I don't really understand what Siemens wants with SaaS or indie hardware creation et cetera. I know they do both heavy industry and some consumer electronics. I don't really see the synergy here. Maybe they are just looking for ideas? But I'm sure Siemens could read these websites without an expensive acquisition. Anyone understand it a little better?
Siemens acquires Supplyframe, owners of Hackaday and Tindie
161–170 of 175 posts
Re: Siemens acquires Supplyframe, owners of Hackaday and Tindie
#162There is a lot of FUD and speculation here.
Hackaday isn't going anywhere.
Ask me how I know: https://hackaday.io/hexagon5un
Re: Siemens acquires Supplyframe, owners of Hackaday and Tindie
#163There is a lot of FUD and speculation here. Hackaday isn't going anywhere. Ask me how I know: https://hackaday.io/hexagon5un
Hoping for the best. Preparing for the usual: https://vooza.com/videos/the-truth-about-acquisitions/
Re: Siemens acquires Supplyframe, owners of Hackaday and Tindie
#164This is great news for Supplyframe. But there is a darker undercurrent here that really needs some introspection. The "makers market" of today doesn't work. Let's compare the market between say 1975 and 1985 with the market between 2010 and 2020. Money spent on the early market supported no less than 6 monthly printed magazines, several chains of electronics component stores (Radio Shack/Tandy/Dick Smiths/Marples(sp?…
I suspect hobby electronics has faced stiff competition from hobby computing, among people inclined towards tinkering. The people who, in the 1980s might have been using a 555 timer to blink an LED? These days they've got a computer, and they're making a web page or writing 'hello world' in javascript. Oh sure, a few of them might get an Arduino and blink an LED from time to time - but nowhere near enough to support…
> they're making a web page or writing 'hello world' in javascript.
Would rather have more hardware people than software but sadly not the case. Hardware is...well...hard. Automating deployments? eh not so much.
This seems to be a general trend where the smart people are gravitating towards "not hard" fields like data science, software and finance. So our houses look like they're straight out of the future retro 60s except for our flat LCD smart TVs and and Alexa pods.
Re: Siemens acquires Supplyframe, owners of Hackaday and Tindie
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's wrong with their UI? Using https://hackaday.com/2021/05/22/irc-will-never-die/ as an example Seems the contrast is excellent and no obvious disturbing layout choices. Fairly traditional layout although I'm not a fan of the white on black as I sit in the sun a lot, but generally it seems quite good if you compare it with most random blogs out there.
There's a reason why nothing, but nothing , of any importance or popularity uses white text on a black background.
Ok, I'll bite. What's that reason? Because as long as the contrast is there, there is no obvious reason why using that color scheme would lead to less importance or popularity.
Re: Siemens acquires Supplyframe, owners of Hackaday and Tindie
#166Am I the only one being surprised that what I perceived where the last bastions of pop DIY culture were in fact just farming for corporate acquisition? This is a bummer, time to forego http and switch to nicer realms. > This will help customers to reduce costs, increase agility and make highly informed decisions. Thanks for informing me about how to make decisions and somehow "increase agility" whatever the f that is…
I think shopping for an acquisition for many businesses, especially in tech, is to be expected. It's hard for owners to say no to the sort of money being thrown around not only for themselves, but for any employees with equity. If there's a platform created by someone who's already struck it rich once and truly doing it out of love, then maybe you've found a super rare unicorn.
Of course, and it's well within their rights to look for sponsors and acquisitions. It's also very naive of me to think people would "keep it real", as if that ever brought anything of value.
It's just surprising, somehow I thought those sites were grassroot, made for passionate amateurs by passionate amateurs.
If you want to see the platforms you talk about I suggest taking a look at tilde servers, lots of passion and proper punk attitude
Re: Siemens acquires Supplyframe, owners of Hackaday and Tindie
#167This is great news for Supplyframe. But there is a darker undercurrent here that really needs some introspection. The "makers market" of today doesn't work. Let's compare the market between say 1975 and 1985 with the market between 2010 and 2020. Money spent on the early market supported no less than 6 monthly printed magazines, several chains of electronics component stores (Radio Shack/Tandy/Dick Smiths/Marples(sp?…
I really miss Byte [0]. It covered a wide range of computing, from Steve Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar [1], to my introduction to hypertext. It was great to read the in-depth reviews of both products [2] and technologies, and get an understanding of what was going on in the tech world.
[0] - https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine?tab=collection
[1] - https://circuitcellar.com/
[2] - https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/013-end-of...
Re: Siemens acquires Supplyframe, owners of Hackaday and Tindie
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
Digikey also carries a decent selection of Sparkfun and Adafruit parts. Shockingly, it’s generally free overnight shipping cross-border to Canada. Ordering stuff from Aliexpress is cool, but having it on your doorstep in less than 24 hours is incredible.
Yeah, that's nice. Digikey is in Minnesota so I assume that helps for some parts of Canada. It looks like it's only free for orders above $100? Amazon is worth a look too, particularly for Prime users.
Yeah, one of the options they have is "Incoterms DDP" (delivered duty paid). From what I can tell, they'll sometimes stick the packages in a truck and ship them out from Winnipeg instead of shipping directly from their facility in Thief River Falls. Saves all of the painful customs things that FedEx and UPS seem to screw up on a regular basis.
Edit: also, I generally have a hard time keeping my order under $100, so I guess I've never actually seen what the shipping fee would be :D
Re: Siemens acquires Supplyframe, owners of Hackaday and Tindie
#169Huge fan of Hackaday so I'm really not with this acquisition but if you offer me 700,000,000 for my blog I'd sell it too. I wish them the best of luck.
Findchips advertising and the SaaS tools for sourcing/lifcycle/data aggregation of components is their moneymaker. Hackaday is basically subsidized through The rest of Supply Frame, along with offering marketing partnerships and other tangential marketing type services. There's a lot of things Supply Frame does and Hackaday/Tindy are not major targets of this acquisition.
The biggest play here is competition to Altium's Octopart purchase, especially with all of today's electronic component supply chain woes. The Siemens (Mentor Graphics/PADS/Expedition) + Findchips/SupplyFX data is likely one of the end goals where the value will be derived.
Re: Siemens acquires Supplyframe, owners of Hackaday and Tindie
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's wrong with their UI? Using https://hackaday.com/2021/05/22/irc-will-never-die/ as an example Seems the contrast is excellent and no obvious disturbing layout choices. Fairly traditional layout although I'm not a fan of the white on black as I sit in the sun a lot, but generally it seems quite good if you compare it with most random blogs out there.
There's a reason why nothing, but nothing , of any importance or popularity uses white text on a black background.
On an iPhone 11 there is about 1cm of vertical space for the content a recurrent reader wants to see: The latest article. Used to be better a couple years ago. Also “From the blog” is not emphasizing that these are actually the most recent articles from the blog and not some random selection