Will you source electronic components through tablet or smartphone applications in 2012? Component distributors are betting engineers and purchasing folks will be conducting many more of their procurement activities via mobile devices. Distributors have begun to offer free, downloadable apps, but it's not clear if engineers are ready to do more than look up prices…
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A familiar headline has been dominating the business pages for the last few days: A big company is planning to spin off part of its business as a standalone unit. This time it's not Hewlett-Packard and the PC business; it's Barnes & Noble Inc., and the business unit is the Nook. B&N is expecting a…
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PHOENIX — Avnet Embedded, a division of Avnet Electronics Marketing Americas, a business region of Avnet, Inc. (NYSE: AVT) announced today the addition of ILS Technology to its Americas offering. Avnet Embedded will carry the ILS Technology deviceWISE M2M Deployment Kit and deviceWISE M2M Application Platform. As the growth of intelligent systems continues to rise,…
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{complink 379|Apple Inc.} diehard fans believe the company can never do anything wrong. That kind of adulation may be fine when you head a dictatorship, but it can be dangerous for a business enterprise operating in a field as keenly competitive as the consumer electronics market. Apple should listen to what critics are saying. Late…
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WILMINGTON, Mass. — Heilind Electronics, Inc., North America's largest distributor of electronic interconnect products, today announced the acquisition of Kotek Eletro Eletronica Ltda, a leading distributor of electronic components in Brazil. “We are very pleased to be expanding into South America and making Kotek and its employees part of the Heilind family,” said Robert W.…
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The major natural disasters in Japan and Thailand in 2011 underscored the global electronics industry's vulnerability to production disruptions. However, these calamities also served as a crash course for high-tech enterprises, providing important lessons on how component and system suppliers should prepare and react to such challenges. In this age of globally connected supply chains,…
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In the closing days of 2011 it was reported that Amazon's shipments of Kindle Fire were stronger than expected. It was launched in mid-November. By the end of the year {complink 11480|Amazon.com Inc.} announced that about 4 million Kindles were shipped in December alone, of which more than half were the Fire. Amazon has not…
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One of the ongoing goals for the electronics supply chain is to “even out” the peaks and valleys in demand caused by rapidly changing market conditions. If cycles were moderating, a fever chart of inventory levels, for example, would look like a bumpy flat line. Instead, there are still dramatic peaks and valleys — only…
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THIEF RIVER FALLS, Minn. — Electronic components distributor Digi-Key Corporation, recognized by design engineers as having the industry’s broadest selection of electronic components available for immediate shipment, has expanded its distribution relationship with Microsemi Corporation to include programmable logic solutions including the company’s SmartFusion® customizable system-on-chip (cSoC) products, low-power field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), and…
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One of the most effective time and labor savers for a product development effort is the use of a selective part list produced from the company's Item Master. In an earlier Best-Practices post, I discussed the Item Master in some detail and promised to write another feature that introduces a subset of the Item Master,…
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