Ponoko

Ponoko is an online marketplace for everyone to click to make real things. It's where creators, digital fabricators, materials suppliers and buyers meet to make (almost) anything. We kicked off at TechCrunch40 at the end of 2007 with a vision to reinvent how goods are designed, made and distributed worldwide. The core of this vision is the trade in product designs - kinda like the trade in music (iTunes), photos (Flickr), movies (YouTube) and software apps (iPhone) before us. We host tens of thousands of user generated product designs, ready to be customized and made into real things with the click of a mouse. But hosting designs is only a part of the puzzle. Importantly, we also provide the world's first digital making system that means these product designs can be priced instantly online and made locally, as close to the point of consumption as possible. It means goods can be made in the greenest way. Making on demand reduces warehousing and wastage. Plus, making locally emphasizes digital transportation of goods instead of the traditional shipping of physical products.