We’ve talked about Ponoko in the past, they do small scale runs on sheet materials, typically used in making personalized products. Previously, if you wanted to add electronic components you’d be forced to order the sheet materials from one source, and then the electrics from another. Ponoko announced recently that they’ve teamed up with the electronics distributor SparkFun, which will let you order all the parts at the same time. The end result will be a more streamlined production process that will reduce overhead costs and make it easier for people to market their products.

From the press release:

Ponoko has teamed up with SparkFun Electronics to help make it easy for you to build custom electronics products using your online personal factory.

This combines the digital making wizardry of the world’s easiest making system with a 1500+ strong electronics catalog from open source electronics supplier SparkFun.

This new service extends Ponoko’s materials catalog to include electronic gadgetry as well as timbers, plastics, fabrics, metals and other sheet materials.

“It’s the first time we’ve offered non-sheet materials,” says Ponoko CEO David ten Have. “Adding hardware to the mix opens up new possibilities on several fronts. Creators can order all the parts they need with one click, rather than needing to go to multiple sources. They also have a single place to describe and store their product design and its components – in this case, the custom parts and the electronics hardware.”

The electronics catalog has been slotted into the existing Ponoko making process so there’s virtually no change from the current making system. Creators upload their designs and select flat sheet materials. Then they have the option to add electronic hardware to their order at the same price as buying direct from SparkFun. They get an instant online price, check out, and all of their items are delivered to their door – custom parts from Ponoko and electronic parts from SparkFun.

“This partnership with Ponoko is more than just business. Rather, it represents another step in our goal of ‘enabling electronic enthusiasts,’” said SparkFun Chief Operating Officer Trevor Zylstra. “SparkFun and Ponoko are working together to create an easy way for our customers to make polished, complete projects. We want the SparkFun community to have the resources to create unique custom enclosures for their projects. Working together with Ponoko, we think we have accomplished that.”

The new service also makes it more practical for creators to sell their custom made electronic products.

“Anyone can sell their custom made goods on Ponoko, including electronic products,” says Mr ten Have. “They just take photos of their finished items and upload them to their free Ponoko showroom along with a description. Customers order online and we take care of the fulfillment process – delivering the custom parts and hardware direct to the customer for self assembly.”

More than 60,000 user generated goods have been made so far using the Ponoko system. Providing easy access to materials is as much a part of its popularity as easy access to making technology and the Ponoko team hopes to continue to expand its material catalog over the coming months.

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.

There are a few restrictions, but they are all reasonable. The demo video below explains that drawings should be done on clean pieces of paper, and photographed under good lighting conditions (fair enough). After submitting the photograph to Ponoko, the site will generate a preview of what the laser-cut design will look like. The video explains that this should look very similar to the original design, but there may be some subtle differences – this is likely Ponoko’s software determining what elements of the submitted design are actually possible to create using the company’s lasers. And because of the nature of the service, designs won’t be in 3D (unless you create interlocking parts).

Prices vary by the type of material (the site offers varieties of acrylic, wood, and a number of others) and the thickness of the design. The cost of two custom coasters printed in the demo was around $25, which seems perfectly reasonable for something that would make for a great gift.

Photomake may not be able to build anything as complex as a chair (though Ponoko’s main service could), but it has endless applications and a low barrier to entry. I could easily see it being used by children to make their parents gifts for the holidays, or by office workers looking to give their cubicles some character – I wouldn’t be surprised if it grows to become the most popular part of Ponoko’s business.

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.

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.

One wonders, just why do people go to such lengths to create items when they can just as easily go to a Wal-Mart and buy the product there? Fried says tinkering and creating gives the final project a more personal touch; you’re less likely to throw something out if you’ve given it your own personal touch.

It’s also fun.

Tinkering at Home, Selling on the Web [New York Times]

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.

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, content views or content downloads. They can also share in site advertising revenues.

Starts with intro and rhetorical questions. About bringing learning to the time poor.

The product brings knowledge and people seeking that knowledge together, with the ability to monetize content.

Users get 5gb of storage space for lectures.

There is also an open questions section..Q&A model.

Teach The People is a “community model not a teaching model.”

CrowdSpirit

CrowdSpirit is a crowdsourcing community built around designing electronic products and staying involved throughout their product life cycle. Users submit ideas for innovative electronic products that the community fine tunes and votes on. The best ideas and their product specifications rise to the top where investors provide financing and development partners make prototypes. Once products have been made they are tested by the community and recommended to retailers. Users involved with product creation can earn a share of the product revenue. Typical products will include MP4 players, DVD players, computer peripherals, headphones, etc.

A Q&A community consultation service for problems and ideas that may be possible. Deeper than say Yahoo Answers, focus is on products and prototypes.

Ponoko

Ponoko is a personal manufacturing platform. On Ponoko members can collaboratively create new products and take them through design and prototyping all the way through to production. Ponoko can manage the full production and delivery process or deliver the parts to the creator.

An online toy creating site, make online and “make it real.”

Users are able to add designs, materials, color etc..

Expert panel: Ron Conway, Don Dodge, Rajeev Motwani, and Yossi Vardi

Ron Conway likes Ponoko. Rajeev likes Cake Financial.

2 minutes ago Jason Calacanis said how wonderful the Wifi had become…at it’s been bad ever since, talk about jinxing it.

Yossi Vardi suggests that Cake should also track sexual prowess, to the merriment of the crowd.

Don Dodge likes Cake + Teach the People, asks question to Teach: selling content is a hard ask on the internet, particularly when you don’t know what you’re getting. TtP: they are running background checks on people offering lessons so they can rate the people offering the lessons.

Yossi asked Ron Conway whether he uses Cake (Conway is an investor). Conway says other people handle his money and Yossi asks whether it is his wife. Yossi follows up with “how many of the 162 companies you invest in do you use”…much laughter, Conway says 20%.

Summary: Cake Financial was the strongest idea according to the panel, and correctly so. Ponoko was the most original.