Infineon Technologies, a founding sponsor of SiliconValley Watcher, is doing some interesting things at InfineonWatch.com. Today, it began to promote the site internally, hoping to involve its employees in discussions and debates.

Since the web site is also public, anybody else can read and involve themselves in the community that develops around InfineonWatch.com. This is unusual since internal web sites are almost always separated from the public Internet. And I haven't heard of anyone else doing something like this; so it will be interesting to see how it turns out.

Infineon's innovative approach is something that other companies might consider as well. Christoph Liedtke, of the media relations team in the US, first spoke with me about some of these ideas last summer; he and his boss, Gerhard Zimmermann, helped develop them further. Mansi Agarwal, Christoph's assistant, has taken to the project with enthusiasm; and our media tech guru, Nick Aster, has been helping out on the infrastructure of the site. InfineonWatch.com will be a work in progress; and its success might establish a new type of communications platform/web site.

Infineon also realizes that it has an opportunity to provide our community of readers with something of value. Through its sponsorship, it has a "window" that is seen by our community. In that window, it has been publishing links to stories from publications around the world, about subjects that matter to it the most. Subjects such as automotive electronics in hybrid cars, RFID, smart cards and homeland security, and memory chip markets. This provides value, in that it highlights the best articles on those subjects; and readers can see what Infineon is watching. That communicates a lot about the culture of a company.

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