Marketing Strategy for SparkfunMini-Case 1 Analysis – SparkFunSparkFun is an untraditional online electronics retailer started in Colorado, United States, founded by Nathan Seidle, 33 – electrical engineering undergraduate. It sells stuff like microcontrollers and printed circuit boards. As of now, this company is in good position and it has a set competitive advantages in the marketplace it’s operates in. Valuable: SparkFun was able to exploit an opportunity where traditional electronics stores like Circuit City, Best Buy RadioShack has failed to do so.Rare: When it was started, they virtually did not have any competition in the space of this business except one of overseas seller (Olimex) with cumbersome ordering process.  Hard to Imitate: SparkFun business and process is not difficult to imitate. It is also not expensive for any other firm to obtain, develop, or duplicate the resource/capabilities.Organizationally Supported: Even though only founder was doing all the roles initially when it was stated, it went through successful basic strategic transformation and developed very solid People, Processes and Technologies through its internal (firm level) & external analysis (Industry level), strategic choices, and strategic implementation.
Based on VRIO framework analysis above, the current competitive implications for SparkFun enjoys unexploited competitive advantage (Valuable, Rare and Organizationally Supported – but easy to imitate).Since it is relatively easy to imitate, SparkFun does not have sustained competitive advantage. The firm relished its monopoly for a while, but there are other companies started popping in this same business. New York–based Adafruit launched in 2005; by 2013, its revenue hit $22 million.In order to maintain its competitive advantage and compete with similar sellers in China and elsewhere, SparkFun has updated its business model and now creates and assembles its own designs and groups products in custom kits, backed with documentation and tutorials that help distinguish its versions from commodities that can be purchased more cheaply elsewhere. The company also began producing a steady stream of videos highlighting talk worthy projects.
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The product line is based on a unique platform based on a proprietary and patented technology, which requires different materials and materials, and requires engineers to make products that are suitable for a specific situation, not some others.
In order to develop and execute projects that work well in a particular environment, the company developed new and unique programming languages from the hardware side. These new languages are often developed using the Java runtime or by programming a generic “smart contract”. In the last year, many major brands—including Facebook, IBM, Cisco, Verizon, Saks Fifth Avenue and even Spotify—have started to develop its new platforms, which have built-in support for a wide range of different platforms and support multiple software languages, using the language APIs to help bring Java and other languages to a more specific target audience. The core Sparkfun core team recently published a major roadmap (1.0) which outlines the direction our team is in to drive business growth.The SparkFun core team is located at the same offices where we worked in the “Smart Contracts” lab.
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Since 2013, SparkFun has updated its products, services and services using the smart contract technology. In 2015 (the 2nd quarter of its first year), it launched a new project: A collection of Smart Contracts that we call Contracts for Delivery, a new API for data and information retrieval through which customers can make a decision about their use of a product or service. The contract is a data and information exchange between SparkFun’s API developers and the business. There are several different projects supported by this new smart contract: a full suite of built-in services that are written in Java, or a suite of paid APIs that use paid APIs. Other projects based on this core model are:
Smart Contracts for Data and Information Retention
Smart Contracts for a Product
Contracts for Access.org
Contracts for Storage.org
Contracts for Payment.org
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The company is building up a team of developers and engineers who are familiar with the smart contract market and technologies, and its smart contracts are being used by several different companies. We are also developing code for the new smart contract API called “JAX-RS”, a custom-defined programming language that is distributed by the software company’s community. While the current Smart Contract framework is compatible with the Java standard library and may not have been fully interoperable with JAX-RS, many of the newer features in the APIs are being used already that allow the programmer to change features without taking up any time.
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Although most of these features have been released via the Java standard library’s JNI API, they have been added to the smart contract code using Java API 16 (version 3.0). This adds new functionality for developers to add to their API clients, like updating subscriptions or adding support to some built-in features.
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There have been some great improvements and improvements to the Java APIs that allow us to simplify the Java platform API as much as possible, and we’re still working hard to get their improvements worked on. However, the major major difference is that the new and improved APIs are being compiled by an entire team of smart contract developers. With the right amount of smart contract collaboration work, they can quickly build and distribute smart contracts.
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If you’re developing SparkFun, then the following links will help