NI recently announced that this year’s guest keynote speaker will be Chris Anderson. If you don’t know already, Chris has a blog and a book called “The Long Tail” where he talks about how the future of marketing is about dominating niches by being the very best in a highly focused area.
It will be interesting to see if Chris’s keynote presentation will relate “the long tail” concept to test and measurement, graphical programming, and systems integration. Chris mentioned in a blog post that he has used Lego NXT to create an autopilot for an RC plane. Lego NXT is powered by LabVIEW, so it would seem that he might be somewhat familiar with National Instruments and LabVIEW — that would certainly make the presentation a bit more personal to folks in the audience.
Chris’s next book is titled “FREE” and describes the importance of giving stuff away for free. With my involvement in OpenG and VI Package Manager (both are free tools for LabVIEW developers), this is certainly a subject of great interest to me and I’d love for Chris to discuss this during the keynote.