Jason Williamson recently wrote a great article for Embedded Insights about dogfooding.

No, Jason has not come up with a new and unappetizing diet plan! Wikipedia defines dogfooding, or eating your own dog food as “when a company uses the products that it makes. Dogfooding can be a way for a company to demonstrate confidence in its own products, and hence a kind of testimonial advertising.”

Great article, Jason!

Interesting article about the future of infotainment systems in cars:  embedded or tethered?

http://www.autoobserver.com/2010/05/automakers-grapple-with-new-age-dilemma-software-or-hardware.html

I am proud to announce that Electronic Design picked up an article from our very own Mike Juran, Graphical Code Generators: Pair The Best GUI To The Lowest-Cost Hardware.

Great article, Mike!

Recently, Don Dingee of Embedded Computing Design wrote a short piece entitled Phonemance. Think “bromance” and then substitute your iPhone for your best pal…phonemance. He discusses the fact that our passion for smartphones is driving the embedded systems industry.

Don ends this short article with an anecdote about his personal surrender to his Droid, an MLB app and social media. I love his last line: “…the stuff that brings us the most joy is the stuff that we don’t have to think much about to enjoy.”

I’m left pondering the “dilemma” of the developers of those apps and HMIs that the world has come to love so much. It’s not simple to deliver complex applications in a way that people don’t need to think in order to use them, enjoy them. But it is a challenge…and it is FUN!

Our customers are too busy creating exciting new products to take the time to toot their own horns, so we’ve decided to do that for them in our new Altia Success Stories Series! In our first feature, “A Case in Point: Altia and the New Star Trac Interface,” you will read about how Star Trac delivered a complete entertainment experience to their new series of fitness products.

Congratulations, Star Trac!

Robert Cravotta has begun a blog series about user interfaces — discussing both direct user interfaces (like the buttons and wheel on a mouse) and logical user interfaces (the subsystems that manage user signals and feedback). He’s going to begin by exploring touch and speech recognition development kits and projects.

This should be an interesting and informative study. We look forward to Robert’s next post!

A very interesting show.  Like other industries, many designers and manufacturers in kitchen and bath are cautiously expecting a comeback.  Some companies are on the sidelines taking the wait-and-see approach.  They want to know that they’re out of the woods before ramping their engineering investment back up.  And how will they know the industry has emerged from the doldrums?  When market leaders launch killer next-gen products (stay tuned – our team is working on a handful of these now).  As we’ve seen time and time again, those companies who pushed for innovation before and during the lull, are poised to eat a lot of lunches.

A couple of Altians are making a stop at the Kitchen and Bath Industry Show in Chicago this week. Home appliances are slowly becoming candidates for iPhone-like makeovers — so the KBIS show should be a really interesting opportunity to check out what’s new for the kitchen. Searching the web for margarita recipes from a touchscreen over your ice dispenser? Downloading your favorite Sinatra mix to your oven so that you can listen and sing along while you’re making an Italian feast? Anything is possible.

If Jason Williamson doesn’t get lost on those busy Chicago expressways, he’ll share some news about the show next week.

I had the opportunity to attend the SAE World Congress at the Cobo Center in Detroit this week. It was great to see many of our customers on hand to showcase some of their new projects. Fun stuff! There are some incredible automotive innovations – especially in the realm of HMIs – coming down the pipe. It’s gratifying to be a part of such a necessary AND fun area of automotive development.

Peter Abowd, Altia’s President of Worldwide Automotive, and Mark Taylor, Altia’s North American Automotive Sales Director, will attend the SAE World Congress at the Cobo Center in Detroit next week. Stay tuned to this space for commentary from each of the guys about their experience at this exciting automotive industry event!