Arrow-Freelancer.com Platform Play Expected to Yield Wearables for CES Debut

Arrow Electronics and Freelancer.com expect the first CE fruits of their ArrowPlus product design and engineering matchmaking service to appear in wearables at CES, Sarah Tang, Freelancer.com vice president-enterprise, told us Friday. The companies announced the ArrowPlus platform last month with the goal of accelerating companies' time to market through the Freelancer.com’s network of electronic and electrical engineers in 1,350 skill areas. Arrow’s portfolio includes more than 200,000 technology manufacturers and service providers, and its Certified Engineering network is designed to solve tech problems across a range of industries including CE, healthcare, IoT, hardware and connected products. The combined ArrowPlus helps companies find qualified experts, use Arrow “technology concierge” services and reach market more quickly at a lower cost than if they went in-house, Tang said. Services include ideation and prototyping; analog and digital design; printed circuit board design; bill of materials parts selection; custom requirements for product delivery; component consolidation and cost reduction; redesigning for smaller size; documentation and translation; firmware, driver and middleware development; real-time embedded software development; and integrated circuit design. A recent ArrowPlus customer was looking to develop a wrist-worn wearable -- from concept to prototype to mass production -- for measuring time, heart rate and other functions consumers would use at a gym, in time for CES in January, she said. ArrowPlus' “platform play” model lowers intermediary and search costs and creates matchmaking efficiencies between supply and demand that benefit smaller companies without the financial resources of large corporations. Quoting a McKinsey report, Tang said the top 10 percent of companies capture 80 percent of positive economic profit and said the ArrowPlus model enables smaller companies to disrupt that paradigm: “Imagine if you can accelerate your go-to-market by two to three times." Arrow calls the platform a “connected talent cloud.” Tang said the platform's cloud-based resources, available globally, means “anything you dream of can come to life."