A couple of weeks ago one of our engineers woke up and read that HackADay was going up for sale. His first reaction was much the same as most regular readers of HackADay, he was worried and concerned that a site that he has read daily for years was going to be sold to someone who would promptly carve it up and ruin it. So he bumped it up the chain here at SupplyFrame and we decided that HaD would be a good fit for us and so we made an offer and here we are!

Who the hell are SupplyFrame?

We’re a technology company on a mission to improve all aspects of the engineering and electronics industry. You’ve probably not heard of us directly, but if you’ve ever used FindChips then you’ve used one of our sites. If you do a little digging you’ll soon find that we provide an advertising network to the electronics industry. While technically this might make us ‘the evil’ in many peoples eyes, we’re more than yet another media company. Our platform and products are used by millions of engineers every month, and we’re building new tools to make designing and manufacturing electronics even easier.

What do you want with HaD?

We build tools for engineers, it only makes sense that we build a closer relationship with the community here. A few of our staff are regular readers, one has even had one of his hacks featured on HaD. We want to do more of that. While we’re mostly Computer Science nerds, we are aspiring makers and hackers – we have a hacklab in our office and a couple of projects under way (check out the blog over here). We try to eat our own dogfood and to generally have a good time building cool stuff. Hopefully soon we’ll have some hacks of our own to post up.

Obviously we have to get some return on our investment, we make most of our money from our advertising network so we’ll probably change out the ads on the site, but that’s the only major change we want to make to the site at this point. Rest assured we won’t be filtering or shaping the content based on our advertisers whims and our main focus will always be on the community and finding ways we can help to make it better.

Where do we go from here?

Well, we’ll keep HaD running mostly as it has been, the adverts will be more relevant (which many of you might actually find refreshing), but other than that not much will change. We’ll try and bring in a few more writers and to help polish up things that have been left unattended. Many of the plans that were proposed in Brian’s presentation align nicely with our thoughts so hopefully we’ll see some of those happen.

In the longer term we’re going to see if we can help out with our contacts, our software development expertise and whatever else we can think of. We’ve got a good relationship with lots of companies in the electronics industry, we hope we can leverage some of those relationships to make good stuff happen here.

Really we’re open to ideas, so let us know your thoughts on how to improve HaD and we’ll see what we can help with. One thing you can be sure of, we’re not here to do evil, we’re here to hack stuff and have fun doing it !

Aleksandar Bradic

CTO

SupplyFrame