Microwave Journal in China

At this past year's IMS show in Atlanta and EumW in Amsterdam, the Microwave Journal booth displayed the beta-version of our pending Microwave Journal China Website. China has for a number of years been a big manufacturing center of microwave hardware and over the past few years has shifted into design work itself. With the large number of engineers graduating in China focused on Microwave technology, we feel the timing is right for Microwave Journal to report on the news, product information and events coming out of China and to provide this vast community of new microwave engineers with our technical content in a chinese-language format.

To understand our new targeted audience better, MWJ publisher Carl Sheffres and I traveled to Shanghai, Shenzhen and Guangzhou last week. We met with a number of company executives, conference organizers, manufacturer representatives (representing China, US and European-based products) and engineering managers. The feedback was unanimous. China is ready for a dedicated source of information about our industry - in Chinese - which targets the growing number of new and experienced RF/microwave engineers.

Our first stop was the IME 2008/EMC 2008 show in Shanghai, where we saw familiar faces (Agilent Technologies, Rohde & Schwarz, AR Worldwide, Valpey Fisher, Gore, LPKF, Emerson & Cummings and Yantel) as well as many new faces.



Booth traffic was very heavy at times as engineers lined up to fill out subscription cards and take a complimentary copy of our October issue (English version). Of course, we were very pleased to hear that a number of show attendees considered the Journal to be "very famous".



Our immediate goal will be to put the finishing touches on the new Microwave Journal China web site in time for its January launch date, work with the partners we had identified to expand our audience and line up authors for this new venture. All in all, it is a very exciting time for us at the Journal as we begin this new adventure. Have ideas for our Chinese web site, add them to this blog or send me an e-mail at dvye@mwjournal.com.

Changing of the Guard- Cell Phone Leaders

There have been several market research reports out over the last month that show what I think is a permanent shift in cell phone leaders. Samsung took over as leading mobile phone shipments in the US market (Apple moved up to #6). RIM seems to be holding strong and introducing some nice products. It seems like the global market leaders of Nokia and Motorola are loosing some of their grip on some of the market. The iPhone also took over as the best selling phone which had been held for a couple of years by the outdated Razor. The smart phones are really starting to take over as they become affordable and Apple, RIM, Samsung and even LG seem to be playing the game better than the traditional leaders (at least in the US).

What do you think? How will the G1 and Android do competing against these phones??