On the Weekly Briefing podcast: Facebook plans to maintain its business empire by building a virtual empire. But what does betting on virtual reality mean as a practical matter? A rollicking discussion with Kevin Krewell, principal analyst at Tirias Research. Also, an interview with Avnet CEO Phil Gallagher.

As we first go live with this episode, there’s still a week to go before Christmas. This time around, instead of our usual focus on the industry, its people and the technology, we offer a sort of audio Christmas card from EE Times, our colleagues and our families. We hope you enjoy it. The tradition of bestowing gifts on Christmas has expanded into a phenomenon that provides critical annual boosts to the retail sector of the economy, and to the electronics segment, too.

we’d like to invite you to come along with us for one of our intermittent trips down memory lane. Just about every week, we like to celebrate the anniversaries of great moments in technology history. This week we are going to set our Wayback machine to…

we’re off to Shenzhen in China, to get a report from the Global CEO Summit and the Global Distribution Summit – two annual conferences traditionally held on succeeding days. The CEO Summit brings some of the top industry leaders from around the world, while the Distribution Summit provides insights into the unglamorous but absolutely critical business of maintaining global supply chains.

First we’ll be talking about the wearables market with Jér?me Mouly of Yole Développement in France. The wearables category is already one of the biggest new markets in electronics, much to the relief of some manufacturers whose businesses were beginning to sag a bit.

Election Day in the United States has come and gone, but the election process is dragging on and on, largely because the process of counting votes is dragging on and on – specifically the process of counting ballots that were mailed in.

The size of the ARPANET at the time was 60,000 computers. The Morris worm took down 6,000 of them. One of the first people to realize the problem was reportedly Morris himself. By one account, his frantic attempts to get things under control – which, of course, failed – also left clues to his identity that the FBI was able to follow.

Leti in France just began collaborating with Intel on advanced chip packaging. A discussion with EE Times’ newest contributor, Don Scansen, who covered the story for us.

Engineers developing products have been working with models for so long now that doing so is mundane. The process of creating models is also routine, but that doesn’t mean the process is simple. In this episode, we talk with Altair senior vice president Pete Darnell about how the task of building accurate models keeps getting more complex as products – and product development – get more complex.

October 26, 1984, the premiere of the film “The Terminator,” starring a guy who, at the time, nobody – but nobody – would have guessed would one day become governor of California.

The popular notion of a robot is something that resembles a human. That’s a conceptualization that comes directly from popular art. The very first mention of a robot was made 100 years ago, in 1920, when Czechoslovakian author Karl Capek coined the term in his play “Rossum’s Universal Robots.” The play, now better known as RUR, was first produced in 1921. The word “robot” was a derivation of the word for slave, and indeed, the robots in RUR were used essentially as cheap labor.

EE Times has just published a book that we’re rather proud of. Called “Sensors in Automotive,” it’s a handsome volume with up-to-the-minute information about the state-of-the-art in assisted driving and autonomous driving technology. It also covers where the automotive market has to take that technology next.

You might recall in an episode a few weeks back, our guest was Jim Warrick of Beacon Technology Partners. Jim is the impresario behind our latest biennial survey of engineers around the world, which we call “The Mind of the Engineer.” The results from the survey tell us a lot about the electronics industry, about engineering as a profession and about engineers themselves.

Uri Adoni has been a CEO of MSN Israel, a partner in one of the more prominent venture capital funds in Israel, and is the author of the new book “The Unstoppable Startup; Mastering Israel’s Secret Rules of Chutzpah.” We talk about why startups succeed – or fail, why some countries are better at supporting startups than others, and (of course) what “chutzpah” actually means.

And Mobileye, now an Intel company, has rapidly established itself as one of the leading suppliers of processing systems supporting sensor-based driver-assist and autonomous driving technologies. Junko Yoshida talks with Jack Weast, Intel’s senior principal engineer and Mobileye’s vice president for autonomous vehicle standards. She speaks with him about a formalized mathematical approach that teaches machines about safer driving.

EE Times has been covering the Internet of things for a very long time, and one thing that is painfully clear to everyone involved is that the IoT is going to be one huge security vulnerability unless people take action.

An interview with Keith Jackson, the long-time CEO of On Semiconductor. Jackson joined the company in 2002, three years after it was spun out of Motorola, and helped it grow from a conglomeration of cast-off operations into a Fortune 500 company.

Just about every week, we like to celebrate the anniversaries of watershed events in technology history. Along with as many digressions as I can find. Today we are going to set our Wayback machine to…

this year’s five in five from IBM. Every year for over a decade, IBM has identified five big societal challenges that new technology could help solve in as little as five years. We talk with IBM Research VP Jeff Wesler about using new tools such as exascale supercomputers, artificial intelligence, and quantum computers to take on various aspects of global warming, the pandemic, a grand challenge in semiconductor processing, and more.

The trade war with China has exposed America’s eroding semiconductor prowess. Congress is trying to figure out how to effectively shore up the industry. One of our guests this week is Chris Miller, an expert in international trade and relations, who argues that Congress might be headed in the wrong direction, and he suggests what the right direction might be.

the supply chain is something you never hear about unless something goes wrong, and now we’re hearing about it a lot. The supply chain starts with basic materials, and that’s one of the most difficult parts to manage.

The automotive industry began re-introducing electric vehicles more than 20 years ago. After al that time, electric cars still represent only a sliver of total auto sales. But that might change relatively soon. Auto industry expert Egil Juliussen has reasons to believe that electric cars will be more cost-effective than vehicles based on internal combustion engines in as little as five years. That is significantly faster than most people expected.

But enough about the future! It’s now time to dwell in the past. Just about every week, we like to celebrate the anniversaries of interesting events in technology history, and by “technology” – imagine me making air quotes – I mean anything sorta tech-y / science-y / math-y. Today we’re going to set our Wayback Machine to…

July 1, 1979. That was the day Sony introduced the Walkman in Japan. The company wouldn’t release it in the US for another year. The Walkman is now an icon of the consumer electronics industry, but in 1979, it was a gamble. The trend at the time was music players getting bigger.

we recently ran a story about how engineers can volunteer their services around the world. Purdue University has actually established a program called Humanitarian Engineering in response to the growing number of students who want to study engineering specifically to apply those skills in situations generally not addressed by the commercial market.