You may have noticed that some time has passed since we last made a post. We were completely engrossed in planning for the 48^th Design Automation Conference, but we are satisfied with our activities at DAC this year. Being that this was our first time attending DAC, we thought we’d share our experience and activities with you.

Stepping on the show floor early Sunday afternoon was overwhelming. After months of extensive DAC planning, we had to pinch ourselves to make sure we were actually there.

Our home base was the Conversation Central area of the Synopsys booth.

Darcy and Hannah sitting on what should be labeled "The Conversation Central Comfy Couch"

Hannah opened her mouth and suggested to Karen that she do a video introducing what would be happening in the Conversation Central area over the next few days. Hannah’s suggestion backfired as Karen went wild over the brilliance of the idea and suggested that we both do it with her! This would have been less nerve racking if the video was not going to be broadcasted live through the Synopsys Facebook Page, but we fixed our hair, checked our makeup, put on a smile, and pulled off a pretty good introduction video. You can watch the playback versions of each of these videos on Synopsys’ Facebook Page or YouTube channel and catch guest like Jan Raebey, a UC Berkeley professor, who talked about putting microchips into people’s brains.

See our introduction video with Karen below.

It was Conversation Central’s first dance with not only video, but live video.  Among 16 shows, we sprinkled in six live video shows. These shows were streamed live through the Synopsys Facebook Page using the LiveStream application. How much did this cost us? Not a single cent. Both the LiveStream account and Facebook application were free. You might assume that we used an extremely nice HD camcorder, but we found our Logitech webcam duct taped to a tripod, to be more than sufficient.

Our Logitech webcam duct taped to a tripod. High-tech at it's finest!

Our live show with Paul McLellan and Jim Hogan on the DAC floor being live streamed to Facebook

With three live audio shows, six live video shows, and seven recorded audio shows, we had plenty of room for a great lineup of guests. From Cloud Computing to chip design at 20nm, you will find a recap of each show posted daily from June 13^th – June 28^th onto the Conversation Central Show Notes page in a series that we are calling “The Voices of DAC”.

We didn’t stop with just Conversation Central. In the past, Synopsys has had a Twitter Tower in the general booth area for attendees to follow. We still displayed a large screen with three Twitter feeds, but this year we decided to step it up a notch and add an interactive element for our Twitter followers by hosting two Twitter games.

Twitter Game Card

The first game was called Twitter Trivia and was played by show guests attending specified events (outlined on game card) and answering a question that was tweeted by Synopsys at the beginning of each event. Once they figured out the answer from the topics discussed at the events, they would then tweet the answer to @Synopsys. Every time they answered a question correctly they were entered in a drawing for a Dell Streak 5. Our two winners, @Bruce1271 and @mguthaus, were able to pick up their prizes right in the booth.

We also had a contest to see who could use “@Synopsys” and/or “#snps” in their tweets the most during the week of DAC, allowing even those who were unable attend DAC a chance to win. Our winner @dennisbrophy, will be sent a Kindle 3!

Another addition to DAC this year was the use of QR codes. Not only did we have an entire sign right outside the booth dedicated to displaying QR codes that connected to each of our new media channels (see picture below), but we also had a station inside the booth that generated personalized LinkedIn Networking Cards that boasted a QR code that would link anyone with a smartphone to your own personal LinkedIn profile, making for easy connections in a fun techy way.

The cards were a hit! We had people come back with their colleagues’ business cards asking us to generate LinkedIn Networking Cards to give to them. We even had a few people ask if we would be able to send them cards in the future for others they knew.

When scanned with a QR code reader on a smartphone, each QR code linked to one of Synopsys' social media platforms

Hannah's personalized LinkedIn Networking Card

In addition to all of the above activities, we also had a screen with a rolling presentation that educated engineers on how they can benefit in their career from using the various social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Our next few blog posts will build off of this rolling presentation as we share how we believe engineers can benefit from social media.

What was your favorite part of DAC 2011?