Tuesday March 21st, 2017 Interview with Altium! 4:30pm ET LIVE! @altium Limor “Ladyada” Fried and team will be interviewing Altium!

http://www.altium.com/

About Altium
“Altium software empowers teams of makers, engineers, and innovators to create a smarter, safer, and more connected world.”

http://www.altium.com/company/about-altium/about-us
http://www.altium.com/company/about-altium/altium-in-a-snapshot

Joining us will be: Ted Pawela Chief Marketing Officer, Altium

TED PAWELA
Chief Marketing Officer
http://www.altium.com/company/about-altium/leadership

Ted Pawela was appointed Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) in October 2016. Prior to joining Altium, Ted served as Product Management Executive responsible for marketing at BIOVIA (a subsidiary company of Dassault Systemes). Ted has extensive knowledge and experience in marketing at a leadership level in additional technology software companies including Accelrys, MSC.Software, ANSYS, Marc Analysis Research Corporation, and ANSYS. As CMO, Ted is a key member of Altium’s leadership team and is closely aligned with the execution of the company’s corporate strategy and product strategy. Ted is responsible for the management of Altium’s multi-product, multi-brand positions and their support for Altium’s bid for PCB market leadership by 2020.

The questions we plan to ask are here, post your questions in the comments!

1. What’s your role at Altium? Given that your background is more in MCAD/MCAE than eCAD, why did you join Altium?
2. Altium has a pretty long history – can you give us a brief background on the company?
3. What would you say Altium’s philosophy is, and how does it set Altium apart from other companies in the “CAD” industry?
4. Altium has several PCB software applications – CircuitMaker, CircuitStudio, and Altium Designer. Are you planning to keep developing all of them, or will some be retired or put in maintenance mode in favor of others?
5. Is there anything that Altium products can do that no other PCB software does?
6. How does Altium help avoid common PCB design mistakes that come up?
7. Much of the Adafruit community is made up of makers. Does a commercial software company like Altium really care about the makers community?
8. It’s no secret that one Autodesk Eagle recently moved to a subscription-only model, and that Altium has been running replacement discount promotions. Why do you think Eagle users should take a look at Altium products?
9. For Circuit Studio, which is the direct competition to Eagle Ultimate, the question would be how does the maintenance premium version compare with Eagle’s saas version?
10. What is your favorite Altium innovation/feature and why?
11. How/where can makers or any customers of Altium participate in giving feedback, suggestions, or just ask questions about all this?

AND…

More questions & comments from the community

1. “I’ve used Altium in the past. The questions relevant for this deal with their both the freeware edition called Circuit Maker and the commercial entry-level edition called Circuit Studio.”
2. “The question for Circuit Maker is easy: why is user data storage strictly cloud-based?”
3. ” For Circuit Studio, which is the direct competition to Eagle Ultimate, the question would be how does the maintenance premium version compare with Eagle’s saas version?”
4. Suggestion/idea: “”A pay only if you successfully crowd fund your project” license. It’s free to use for makers and hobbyists, but if you crowd fund your project you pledge to pay for the tool. And you build the cost of the tool into your campaign, so you’re effectively crowd funding your toolkit as well as your project. It’d be also helpful if they can figure out a way to do multi-tier pricing, so they have an intermediate tier for less complex designs that don’t really require a $5k up-front to work on.”
5. Suggest/idea: “a city-wide site licenses for hackerspaces, so you’d have a limited number of copies that people could check out and use within the hackerspace context”.
6. Comment – “any cloud-based board design tool is very limiting. I do a /lot/ of board design on long airplane rides — layout is the perfect thing for that situation. So if someone told me I could only use my design tool if I had an Internet connection, it would be thrown out of my toolkit pretty fast.”