This company Nominal (nominal.io) just raised $80M at a $1B+ valuation for hardware engineering data infrastructure. That alone is interesting. But what caught my eye is they released a physical product catalog styled after McMaster-Carr. Square-back binding, industrial aesthetic, the whole thing. It's a software company shipping a paper catalog in 2026.
Their product helps hardware teams (aerospace, defense, automotive) manage test and operational data. Think time series, video, structured metadata across massive test campaigns. Customers like Anduril and Hermeus are using it.
But honestly I'm just here for the catalog. Someone over there clearly cares about the craft of how engineering tools get presented to the world. The website has a similar retro-industrial vibe. Feels like a throwback to when instrument companies like Tektronix and HP actually had taste.
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If Google began to charge for their services, at least there would be a way out. If a single market telecom raised prices or change policies, there isn't any real recourse.
The updates take the entire instance down for 2-5 minutes each month. While you can't avoid them, they can be scheduled for particularly low traffic times. If you're trying to avoid downtime, its a giant PIA. Even with HA enabled, you still lose master, slave and read replicas. Not entirely sure what they define HA as, but a mandatory monthly downtime doesn't usually fit into mine.
[Update]
That said, from what I understand, they have a road map to maintaining read replicas and queued writes. Not sure what the date on it is though.
I wouldn't say they're risking nothing. Sure, they're not shutting down existing offices and removing themselves from markets, but they probably walked away from money they wont get back. I'm sure there were legal fees, plus people they might have already begun to recruit. So yes, its not a large risk, but its not like it didn't come at a loss for them.
Local Charlotte paper kind of agrees, it would be interesting to see companies pull out of places like China and Saudi Arabia, given the investment that has been made already, and the loss of growth that would come from that.
Essentially, the company would have to put social issues as a priority over being competitive, because I can assure you that someone else with lower morals would take that business. Would be a very hard stance for companies to take with share holders.
I feel products like this - http://www.vtechphones.com/products/product_detail/1673 - (just an example) are a better solution to this problem. You dont need a land line subscription, just a cell phone with bluetooth.
When my parents get home, their cell phones pair to the home phone, so when they receive a call, the home phone rings. They don't have to carry around cell phones, and they can place calls through their cell phones using the handsets. Seems complicated at first, but saved headache and $$ in the end.
"Today, the average member of the union in Oakland makes $147,000 per year in wages, with benefits equal to another $82,000 per year."
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That is a huge amount of money, especially considering that includes entry level positions. While I understand these machines are complicated, and don't blame them for wanting to keep their jobs, I didn't expect over 200k a year total to be the average.
Their product helps hardware teams (aerospace, defense, automotive) manage test and operational data. Think time series, video, structured metadata across massive test campaigns. Customers like Anduril and Hermeus are using it. But honestly I'm just here for the catalog. Someone over there clearly cares about the craft of how engineering tools get presented to the world. The website has a similar retro-industrial vibe. Feels like a throwback to when instrument companies like Tektronix and HP actually had taste.