know how to triangulate the position of a hit on a wall using synchronized data from three accelerometers. I feel smart now.
They even go so far as to post the actual software code they used to build their system. Now, seeing as how they have captured an audience on the scale of 200,000, I imagine not every single one of those viewers know of, or have even heard of LabVIEW. But by attaching the open source .vi’s, they are inherently teaching people how to program in LabVIEW.
September 9, 2009 at 3:52 pm |
John,
Sorry I haven’t written in a while. I was hoping to see you at NI-Week this year; but our travel budget has been decimated this year.
Let me suggest that at some point no amount of marketing will change certain companies & programmers to see the ways of LabVIEW. I personally have this issue with Macs vs. PC’s at home vs. work. So I believe NI’s approach targeting the next generation is the way to go. Let me also suggest that there is a gap between the targeted generation at school and that same group going out and purchasing NI products for their company or venture when they graduate.
I believe a very successful product to fill this gap would be the LabVIEW “Stamp”. A product similar to the well known Basic Stamp from parallax.com. NI could put together a “Student Edition” of LabVIEW embedded and a very simple embedded system allowing turnkey operation all for a very attractive price (<$100). The embedded system could be custom; or based on something like the STM32 Primers (stm32circle.com), or even something very cool like the NXP mbed module (www.standardics.nxp.com/support/development.hardware/mbed.lpc236x/).
Such a product need not compete with your bread & butter products; but needs to be a very attractively priced option for students that want to go a step further and experiment with home control, remote controlled UAV's, modify $30 toy helicopters, etc. I would say almost without exception those students & hobbyists end up not using LabVIEW because of the high barrier costs of entry.
Just my $0.02
Milan