Plenty of time for marketing

Some years ago I ran my own consulting business. The economy was good and it took only a gentle shake of the tree for some nice projects drop into my lap. Unfortunately though, while I was busy doing chargeable work I would omit to continue my marketing efforts, with the rest that my order input had a serious stop-go quality to it.

I share this with you because I’ve noticed in recent months how the trade press is full of articles from machine vision integrators sharing their latest and greatest applications. Cynic that I am, I have to believe this flurry of interesting media stories stems from a lack of chargeable work. In other words, with a lack of new orders coming in, these enterprising businesses decided it was time to get their name out in the public domain.

While this lack of work is obviously bad news, it does have a silver lining for those of us who like to read about real machine vision applications: there are lots of stories being told.

For instance, turn to the “Vision & Sensors” section of Quality Magazine. In the January ’09 issue you’ll find intelligent pieces by David Dechow, “Integration: making it work,” Dan Reed and David Wyatt, “Raising the bar,” (about reading datamatrix codes,) and Maggie McFadden, “What’s the Big Deal with Light Sources?”

The machine vision business may not be booming, but there sure are some interesting stories to read.