Marketing TODOs for V1.7

[sy2002]

Marketing Goals

V1.7 will be such an awesome release that it is now time to proactively market this project to create a larger community.

Prerequisites

The prerequisites in these section should be finished, before we "Go To Market", because my experience is, that a well planned Go To Market creates some buzz and during that time you have only "1 shot" to make it right! But if we do it right, our team of three should have the change to grow ;-)

Visually more appealing: Leverage our cool demos

The younger generation is not so much into text-mode ;-) In all of our communication, starting with the first thing somebody sees, when entering our website: We need to be visually more appealing and also leverage the great demos that Michael wrote.

For a quick test-drive, everything needs to be easy to follow within the WASM emulator, so that people can get a flavor effortlessly.

README.md

• Enhance "Learnig, teaching and having fun" to reflect the retro gfx/multimedia recreational programming capabilities; in general we might think about the term recreational programming
• Replace the two static demo pictures by animated GIFs (example: https://dev.to/kelli/demo-your-app-in-your-github-readme-with-an-animated-gif-2o3c): The first picture, that shows the textmode mandelbrot could have this choreography: Freshly booted system, blinking cursor, then help, then file run /qbin/mandel.out, then mandelbrot, scroll up, file run fancy font. The second picture showing Q-TRIS should show ~5 seconds of gameplay in classic mode and 5 seconds in color and font-gfx mode. Create the animated GIFs by using a cam on a tripod and then convert to animated GIFs that are not too large.

Our own QNICE Website

• Take animated GIFs from README.md
• Update MIPS on page http://qnice-fpga.com/emulator.html from 13.0 MIPS to 14.0 MIPS (or more, depending on how fast we are until the release, see doc/MIPS.md)
• Add maze2d in the "More Programs to Try" section
• Update Acknowledgements on the start site to reflect Michael's huge V1.7 contributons
• We should have a video like this guy here: https://hackaday.io/project/18206-a2z-computer (and it contrast to this: we do have interrupts, a c compiler, complex addressing modes, ...)

Marketing

Find and nurture multiplicators

Something like this is pure gold:

• https://www.hackster.io/news/qnice-fpga-a-nice-addition-to-your-fpga-f29b3554182b

• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22556573

How can we have more like this?

Also: There is a larger DE-10 community out there than Nexys. Where are these DE-10 community? Can we position ourselves there? Do we want to be officially part of

Reddit: When entering "recreational programming", there are Redit groups and the likes, we might want to post there.

Virtual Chaos Computer Club Meeting: Speaker Slot?

sy2002

• Make a clearer communication about the Digilent A7 board (the 100 version): This is a very common board at ECE studies and students googling for learn projects should find us https://forum.digilentinc.com/topic/18000-nexys-a7-vs-nexys-4-ddr/ This also means: Adjust README.md and hw/README.md. Maybe have two different TOP files for the 50 and for the 100 version assuming the 50-FPGA is not strong enough for our full setup (we might want to open a separate issue for that; I am just keeping this here for not forgetting it now)
• Update our hackaday profile to reflect the huge amount of cool new stuff we are having: https://hackaday.io/project/170512-qnice-fpga
• Revive our hackernews post (or do a new one)
• There are more profiles such as hackaday: Find them, update them, too
• Post on HackerNews and the likes
•  Create Discord Channel / Group / whatever this is called (in contrast to Facebook, for younger people than us)

Bernd

• Create Facebook Group (for older people like us)
• Promote our new website on Facebook Group, on LinkedIn and using FOM's PR department
• Other ideas using Bernd's network?

[bernd-ulmann]

• I will switch from using MIPS as a demonstration example for assembler programming (that is standard at our university) to QNICE this semester thus bringing more students into contact with our machine. :-)

• A catchy video would be just wonderful! (@sy2002 : Do you think Karl's colleague in Karlsruhe who does the promotional videos and made a video of one of your meet&geek-sessions might be interested in helping us with this?)