Avnet Acquires Hackster, Focuses on Hardware Startups.

The combination of Hackster.io with Avnet’s recently launched MakerSource resource directory and acquisition of Premier Farnell’s element 14 community will allow start-ups to design and create new ideas, then quickly find the resources to support them as they prepare to take their product to market.

Read more on MAKE and Business Wire.

Kicking off Maker Business Monday! Avent now has the element 14 community as well as hackster.io. Back in October Avent announced element 14 (Premier Farnell). Hackaday (and Tindie) was acquired by SupplyFrame, and a looooong time ago Instructables was acquired by AutoDesk.

IT’S A MAKER ROLL UP YA’LL.

What does this mean for makers? Maker businesses? Companies in the maker space? Well, the community play is just about done, as in, Instructables, Hackaday, element14 and hackster.io are all purchased – that leaves MAKE Magazine (Maker Media) – so if they’re selling, the price likely just went up.

Next up, these acquisitions will or are all user acquisitions, page views and ways to sell ads/media/events, etc. We’ll start to see some hardware company acquisitions, maybe part of this “roll up”. If we had to guess AVNET might be looking to grab a SparkFun or parallax to have a way to make hardware that goes along with the online efforts. Seeed, pimoroni are not USA based, that’s what we’re talking about here, but it does not mean that something isn’t possible. The rapid hardware development and “story” that needs to go along with these purchases of eyeballs, still has not happened. With SparkFun’s new CEO (Glenn Samala) from ARROW, that might be the first one, but these are all just guesses.