Today we are really excited to announce that MyPonoko (beta) is now live for people in NZ to login to make and sell their product ideas.

In fact, earlier this afternoon we sent email to all the kiwis who signed up over the last six months to let them know they can now get started designing and adding their creative ideas and products. Now that we have gotten past the massive traffic overload from last week we are now beginning the roll out of MyPonoko to the world. Starting with the 4 million or so in New Zealand.

However, please be aware we are still in beta and with the increased coverage we’ve been getting across the internet there may still be some small issues. We will be carefully monitoring our internet hardware infrastructure and we’ve also gone to the considerable trouble of mugging several hobbits on the streets of Wellington in order to find a magic potion that causes servers to handle any level of traffic.

Now, we are fully aware that there are many other wonderful people from around the world who are keen to get on the site. We do hope to roll out to other countries very soon and we’ll have updates on that within the next month. Thanks for your patience out there, we know you want to get in … we want to let you in as fast as we can too! Please be aware that as a buyer you can access the site already no matter where you are in the world, so if you want to purchase a product that catches your eye then go for it.

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Dave ten Have, CEO and co-founder of Ponoko has written a post for us on his take on the EPS file format and it’s importance in regards to using Ponoko. We’ve had a few questions about it so I think this is really timely. Thanks Dave!

When choosing file formats it is a fine balance between utility, ubiquity and availability. The utility lies in the question about whether or not the file can do what you want. The ubiquity lies in how many other tools use the file format. The availability lies in the hoops you have to jump though to get access to the file format. When creating the Ponoko service we looked a bunch of formats and settled on EPS (PDF, SVG and DXF were the other contenders).

EPS is a good format in that it is well supported in a lot of our target tools and it is has the accuracy that we need to produce products for our end users. The downside is that it is a bit used and abused. In all our testing we’ve had a great success rate with EPS in generating an end result that our users are happy with. Furthermore we’re into the game of remixing industrial design and to do that we need a file format that can be easily shared, again EPS has done us proud in that process.

The only area where we’ve had problems is with the Adobe CS suite of tools. Illustrator is a great product which I have had a crush on for years. I used version 10 as part of my demo at TechCrunch. When Adobe released later versions of the product they did something to the EPS file format that made it readable in only Adobe products - essentially making the file impossible to read in tools like GhostScript. This is a sad state of affairs because there is a vibrant eco-system of tools that sit in this space and now there are EPS files that are more equal than others. Pragmatically, Adobe are free to do what they want with the EPS format - they own it, but it causes a little heart ache. The tools I love are not playing nicely.

What does this mean for Ponoko users?

Well it means that you need to be a bit selective about the tools you use to generate your EPS files. This is what we recommend (*):

- Adobe Illustrator version 10 and lower (generally be a little more paranoid and save the EPS file as version 8 )
- Corel Draw
- Inkscape (check out this commentary about using Inkscape with Ponoko)

The aim for Ponoko is support a broad base of tools (we don’t want to get into the tools game) and we’re working hard on a solution to the CS curve ball. I hope to be able to announce something in the next little while. The obvious question is whether or not we’d be supporting other file formats. The answer is ‘yes’, but it’s a big task and is something that will take a little time.

(*) Please feel free to make your own recommendations.

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The traffic we’ve had since September 17th due to the Techcrunch40 has put a lot of strain on the Ponoko site. We’ve reacted to it and our technical geniuses have done a great job of keeping the site available so everyone can see what we are all about. But some parts of it have suffered which we are now getting up and running again. In particular we believe we have lost some messages sent to designers between 4pm Monday September 17th and 11pm Tuesday September 18th PST. We apologize profusely for that and we ask that if you clicked to contact a designer over this time that you please have another go right now, as all systems are go.

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We’re enjoying the coverage from appearing at the Techcrunch 40 conference. In the last 24 hours here are some of the stats on our site:

Website live: 23 hours 27 minutes 6 seconds
Total hits: 1,000,160
We’ve also been covered on quite a few media outlets and blogs, which we really appreciate so thanks a lot to all of you, even if you aren’t in the list below.

Kiwi start-up Ponoko picked for TechCrunch conference

NZ start-up heralds DIY 2.0

Wellington start-up hailed for originality at TechCrunch40 conference

Engadget

VentureBeat- Ponoko Stands Out

ReadWriteWeb- Crowdsourcing at TechCrunch

Andrew Parker on Ponoko and the Future of Product Design

Ponoko.com - Embrace Your Creative Side

DIY Life - Ponoko Custom Manufacturing for your Idea

Ponoko starts at TechCrunch40

Ponoko: A Funny Word That Will Make Your Dreams Come True

Wellingtonista

PersonalBee

Terminal Digit - Ponoko: On-Demand, Social Manufacturing

Smoothspan - Picks from the TechCrunch 40

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Well our 8 minutes are over, and I have to say the nerves were very stretched, even with only watching. Dave, our CEO, did a great job and hammered out a demonstration of ordering a product and then making the product he ordered on stage. There were four other really cool companies presenting so the panel questions were split amongst those companies. But Angel Investors Ron Conway, and Yossi Vardi both mentioned that they thought there was a really strong opportunity for Ponoko in the future. Techcrunch reviewed the whole session here.
We were also able to get some of the neat products from different creators who’ve used Ponoko like Ross Stevens, Dan Emery, Sue Tyler and Yana Skaler, Rebecca Bulman either on the stage or in the presentation.

One totally unplanned but very cool result was that during Michael Arrington’s interview of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (where he made a big announcement for Facebook application developers), a wine rack created by Dan Emery was left sitting on the table behind them during the interview. You can see the photos below that appeared in media all over the world.

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Our CEO Dave ten Have will be on stage at the Techcrunch40 at 3.45pm US Pacific time (30 minutes from now!). And I’ve noted down the panel of experts who are evaluating Ponoko biographies below. All very accomplished people. We are halfway through the early sessions of the conference now and the early panel included Marc Andreessen, the creator of the first web browser, Marrisa Mayer from Google, Om Malik of GigaOm, Ryan Block from Engadget and Chris Anderson, Editor of Wired Magazine. They didn’t grill the companies but they asked tough questions and I was impressed by the ability of the speakers to answer well.

Jason Calcanis asked Om Malik to rate which companies he thought would be acquired or be around in 5 years he was positive about a few but wasn’t so sure on the others. I’ll let you know in detail what they say about Ponoko.

The keynote with David Filo, co-founder of Google, Marc Andreesen, co-founder of Netscape, and Chad Hurley, co-founder of YouTube was very interesting. Some great tips as well some exciting stories. I’m sure the video will end up online somewhere so I’ll try to post a link once we find one.
Panelists Evaluating Ponoko are:

Ron Conway is one of the Internet’s pre-eminent angel investors. He was the Founder and Managing Partner of the Angel Investors LP funds whose investments included: Google, Ask Jeeves, Paypal, Red Envelope, Good Technology, Opsware, and Brightmail. Ron was named #6 in Forbes Magazine Midas list of top “dealmakers” in 2006. He is an active advisor for a number of Internet companies and also very active in community and philanthropic activities, including Vice Chairman of UCSF Medical Foundation in San Francisco. Most recently, Ron has been leading the “Fight for Mike” Homer and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD.)

Don Dodge is a veteran of five start-ups including Forte Software, AltaVista, Napster, Bowstreet, and Groove Networks. Don is currently Director of Business Development for Microsoft’s Emerging Business Team. The goal is to help VC’s and start-ups be successful with Microsoft, and together, provide great products for our customers. He writes a daily blog, Don Dodge on the Next Big Thing.

Rajeev Motwani is a professor of computer science at Stanford University, where he also serves as the director of graduate studies. His research interests include: databases and data mining, web search and information retrieval, robotics, and theoretical computer science. He has written several books including Randomized Algorithms, published by Cambridge University Press. Motwani has received the Godel Prize, the Arthur P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the National Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation, the Bergmann Memorial Award from the US-Israel Binational Science Foundation and an IBM Faculty Award.

Yossi Vardi is one if Israel’s hi-tech veterans, having helped build some 40 hi-tech companies in Internet, software, telecommunications, electro-optics, energy, environment and other areas. Several companies Dr. Vardi co-founded became successful public companies, among them Alon, Advanced Technologies, and Granite Hacarmel. Internet companies backed by Dr. Vardi include Mirabilis Ltd, ICQ (acquired by AOL), Gteko (acquired by Microsoft), Scopus and Answers.com. He is a member of the World Economic Forum, on the board of Amdocs, and the advisory board of 3i. He has served as an advisor to the World Bank and the United Nations Development Program.

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Well, here is the biggest news we haven’t been able to talk about in the past month. Ponoko is at the TechCrunch 40 in San Francisco, California! For those who don’t know, this is the the inaugural TechCrunch 40 Conference created by Jason Calcanis and Michael Arrington. Ponoko was chosen early on from 700 other startups globally to present on stage in front of an incredible group of web industry luminaries such as Guy Kawasaki, Mark Andreessen, Mark Cuban, Marissa Mayer, Chris Anderson, Ryan Block among others (including MC Hammer!). Think Dragon’s Den or American Idol for Web Entreprenuers.

One of the prerequisites for being at the conference is the ability to release during the conference, which is exactly what we’ll be doing. So from 3:45 pm Pacific Time, Ponoko WILL BE GOING LIVE!! By the way, while there are 39 other companies who are presenting, the prize for being the winner of TechCrunch is 50K USD. Wish us luck!

On the ground here in San Francisco, we have a team of four including myself, John Lewis, Nick Gerrittsen, and CEO/co-founder Dave ten Have . If you’d like to reach us while we are in the Bay Area, you can contact us by email or cell phone at the following:

Dave: dave(dot)tenhave(at)ponoko(dot)com

Steven: steven(dot)kempton(at)ponoko(dot)com

John: john(dot)lewis(at)ponoko(dot)com

cell phone: +1 (510) 461-1035

in New Zealand, co-founder Derek Elley is available at +64 4 473 0031

This is a huge opportunity for Ponoko and we are really really excited to be here. But even though it’s a huge deal to be at a big conference in the heart of Silicon Valley, we want to thank and recognize the huge amount of work that is being done by our team in New Zealand. They are going hard out right now. Well done guys!!

We’ll be trying to blog as much as possibly as we can while we’re here at the conference about our experiences here giving you an insight into what goes on at TechCrunch40. Any questions or comments, please let us know!

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Study: Toy design, not production, blamed for recalls - Sep. 11, 2007

There has been so much in the news recently about manufacturing of toys and other goods in China that now have to be recalled because of dangers they pose to children and other purchasers. I’ve been following it for a couple of reasons, one I have kids and secondly because at Ponoko we have a big interest in manufacturing, product design and the changes we think will happen in the future. There a few different arguments that have come out of reporting on each and in my opinion they seem to fall into the following:

1. The Chinese suppliers have cut corners and made mistakes and it’s their fault. Often this is simplified into: Chinese manufacturers are bad.
2. The importers and companies who’s name is the brand on the product have failed to test properly and that’s caused the problems. Often simiplified into: Importers and companies who use Chinese manufacturers are bad.

Interestingly this article on CNN has referenced a study from the University of Manitoba that shows that over the last two decades 77% of all product recalls have been due to design faults. Only 10% of faults have come from manufacturing issues such as lead paint.

Now while this doesn’t mean that all is perfect on the manufacturing front it does show that design flaws in toy manufacturing are a hidden but actually larger problem. And that often these design flaws are hidden in a way similar to the problems with lead paint. After all you can’t tell a paint has lead in it from looking at it, and you also can’t tell if a toy’s design means a small piece will easily break off or fall out and be a risk for choking your child.

It seems that it’s somewhat easy to blame Chinese manufacturers for these problems when the more serious issue is with the design of the products. At the moment Toy Designers seem to be a pretty anonymous group. They are employees at large multi-national toy companies in many cases. But I think that there is a huge opportunity for Toy Designers who confident in their ability to design child-safe toys to really embrace and promote that as part of their personal brand. The first Toy Designer who promotes their focus on that has a huge opportunity to differentiate themselves and their toys, especially in the eyes of parents.

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Business 2.0 recently listed The Next Disrupters - 15 companies that will change the world by rewriting how things are done. Ponoko’s not on there — yet — but another startup company, Desktop Factory, is. With a goal of making 3D printers as common as your laser printer in offices, schools and homes, this company is set to make a very affordable 3D printer at about $5,000, compared with the commercial ones out there that retail for $20,000 on up. That’s a big goal, considering so many people don’t even know what 3D printers are. I’d say only in the past couple years has rapid prototyping been making mainstream news. Until recently 3D printers were so expensive and out-of-reach - reserved only for large companies and manufacturers with deep pockets - examples given were Boeing and Logitech, costing upwards of 100K+ ten years ago. Now we’re hearing more often than not of new models being released at prices that keep getting lower and lower.

So, does Moore’s Law apply to 3D printers as well? I’m probably applying this extremely loosely to 3D printers, but the point it - the technology is getting faster, better and cheaper - all leading to more accessibility to more people who in turn use them in a wider range of environments and uses. From Motley Fool:

If the price continues to plummet, the number of companies using these machines could explode. This will be especially true as a new generation of designers comes to understand that they can easily create complex shapes and parts to produce new products that were previously too expensive, if not impossible, to manufacture.

Wohlers Associates, a consulting firm specializing in tracking development in the emerging field of rapid prototype manufacturing, has estimated that the market for these machines will grow 360% to 15,000 units by 2012.

There’s no doubt 3D printers will become more mainstream in the very near future. Where it’ll be about the exchange of designs, rather than the exchange of actual physical things, putting more control into the consumer’s hand at “manufacturing” a whole design or even just parts and pieces at home or office on their 3D printer or at their local digital manufacturer.

via The Motley Fool

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