Arm
Founded the Arm Innovator Program and the Arm Leading Edge partner program from nothing, and built the reference designs, challenges and summits that gave Arm a direct relationship with the engineers building on it.
Numbers
- 100
- Innovators activatedsecurity, IoT, TinyML, robotics and medical devices
- 3M+
- Earned media impressions
- 50
- Leading Edge partners at launchlaunched at Embedded World 2018
- 200+
- Partners and high-value developers orchestratedrobots, drones, AI/ML, IoT, IIoT, infrastructure, embedded, autonomous
Problem
Arm is in billions of devices. Almost nobody building on it had a relationship with the company. The architecture sits under the board in your hand, so the loyalty sits with the Raspberry Pi or the dev kit.
There was no developer program, no reference designs of our own, and no event where an engineer met Arm as anything but a license.
Solution
I built the Innovator Program first. Find the engineers whose work other engineers already follow, support them, and let the ecosystem hear about Arm from them. A hundred of them, across security, IoT, TinyML, robotics, and medical devices.
Then the same idea for companies. Arm Leading Edge launched at Embedded World 2018 with 50 of Arm's leading embedded systems partners. A badge, with developer content and co-marketing behind it.
Both programs needed something to point at. Reference designs. An open robotics challenge with Hackster.io, 120+ projects from more than 500 developers. An autonomous vehicle platform with ADLINK. A summit and a roadshow, so people saw it in person.
Analysis
I capped the Innovator Program at a hundred on purpose. A hundred engineers with real hardware, real co-marketing, and a named person who answers will talk about the work on their own.
The credit went out under the Innovator's name. That costs Arm impressions in the short term. It is why the advocacy read as theirs.
Result
A hundred Innovators activated. More than three million earned media impressions. 50 Leading Edge partners at the Embedded World launch, and 200+ partners and high-value developers across robots, drones, AI/ML, IoT, IIoT, infrastructure, embedded, and autonomous systems.
The same network is why Rosetta@home and Folding@home could move onto Arm during COVID fast enough to matter.
What I built
Arm Innovator Program2017
Identified, activated and supported a global network of 100 leading Arm developers. I built the selection process, the support model, the co-marketing and the content engine behind it.
Arm Leading Edge Program2018
Founded and launched at Embedded World 2018 with 50 of Arm's leading embedded systems partners. A badge program carrying developer content and co-marketing, aimed at companies rather than individual developers.
Arm Autonomous Robot Challenge2019
Open robotics challenge run with Hackster.io. 120+ open-source projects from more than 500 developers.
Arm autonomous vehicle platform with ADLINK2019
I worked with the CTO of ADLINK to onboard their SOAFEE reference design to Arm, an autonomous vehicle development platform on Ampere Altra.
Folding@home and Rosetta@home on Arm2020
I helped bring Rosetta@home and Folding@home onto Arm during COVID, with the University of Washington, Packet, Neocortix, Linaro, 96Boards, and balena. Thousands of developers ran it on Raspberry Pis.
Activations
Arm AIoT Dev Summit
Two days at the Computer History Museum covering IoT from edge to cloud, intelligent and autonomous machines, and AI from development through deployment. Half on stage, half hands-on with hardware in the room.
500+ Developers
Arm AIoT Summit China
The Shenzhen edition of the AIoT Summit, built for the hardware ecosystem that manufactures most of what the rest of the industry prototypes.
800+ Developers
Arm DevDay: Explore AI on Arm
A free one-day online event run with Hackster.io and taught by the Arm Innovators themselves, covering machine learning, voice, computer vision, edge compute and robotics.
10,000+ Live streams2,000+ Developers reached
Arm Innovator Asia Tour
Five cities in three weeks, taking the Innovator Program to the regional developer communities that manufacture this hardware. Taipei, Tokyo, Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen.
2,000+ Developers5 Cities
The Autonomous Robot Challenge
An open robotics challenge run with Hackster.io. Build a low-cost autonomous robot on Arm; what came back was rovers, delivery robots, donkey cars, underwater and aerial platforms, and a trash-sorting robot.
507 Participants203 Hardware applications28 Projects submitted
Arm autonomous vehicle hack, Seattle
A hands-on autonomous vehicle build and race in Seattle. Developers trained models on small Arm-powered cars and ran them against a taped course.
220 Developers
Platforms
Fold for Covid
At Arm, I helped bring Rosetta@home and Folding@home to the Arm architecture during the COVID pandemic, in collaboration with the University of Washington, Packet, Neocortix, Linaro, 96Boards, and balena. Thousands of developers ran it on their Raspberry Pis, helping fold proteins to map the COVID spike protein.
18 Developers in the task force6,778 Machines contributing14 Rosetta@home team rank
SOAFEE
At Arm, I worked with the CTO of ADLINK to onboard their SOAFEE reference design to Arm, enabling a new generation of autonomous vehicle reference platforms on the Arm architecture.