Last year we wrote that ECS 2010 would gain a sure place in our event calendar and so it did – on 4-5 October we took part in the 2011 edition of Embedded Conference Scandinavia. This time we were able to see the entire event and participate in the handing out of the Swedish Embedded Award, a very nice ceremony accompanied by music, good food, and a little twist in the form of short poems in Swedish in honour of the award winners.

The prize in the Enterprise category was especially well-deserved, going to Comfort Audio AB for their extremely small digital audio receiver for use in hearing aids. Well done!

If you can read Swedish, you’ll find more info on the winners of the Embedded Award 2011 in all categories on the Award’s home page.

The organizers underline that the Conference was an even greater success that the one last year, with a 15% increase in the number of visitors. We certainly felt this year’s event to be even more beneficial than the previous one, we had a lot of interesting conversations with our friends from Halmstad and Stockholm and even managed to see a few of the talks.

Especially the one given by Jonas Bonn from SouthPole on the current state of OpenRISC Linux port was a great and insightful speech, a good summary of where the OpenRISC project stands with respect to Linux support in view of the port’s inclusion in the 3.1 Linux mainline kernel.

Other talks were also nice, although some did lack the level of detail that would make them interesting. To be fair, this is always hard to achieve if the knowledge of the audience in the field in question cannot be predicted.

Well, we should probably start preparing for next year!

Whether to go to the 4th Annual Conference by KTH’s Innovative Centre for Embedded Systems was not a tough decision to make, as the topic struck as as quite relevant – “New Businesses based on Embedded Systems – how to succeed!”

Indeed, several different approaches to the issue were presented, with speakers from both organizations and businesses old and new, those which introduced embedded systems decades ago and those which only recently took heart to this kind of stuff. Even though the starting point was different, the conclusion was universally agreed upon – embedded systems are the way to go, but it’s not so easy to make successful use of them.

Panel Members at the ICES 4th Annual Conference

What we liked about the presentations is how one important topic kept coming up in almost each and every one of them – and especially in that given by Christian Sandström from KTH – that it is critical to understand the needs of the customer and work closely with those who understand the market to succeed, otherwise even the best idea will be wasted.

One funny thing that came up during his presentation was an comparison he made between a network of smart embedded devices and… a swarm of ants! Their power lies in great cooperation, keeping one another informed and distributing jobs between many agents, which makes the task virtually fail-safe.

See for yourselves!

That is exactly the association we were going for. Christian was very positively surprised seeing our company’s name on our name-tags! We had a very pleasant chat with him.

ICES 4th Annual Conference attendants

The exhibitions held during breaks between talks were also very interesting, with some of the speakers giving additional information on what they were talking before as well as many current KTH projects. They were also an excellent opportunity to talk with the great guys at Freescale and EIS.

The food and drinks were very well chosen and simply delicious – we also really appreciate the concern the organizers showed for providing dishes according to everyone’s tastes and dietary recommendations – and as can be deduced from the photos, the venue was just as nice. Overall, it was an incredibly pleasant day.

At the conference we finally got a chance to meet Vicky from ICES in person, and it’s at her courtesy we use these photos. Thanks!

The autumn is a very busy period for Stockholm, with numerous events related to the field of embedded systems going on within a relatively narrow timeframe. One of such events is the Embedded Conference, which took place in Stockholm beside the bigger Tekniska Mässan on 19-20.10.2010, combining interesting lectures in the field with an exhibition of embedded companies from both Stockholm and other parts of Sweden.

We were pleased to learn that, despite a very strong competition, the Embedded Award in the student category was won by a Polish team, who utilized an Altera FPGA in guitar output processing.

The conference’s friendly atmosphere was a nice contrast to the winter chill that arrived in Stockholm in the meantime. The event was well-organized and interesting, making it a sure spot in our calendar, should there be one next year.