Embedded World 2006 was organized at Nurnberg, Messe. Getting there via German public transportation system was really easy. The exhibition and technical events were hosted in a series of halls. Keynote address on 14th February by Jerry McGuire of Analog Devices stressed on need for convergence of MCU and DSP worlds. He touted that their Blackfin architecture fits the bill. Most technical talks were dominated by German and French speakers. Communicating their thoughts across to the world audience was obviously not very easy for them. Sessions by Hitex on their debugger for ARM based MCUs (HiTop5) was particularly interesting. One of their architects nicely explained how conditional execution of each ARM instruction posed a problem while deubgging optimized code. Another very nice talk was given by Markus Levy, President EEMBC (http://www.eembc.org/About/ConsortiumLeadership.asp). He very candidly explained that some of the benchmarks were in need of rework and also explained the need for doing apple-to-apple comparion while evaluating various Embedded Systems development choices. Linux was big at the show. Everyone was trying to showcase linux in their products. Windows CE was present (they had few booths in the exhibition), but had much smaller coverage. Very few Indians were present at the event. Organization of the event was ok, but events in Singapore are much better managed both in terms of quality and logistics.