VentureBeat

I’ll admit it: Ponoko excites me. In the virtual world of of web startups, it’s unusual to see one that not only sells, but produces real-world items. Prior to today, Ponoko was only accessible to people with at least some familiarity with computer aided design (CAD) software, but it has just released a tool, Photomake, to let anyone design small items.

Ponoko, in case you haven’t heard of it, makes small items from a variety of materials, based on user designs (see right for some examples of finished products). The company uses computer-guided laser cutters, which work without human direction, simply following the instructions provided to them by CAD files. CAD expertise, unfortunately, is generally restricted to professions like architects, designers and engineers.

Now you can create your own design by simply drawing it on a blank piece of paper, taking a picture, and uploading the picture to Ponoko. From there, it’s converted to a simple CAD format, from which the cutters can follow their directions.

The trade-off of the tool’s simplicity is just that. CAD allows for some pretty complex designs. With this tool, you’ll only get to work in two dimensions, unless you’re clever enough to make something that can be bent, folded or slotted together into a three-dimensional object. Also, the margin for error is appreciably larger when scribbling by hand, rather than precisely measuring out a software design.

And it also requires at least a little understanding of how the machines work. Below, I tried to make things difficult for Photomake by drawing a lumpily-outlined elephant with freckles on its behind (I’m distantly related to Van Gogh). The design didn’t fully make it through, although the software tried valiantly to follow the outlines. Note that the elephant would come out as a solid piece, and the freckles and eye would pop out to leave holes.

But mostly, you can see how your design will turn out before you order it, and you can choose from 19 plastics and 11 woods of varying thickness if you choose to order it. The tool is fun to play with, any really, when was the last chance you really had to make something, if you’re not a crafty person with tools and know-how?

Ponoko is still in an early stage, so it remains to be seen how well they’ll pull of their ideas. But with 3d printers and rapid manufacturing tools becoming cheaper and more accessible every year, it’s only a matter of time — and my feeling is, not much time — until someone strikes it big in this category, much as happened with Threadless in custom t-shirts (although that site was smart enough to run design contests).

For now, Ponoko is one of the only games in town, and it seems to be growing pretty well — chief strategy officer Derek Elly tells me sales are up 111 percent in the last month. It also released another tool earlier this month, which allows people to commission designs. For another idea with a somewhat more limited scope, check out Fabjectory and FigurePrints, which print out 3D versions of avatars from Second Life, World of Warcraft and other games. Shapeways also prints 3-D versions of artistic designs. (We wrote about Shapeways here).

Custom design is finally beginning to mean more than just cheesy screen-printed t-shirts and coffee mugs. With a little money, you can now order specially manufactured goods from a company called Ponoko, by tapping into a base of freelance designers who will bid to fulfill orders.

Ponoko is a startup that uses laser-cutters to create items from materials like wood and plastic. Designers send Ponoko files containing specs for items; the company then creates the item in a single piece, or separate pieces for assembly. Those items are sold through its website to customers. That basic idea is similar to Threadless, a well-known t-shirt company that sells shirts based on designs that artists dream up.

What Ponoko is adding today is very simple: It’s providing customers with a form and bidding process to have their own pipe dreams created. So if you want, for instance, a giant pink plastic elephant based on your own drawings, you can send a request to designers, then pick the lowest bid, or your favorite interpretation of the drawing. The service is called Ponoko ID.

Simple idea, it’s true, but it’s also an idea with plenty of potential. Designers and consumers rarely have any direct contact; by bringing them together, Ponoko is helping to create a market that could turn out to be very large.

That was certainly the case for CafePress, an web boom-and-bust era success based on the same custom t-shirt theme that later took Threadless to fame. With CafePress, the idea that sparked its success was simply letting customers have their own designs screen-printed onto shirts. The similarity between it and Ponoko makes it very fitting that the company is also adding Fred Durham, one of CafePress’s founders and its current CEO, to its board.

We also covered Ponoko back in May, when I did an audio interview with CSO Derek Elly in which he described the business model in more depth. Since then, the company’s user base has risen to about 10,000 people. It’s also about to add more materials to work with, so that more different sorts of items can be made, and is building tools and tutorials to make it easier to learn to design items.

The company, which was interested in taking a venture round, has decided to go after angel investment instead. It’s based in New Zealand, but has a US subsidiary.

A few years ago, it was still a subject of regular outrage. Jobs were headed to Mexico. Factories moving to China. Everybody hated globalization, without quite understanding it. But with a flood of news coverage — the slightly nauseating peak being an all-too-popular book about the world being flat — people finally figured it out: The manufacturing jobs were gone. Get a job banking, or flipping burgers, but don’t expect to be building cars or making clothes.

The idea is that we should switch to a knowledge-based, service-oriented economy. And Silicon Valley, for one, long ago pinned its hopes on brains over brawn. Just take a look at the companies that get funding. But now that everyone’s getting used to the knowledge economy, manufacturing may make its comeback.

Here are the primary factors driving a manufacturing renaissance: The rapid growth of middle class consumers in countries like Brazil, China and India; a shrunken dollar and the loss of economic pre-eminence by the United States; less easy credit for overseas goods for consumers in the US; and, potentially, rising transportation costs that cut into cheap goods sent from overseas.

Those details are outlined by the CEO of the Manufacturers Alliance, Thomas Duesterberg, in this Industry Week article. There are a few more that could be added to the mix, though.

The first is our bid at shifting energy usage at home off foreign oil. Companies like Ausra, Nanosolar and Tesla are basing not only their research, but their plants in the United States. They have plenty of reasons to do so. States, eager to win back jobs lost long ago, are offering hefty incentives. Materials like solar mirrors and wind turbines are expensive to ship, and solar panels often break during long voyages. And for Tesla, there’s an additional prestige to having a car manufactured in the U.S., even if some parts are made overseas.

Another good example is Infinia, a solar company that is reducing its own startup costs by using existing manufacturing capacity in the country, much of which has been idle for years, to builds its solar dishes. And finally there are the many biofuel startups, many of which have no choice but to place their plants near the sources for their fuel. As the market for renewables grows, more will certainly be built here.

The need for specialized work will also become more prominent with the rise of next-generation materials, especially nanomaterials. Although fabless manufacturing in the semiconductor industry proved that high-tech work can be done overseas, the first generation of manufacturing will be at home. And with costs for overseas labor rising, the new nano industry may choose not to move elsewhere.

There are also opportunities for less commercial production. As the online marketplace Etsy has shown, there’s a nascent industry of crafters who are are eager to sell their goods. Ponoko, for one, wants to help those people create their goods, with online tools and a relatively inexpensive production process based on laser cutters.

And for the professionals, the small design firms and build shops of the world, cheap rapid prototyping and rapid manufacturing technology are on the rise, a subject that I wrote about a year ago.

Whether physical production can ever dominate the American landscape again is doubtful. But the conventional view into the future, which suggests that we’ll make our way as a pure knowledge economy, is likely also off the mark. The future is never quite what you expect.

The clean-technology event VentureBeat is co-hosting with SF Green is coming up on Monday (it starts at 5pm for networking at 111 Minna Gallery in San Francisco; program content starts at 6pm).

We’ve added three companies onto the roster of exhibitors, which already included Tesla Motors and Kleiner Perkins managing partner Ray Lane. Ticket sales for the event are still open here, while our previous post includes full details on the event’s background. The purpose is to bring clean-tech entrepreneurs, investors and other interested parties together.

First up, we’ll have Akeena Solar showing up with one of their new Andalay solar panels, which they’re calling the lego blocks of the solar world — just snap them together on a rooftop. (Unlike legos, you’ll still want to have a professional installer on hand.) Second, we’ll have a pair of Vectrix electric scooters on hand from a local dealership. With a top speed of 62mph, top range of 55 miles and 0-50mph acceleration in 6.8 seconds, it’s one of the few two-wheeled electric vehicles that could get you to work reliably every day.

Finally, we’ve got Ponoko, an “online personal factory” startup. Ponoko takes designs from its users and creates them in the physical world with laser cutting machines. Although the company is based in New Zealand, it’s establishing an outpost in San Francisco. Its eventual ambition is to spread across the map, setting up local, on-demand shops close to where they’re needed, and thus saving on transportation and manufacturing waste. I got together with Ponoko’s Dave ten Have today to talk about the concept, and that’s what the audio post and pictures below are about.

A puzzle board made with Ponoko’s laser cutting machines:

The plastic parts in this device are made by Ponoko, the remainder assembled by the designer:

Ten more companies presented during today’s afternoon portion of the Techcrunch40 conference. If we were able to have stock in these companies, here’s the order we’d rank them: MusicShake, Cake Financial, Tripit, Ponoko, Everywhere, CrowdSpirit, DocStoc, Flock, StoryBlender and TeachThePeople. Summaries of each company follow.

MusicShake, a music-creation app — This is site is winning kudos because it looks addictive. According to the logo on the webpage, it’s a “Music making game which is no need of intelligence.” Whether that’s really a translation mistake — the company is South Korean — is a matter of opinion, but it does reflect the whimsical attitude of the founders. MusicShake’s presentation started out with annoyingly-upbeat techno pumping out of the speakers, music that they claimed had been created by a 9 year old girl. And when they started to show off the app, it looked easy enough for even a child to make music at least as good as what’s played on commercial radio. The method is simple: Like existing music creation software, MusicShake provides instrumental sounds to users, who add them together to create songs. The difference is that MusicShake is both free to use and entirely intuitive. One possible drawback: Our immediate thought was that MusicShake provides a brilliant way to keep users anchored on a website, but the founders have chosen not to place any ads on the app. Instead, they claim that users will be able to sell the music they make, and split the revenue with the company. Its hard to sell to online, so the risk is that the company won’t make much.

Cake Financial, a great way to access investing information — We wrote a separate post about this company today. It gives you a way to see the historical performance of your portfolio, as well as and monthly and yearly performance data, on risk adjusted basis. You can see the portfolio holdings of other people, and how you compare with them. Angel investor Ron Conway invested in the company, but conceded he doesn’t that use the service, but lets Goldman Sachs make his investments. Yossi Yardi, an entrepreneur and investor, also on the panel of the presentation, gave him a hard time, Conway he wasn’t eating the “dog food.” One significant risk factor for this company: People may not want to expose less than stellar investment habits and decide not to participate? That might hamper adoption.

TripIt, a travel plans organizer — This service launched out of beta today. Rather than attempting to compete in the crowded booking space, dominated by giants like Expedia, TripIt aims to organize the avalanche of information that serial travelers face. Users can link in information from their travel plans — airline tickets, hotel bookings, tours, and so forth — and an app, cleverly called “the Itinerator”, gathers the most relevant information into an organized file, a process that CEO Gregg Brockaway calls “a baby step toward the semantic web.” Rather than stopping at organizing a traveler’s itinerary, TripIt then goes on to pull together information on the destinations being visited from outside sites like Wikipedia and Flickr. Finally, users can collaborate to put together group trips. TripIt benefited from a better thought-out presentation than most of the other companies, but also struck us as a solid business plan in a space that has so far been left more or less open.

Ponoko, a personal manufacturing platform — This is a fun company, letting you design any product by using a wizard that takes you through the process (say for a piece of jewelry, a piece of clothing or a lamp). It provides drop down menus of materials you can use, what they look like after they’ve been processed. Finally it will soon provide you tools to help sell the product and promote it. You can get design tips from others, or buy designs from others who have built things on the site. It has been in beta testing so far.

Everywhere, a community-generated magazine — 8020 Publishing, the company launching Everywhere today, has already met success with JPG Magazine, using nearly the same model. That’s perhaps the most important detail about the new magazine: While it won’t knock your socks off, the fact that 8020 is working from a tried-and-true model sets it apart from almost all the other companies by raising its chances of success. However, as a magazine play, its upside is limited too. Everywhere will work by starting a community for travelers to share pictures and stories, of which the best will be periodically pulled together into a glossy-paged publication. Overall, the magazine’s website looks similar to Flickr, with space to write stories.

CrowdSpirit, a company that uses “crowds” for designing consumer electronics — This lets end users submit designs for products. The submission gets rated by others, as well as feedback for improvement. It also then leverages fan of a particular product, and possible partners who might buy the product to distribute in retail. CrowdSpirit tells the product or application manufacturer when there appears to be enough demand from fans, and partner orders, for them to ship for manufacturing. The company will make money from rev from sold products.

Docstoc, the “YouTube for professional documents” — This company lets you post documents easily online, giving you a way to post them straight from your desktop. Others can come and read them or use them. We just wrote about this company’s funding round. The company has more extensive features than we’d previously realized. You can classify documents in detail, so that people can search for documents for say, a divorce lawyer, and Docstoc will show you the documents that have been most used by others in that category. People submitting doc can tag by category, or others can do it for them. People can vote documents according to usefulness. You’ll also be able to store your documents with Docstoc. The question about this company is how it will make money. The company says people may be willing to pay for extra storage and that it can make money that way, or by getting shared revenue by selling things like say, research reports from Gartner.

Flock, a browser dedicated to social networking — If you’re totally addicted to Facebook, Flock may be useful. The browser is all about streamlining social networking, adding value by easing interactions for hardcore social networkers. The question is whether enough people think of the internet as a platform for Facebook and Flickr to support an entire browser. As the drawn-out fight between Microsoft’s Explorer and Firefox has shown, people tend to stick with what they know unless the alternative is repeatedly shown to be inferior. Flock has been around for a while, having notched up almost 2 million downloads, in contract to Firefox, which is approaching 400 million. The big announcement today was that a pre-release of version 0.9 is now available to everyone for download, and version 1.0 is in private beta. For our previous analysis for Flock, see this post.

StoryBlender, collaborative video creation — Allows you to “blend” videos, putting together parts of different videos and adding in simple animation effects. Anyone familiar with professional video editing would laugh this app out of the room, but the point is to simplify enough that the average person can put together a simple mashup. Storyblender allows collaboration, and can show a visual timeline detailing the chain of people working on any particular video. The concept is mildly interesting, but is less polished (from the demo at least) than MusicShake. An encouraging detail is that its CEO is the founder of Cyworld, a social network that holds a near-monopoly in the South Korean market.

TeachThePeople, a “peer-to-peer” collaborative education service — This company lets experts try to make money from their knowledge. So someone like Marc Andreessen, a well-known entrepreneur, might try to sell advice to first-time entrepreneurs. Andreessen would do this by creating a “community,” outlining the details of his offering, the category it belongs in, goals, and how he wants share his knowledge. He can appoint community managers for his site to help him manage subscribers, and he set different layers of access for subscribers to the community. It gives him space to load lectures. The company makes money by sharing in advertising, if Andreessen offers his service for free, or in revenue if he charges. There’s chat, too. The downside is that it’s hard to get people to buy things over the Internet, and experts already have a number of voice as and Web-based alternatives for selling their services. The company is seeking a round of funding.

(This was co-written with Matt Marshall)