This bankruptcy has been long anticipated. It's time.
There was a time when it was hard for hobbyists to buy parts. Even in Silicon Valley. I used to have a commercial account with Hamilton/Avnet just so I could order and pick up at will-call. The alternative was ordering from Allied Radio, with two week delivery and a 5% error rate. Now, anybody can order from Digi-Key, and get delivery tomorrow if you pay for express shipping. There's not even a minimum order.
If you're looking for a business model, consider a hobbyist front end to Digi-Key and Mouser. Digi-Key has about 40 options for a 1/10 watt 100 ohm leaded resistor. This overwhelms many hobbyists. (Do I need flame resistance?) Octopart does some of this, but a social component is needed. Something like Github for hardware, with design files, bills of materials, issue tracking, etc.
Sam from Octopart here. Our Common Parts Library is an effort to distill commonly used components for connected device applications, https://octopart.com/common-parts-library .
But the list doesn't have common prototyping components like radially leaded resistors (it's almost all SMT parts). I could imagine a "Common Parts Library for Prototyping". I'd love to hear feedback on something like this.
Also, check out our lightweight Bill of Materials Manager, https://octopart.com/bom-lookup/manage
It has built in collaboration features - it can be collaboratively edited much like Google Docs.
> consider a hobbyist front end to Digi-Key and Mouser
Adafruit and SparkFun are that. SparkFun even explicitly mentions the Digikey part for boring stuff like capacitors. (https://www.sparkfun.com/products/8375)
There was a time when it was hard for hobbyists to buy parts. Even in Silicon Valley. I used to have a commercial account with Hamilton/Avnet just so I could order and pick up at will-call. The alternative was ordering from Allied Radio, with two week delivery and a 5% error rate. Now, anybody can order from Digi-Key, and get delivery tomorrow if you pay for express shipping. There's not even a minimum order.
If you're looking for a business model, consider a hobbyist front end to Digi-Key and Mouser. Digi-Key has about 40 options for a 1/10 watt 100 ohm leaded resistor. This overwhelms many hobbyists. (Do I need flame resistance?) Octopart does some of this, but a social component is needed. Something like Github for hardware, with design files, bills of materials, issue tracking, etc.