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andres

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Octopart Traffic (octopart.com)
50 points by andres 10 months ago | link
cached about 1 month ago
"Be Good"
31 points by andres 8 months ago | link | parent | top
cached about 1 month ago
Personally, we don't view them as evil (or ourselves as good, for that matter). We have had good experiences ordering from Digi-Key as well. They have a lot of parts in stock and they ship things right away so we don't have any qualms with their service.

I think that what frustrates Paul is that Digi-Key is actively trying to block innovation in part search because they don't want price competition. Part search today is like travel search in 1995. I used to go straight to American Airlines to buy tickets and that was fine but how much nicer is it to buy tickets online now? I even travel more because it is easier to find things.

The only thing that Octopart is trying to do is make it easier for people to find parts and Digi-Key has said that they don't want that to happen. They have specifically told us that they don't want us to exist because they don't want price comparison. We keep Digi-Key on the site because it makes our users happy. You'll have to ask Digi-Key how getting rid of Octopart helps their users.

Cybersquatter email
18 points by andres about 1 year ago | link
cached 4 days ago
From: "Thomas Li"

Subject: important domain names: octopart.cn & octopart.com.cn

Dear Sirs,

We have octopart.cn & octopart.com.cn and found that the domains are useful for you if you want to explore China market.

We can really consider selling them out if you are interested in them.

Please get back to us with your kind offer.

Thanks

Regards,

Thomas

Three Minutes with Steve Wozniak (pcworld.com)
17 points by andres about 1 year ago | link
cached 12 months ago
"Be Good"
13 points by andres 8 months ago | link | parent | top
cached about 1 month ago
Digi-Key is the largest small-volume distributor of electronic parts in the US. They do $1.2Bn per year in revenue of which $700M is done online. Their gross margins are about 50% and their business is growing at 20% per year.

When Microsoft accused Linux of violating 50 software patents, most people thought they were pretty evil. The claims were frivolous and their aim was to preserve their market share at the expense of consumers. Likewise, Digi-Key makes the frivolous claim that by displaying their public information and linking to their webpage, Octopart is acting illegally.

This is not a debate about whether Digi-Key is good for the town of Thief River Falls or if Digi-Key should be making money. They have as much right to make money and keep their employees happy as Microsoft does, but when they use their muscle to wrongfully stifle innovation at the expense of consumers, it shouldn't be surprising that some people would call them 'evil'.

"Octopart very well received after its first time on the Reddit frontpage"
13 points by andres 8 months ago | link | top
cached about 1 month ago
The entire thing is pretty funny - we never thought an electronic parts search engine would get on the front page of reddit. Here are the reddit stats: 4056 unique ips, ~10000 queries

The reddit post also got us traffic from popurls.com (157), wired.com (37), and some random traffic from stumbleupon.

I have a new appreciation for reddit comments. Redditors are extremely intelligent people expressing well thought out points of view which I agree with whole heartedly. I'm going to start using the testimonials in our VC slide deck.

http://reddit.com/info/6gtvm/comments/c03sz4z

"I Dropped Out of Grad School Today"
13 points by andres about 1 year ago | link | parent | top
cached 28 days ago
Whoah! Give me a little more credit than that! Octopart is a startup which we've only been working on for three months- we're no where close to being done. So far as my comments about women and society go, I think they will resonate with physics grad students and probably a few others. Otherwise, I agree, they don't make sense.
Sergey Brin (stanford.edu)
12 points by andres about 1 year ago | link
cached 25 days ago
Google PowerPoint Clone Coming (techcrunch.com)
12 points by andres about 1 year ago | link
cached 1 day ago
Dell Picks Ubuntu Linux (redherring.com)
11 points by andres about 1 year ago | link
cached 20 days ago
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