Hello From SupplyFrame – Your New Evil Overlords !

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

234 thoughts on “Hello From SupplyFrame – Your New Evil Overlords !

  1. Glad to hear nerds will be calling the shots, and not clueless dumazz hipsters. ;)

    I’m sure despite whatever else gets written here, most readers will still be along for the ride.

    Best of luck with the new venture.

  2. Seems like a good deal for me solely because you can tell this isn’t some uptight and traditional company. (“hell” in an announcement!? blasphemy!) They also are clearly involved in the electronics industry and aren’t JUST and advertising or news company. I for one welcome our new overlords

  3. Congrats guys! But you paid too much, lol.

    Feature request: please add the full screen button to all youtube videos posted. It’s highly annoying to have to open youtube first each time. Thanks!

  4. The only thing SupplyFrame sells is ads and “marketing solutions.”

    So I’ve got a question, if they sell an ad for say a certain tool, and a hack for that tool is posted on HaD, given the possibility of industry pressure would SupplyFrame pull the link to the hack?

  5. sadly, A large majority of the readers and posters here cant afford the shipping on your products let alone anything that you guys sell. Your stuff is top notch, but most of HAD are homeless, college kids that live in their car, or mom’s basement dwellers. There area few of us that actually work in the industry though, so maybe it will be profitable to you guys.

  6. Mr bradic,

    Perhaps you could start with a few subtle changes.

    How about weekly reading comprehension testing for the editors?

    For example:
    http://hackaday.com/2013/07/26/retrotechtacular-a-tour-of-wlw-a-500000-kw-radio-transmitter/#more-100266

    That is a 500,000 Watt transmitter. The fact that it is a 500,000 Watt tower is in the youtube title and the intro text. In GIANT BOLD LETTERING.

    How exactly does mike manage to turn that into 500,000 Kilowatts?

  7. Not sure how to react. My immediate response was, “Oh No!” but after checking out your website, as well as hearing Caleb’s comments, I feel much better about the whole thing. I still feel uncertain about the whole thing, but I’m not bailing out anytime soon.

  8. if you love supercookies and feel compelled to eat them,
    dont read the rest of this post, it will offend you

    only ONCE did i click an ad on this site.
    this ad i had ONLY ever seen here on H.A.D.

    THIS AD HAS FOLLOWED ME AROUND THE NET AND BACK
    AND IT IS NOW (sometimes) ON ALL(any) WEBPAGE
    I VISIT EVEN when I CLEAR MY COOKIES (every time browser close)
    on sites like google and youtube to name a few.

    you REALLY want me to believe that YOUTUBE serves ad’s of
    SuperBrightLEDs.com to the general public ????!?!?!?!
    yeh because everyone knows WHAT (the required) solder/heatsink even IS.
    (mostly sell component LEDs that need to be soldered)

    im no joke,
    and i only put up with this cyberstalking because H.A.D. was independantly owned

    SOLD TO AN AD COMPANY? really? so im going to get tracked EVEN MORE?????

    if this was MY site i would have rather let it burn that sell it to an ad company.
    so im a looser and the odd one out if i dont buy things online???
    thats ANTI-HACKING!!! (hardware)

    THIS SITE WAS ABOUT HOW TO SAY “FU” TO ALL THE SELLERS AND ONLINE VENDORS BY HACKING WHAT WE ALREADY HAVE OR CAN GET SECOND HAND
    OR CAN BUY IN F* PERSON AT A REAL F* STORE

    nuff said

    PS: if you EVER see this name “NewCommentor1283” evereverever again here,
    it is not me.
    PPS: i have NEVER used this name on ANY other site, if you saw it, it was someone else

    FUCK YOUR GODDAM “SUPERCOOKIES” cuz thats all you got left

    if any of my projects EVER make it onto here i will send you a CeaseAndDessist order. my hard work is not so you can use it as a deliverey method to litter, track, and poisn other people’s desktop computers.

    i have two lawers, and i can get a third if i need to.

    1. If it weren’t for my horse, I wouldn’t have spent that year in college.

      Seriously, though, using extensions to block javascript, flash, and ads, and then being thoughtful about where I click, I never run into that trouble. Oh, and use private browsing when I log in on facebook or twitter or others that are highly invasive.

      I agree that such cross-site tracking is evil, but I don’t think we’re going to convince the perpetrators to stop, so we may as well just take reasonable precautions on our own systems.

      It sounds like you have something pretty scary going on in your browser/system. Maybe time to reformat.

  9. I’ll go along with it. As much as I disapprove of the annoying advertisements floating all over the internet, tasteful ads are welcome, especially if they are relevant to the site in question. I know that there needs to be a return on investment at some point, and I hope this works out for everyone. I guess as long as the new owners care about HaD, and control the ads that are posted, this will be one less website where you have to worry about getting those annoying fake antivirus and ransomware malware infections. Never personally had a problem with those, but I certainly have to clean a lot of computers that get infected.

    Best of luck to the new owners, here’s hoping you can make this community thrive, and receive a return on your investment as a bonus. I’m sure there’ll be some difficulty, just stick with it.

  10. sooooo how long is this article going to be at the top of the front page? I kinda want it to go away now cause I’ve read it and kinda want to start seeing what’s new without having to scroll right away.(yeah yeah I’m lazy but you know you’re thinking the same thing I’m just the guy with the nerve to say something :P)

  11. Man, I have just got to check in more often. This like the second or third time I’ve waded in on a subject after the fact (but I had a good excuse, found a really awesome midget/barbed wire porn site and ..lost track of time)
    Soooo…….Heeeeyyy…………..(dozed off…)…..uh Overlords!! Yeah welcome. Here’s some brand new advise you probably haven’t heard.. Ready?
    “DON’T FUCK IT UP!!!” Of course I mean for me. Which probably, is exactly what you would have to do in order not to “fuck it up” for you.
    I’m not anti-capitalism, quite the opposite, but I fear that making a profit will get ahead of and require the leaving behind of the one aspect of HAD which I have come to not only enjoy the most, but have many times actually gleaned better information on the subject from than the post itself, the comments.
    And of course the inevitable sanitizing (censoring ) of projects which may, arguably, be less less thrilling technologically, but are none the less, hilarious, irreverent, dangerous, libelous, scandalous, dangerous, illegal in some places, immoral to some people, dangerous, foolhardy and or fun. and dangerous. (better yet, potentially fatal, after all, life is usually lived fullest by those closest to losing it. That’s a real fact.)
    I mean, lets face it, the first time some “copycat” , would be hacker crashes his Giant Arduino controlled, Hemp fired, Reciprocating Phallic Hexibot into a preschool for pets belonging to under-privileged urban investment bankers and their celebrity wives, that’ll be it.
    Once the the place is a complete boor, the punctualateriot’s will finally get their way as the final nail is driven home on the coffin lid as the board approves a full time grammar and spelling editor to give the site that “professional” look it had lacked for soooo looong!
    Hope I’m wrong, Because IMHO there are a million different places I can go online to learn things (like that there are a thousand different kinds of barbed wire, for instance) but there are not a lot of places where I can go to learn of things.
    Ursus.

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