3M Co.’s greatest strength can often also seem like its Achilles heel. Few technology companies have quite as diversified a product portfolio, which means declines in some business segments can be offset by solid growth in other sectors but the opposite can also happen – as it did in 2012 when 3M’s revenue grew a…
DetailsMany electronic OEMs don’t buy standard off-the-shelf enclosures, but they don’t have to go the custom route, which can be an expensive and time-consuming process.
DetailsPremier Farnell today released its first half 2013 highlights: Group H1 sales per day up 0.9% versus prior year. Sales excluding Raspberry Pi declined 1.4% as overall market conditions remain subdued. – Excluding Raspberry Pi, year on year sales growth was stable through the period in our main MDD business as Continental Europe, Asia Pacific and…
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It's September, which has unofficially become “maker” month in the engineering community. Kick-started by the three-day Labor Day weekend (perfect for tackling do-it-yourself (DIY) projects) September led into the Open Source Hardware Summit at MIT last week and brings World Maker Faire toward its end. A maker, if you are unfamiliar with the term, is…
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Automation and integration permeate the electronics industry supply chain. But how well integrated is your marketing connected to your suppliers and distributors? Probably not as well as you would like. Fortunately, there are some simple and useful ways to strengthen your marketing links with your most important business partners. Recommendations here presuppose that your company…
DetailsAs hoped, my last blog spurred some conversation within the distribution industry. I’ve heard from a company that remembers how business was done before the Internet came along. Of course, that conversation was by phone. But we’ll be moving it online shortly. (See: In Distribution, How Much Support is Enough?) The question “How much attention…
DetailsKOA Speer Electronics, Inc., of Bradford, PA, was presented with the 2013 Passive Category Supplier of the Year Award during the company’s Annual Supplier Conference. The Supplier of the Year award is an acknowledgement of significant contributions made during the year by suppliers and is based upon quality, delivery, total cost of ownership, lead time…
DetailsCooCox, the highly integrated ARM® Cortex™-M design environment (IDE) from Newark element14, has been extended to support the new STMicroelectronics Value-Line of microcontrollers (MCUs), enabling designers to quickly develop applications across the STM32 Value-Line MCUs. The new design support is a dividend of the close collaboration between ST and Premier Farnell (LSE:pfl), parent company of…
DetailsFuture Electronics, a global leading distributor of electronic components, announced immediate availability of Renesas’ ultra-low-power Wi-Fi solutions with integrated GainSpan Wi-Fi adapters. Wi-Fi is the most extensively deployed networking infrastructure and is the connectivity medium of choice for products in diverse markets, providing high levels of encryption and security via WPA2, achieving high throughput (72Mbps…
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In putting together the slides for a technical review, I realized that two thirds of the staff at Lytica have technical degrees; mostly electrical engineering but also computer science, mathematics and related fields. While not a total surprise, it is unusual to have this technical depth in a supply chain company and it is also…
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