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.
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.
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.
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, 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.
