Ponoko, a company that helps people make stuff on a small scale, has teamed up with SparkFun Electronics – another company that helps you do the same thing. The reason? Well, Ponoko makes the physical enclosures, and SparkFun makes the electronics. This enables people who want to make stuff order all the parts from one source, rather then multiple sources on the internet. → Read More
Ponoko, the site that lets you build (and sell) products from homegrown design schematics, is about to make its service even more accessible. Under a new program called Photomake, you’ll now be able to produce tangible objects from doodles on a piece of paper – just snap a photo of your masterpiece, choose a material, and Ponoko’s laser cutters will do the rest. It’s a great idea, and I can’t wait to immortalize my favorite doodlings in black acrylic. → Read More
You know that doohickey you’ve wanted to make for the last decade, but you’ve never had the right materials or equipment? The one that’s going to make you rich? Your time for glory has arrived. Ponoko, which launched at TechCrunch40, has introduced a revamped site that will bring e-commerce functionality to their marketplace, allowing users to buy, sell, and give away the designs they’ve created. The site allows designers to sell their products and have Ponoko ship them directly to customers, enabling them to create a virtual storefront with few (if any) upfront costs. Sellers need only pay a small fee to the site in addition to the cost of materials, without having to worry about establishing distribution channels or inventory. And buyers are guaranteed that products are unique – they can even buy and modify design files if they want to tweak something. Ponoko has also added a factory and moved its headquarters to San Francisco, explaining that over half of their U.S. visitors live in California. According to Ponoko, the move, combined with the direct designer-to-consumer retail model, will help reduce carbon emmisions. Ponoko’s desire to go green is given further credibility by the addition of Graham Hill, founder of TreeHugger, to their board. CrunchBase Information Ponoko Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
As much as I enjoy screwing around with the latest tech goodies, I couldn’t build a car out of legos, much less Steampunkify an old keyboard or mouse. Plenty of folks can, however, and are turning their gadget making and tinkering skills into viable businesses. Take Limor Fried, who runs Adafruit, a Web site that she uses to custom etch iPod and laptops and the like with personalized messages—”CrunchGear BFF!“, for example. Say you have a design in mind that you’d like to see made into an actual product. Not a problem. Go to something like Ponoko and upload your designs. The company will then create your design, which you’re then able to sell through the very same Web site. → Read More
We are being flooded with emails regarding the TechCrunch40 conference – things we did right, things we did wrong (lots, apparently), and suggestions for next year. All are welcome, but what I like to see the most are the emails from presenting companies talking about what’s happened to them since they went up on stage last week. I’ll be pulling all of the feedback into a wrap up post later this week, but today I received an email from Ponoko, one of the forty launching startups, that really made me feel like the whole thing was worth it. “We reached 1 million website hits within 23 hours 27 mins and 6 secs of launch,” said Derek Elley, the company’s chief strategy officer. They also wrote a blog post noting some of the coverage the company got immediately after launching – there was a lot of it. So much, in fact, that the site went down for a while. Ponoko is a cool way for designers to create new physical products and sell them. Users collaborate on design and prototyping all the way through to production. Check it out – the website is back up and humming. → Read More
Session four as follows, including our live notes. Cake Financial Cake Financial is a social investment service that lets people track all their investment portfolios in one place. The service allows individual investors to track and analyze their historical performance up to ten years. Users can also view the real-time portfolios and performances of their friends, family and top investors all without disclosing net worths, shares owned, portfolio sizes, etc. Online investing service that offers social recommendations, without disclosing personal details. “There is nothing fake about Cake!”. Homepage provides all the information usually found at the brokerage firm, but provides aggregated data from multiple firms. Cake calculates annual returns across multiple brokers. Interesting: you can chart your success against others, friend, associates etc. Tools also allow you to look at trades other Cake members have made, the idea being that you can see what users with better results are investing in. You can also see who is investing in a stock, eg: you can see everyone who holds Cisco, and then see what they are buying and selling as well. DocStoc Docstoc is an online community and professional network around user generated, professional documents. Users can store their own files or documents from anywhere around the internet. The files can be categorized and shared with various levels of read write accessibility. The documents can be searched by categories or by keywords and then previewed online or downloaded. Search results can be filtered by views, downloads, ratings and comments. Learn more about DocStoc. Interesting introduction: fake customer testimonials from the audience. A professional document service, comes with comments, profiles etc… Docs can be found by keyword search, filters which include community filters, category search. Documents can be previewed via popup and shared. Includes registration for blogs as well. Teach The People Teach The People is a social network built around online education. The site lets anyone with specific subject knowledge or a useful skill set to share it with the Teach The People communities. Users can create individual profiles and contribute content to topics (computer programming, math or “Bob Marley’s Influence on R&B Music” are a few examples). The site encourages quality content by letting users become community creators and by giving users points for rating, referring friends and answering questions. Community creators help create content and run day-to-day community operations. They can charge other users fees for monthly community access, → Read More
