Content area
Full text
Although Dan Carracino has never had to sing for his supper, in his bohemian days it almost came to that.
However, a serendipitous migration to Southern California and UCLA's film school eventually resulted in the nearly penniless artist co-founding what is now North America's seventh-largest independent semiconductor distributor: the American IC Exchange.
Though he once shunned the business world, Carracino today is known as one of the minds behind AICE's RAMDEX exchange, a price index used as an industry bellwether by the likes of Bloomberg LP and Dataquest Inc.
By publishing the street prices for certain commodity chips, RAMDEX puts power back into the hands of buyers, and at the same time improves AICE's competitive position, according to Mark Giudici, pricing trends analyst at San Jose-based Dataquest. For the first time, users have free access to a semiconductor clearinghouse where multiple-source open-market pricing is presented in a graphical way, Giudici said.
From the outset, AICE recognized that certain electronics goods were beginning to behave like commodities. But while the products had become more generic, buyers continued to pay distributors premiums on what were billed as "unique" goods. AICE decided to change that-or at least offer an alternative.
As...