Ponoko’s contribution to the advancement of personal manufacturing and open source philosophy.
Ponoko Ltd
“Ponoko did not invent the laser cutter...but Ponoko is the first company to hook a laser cutter up to the Internet and let anyone, anywhere, take control of it.” - Inc Magazine Since it’s inception at the end of 2007, Wellington-based Ponoko’s goal was to create the world’s easiest making system, allowing custom products to be created effortlessly. Their vision was to reinvent how goods are designed, made and distributed worldwide. Ponoko has since become the hub of a global personal manufacturing eco-system that brings together creators, digital fabricators, materials suppliers and buyers to make (almost) anything. Based on on an open source stack, Ponoko’s platform allows users to make their creations available through Creative Commons licensing for both real world production and download.
Ponoko is helping push Open Source concepts into the 'real world', both by enabling it's users to share creations and by supporting important industry initiatives. Ponoko enables tens of thousands of users to share their creations through the Creative Commons licensing scheme. Almost half of the 1800 items listed for printing or download on Ponoko are either Public Domain or creative commons licensed. Their continued support of important technology initiatives (like Fab@Home, MakerBot and RepRap) is helping to drive personal manufacturing into the mainstream. Making these technologies available to a wider audience helps blur the line between producers and consumers, and advances the democratisation of product creation.
The Ponoko platform is built on an open source stack (Linux, Mysql, Ruby on Rails) and they use the Creative Commons licensing scheme for users’ content.
Ponoko has attracted more than 30,000 users, for many of whom Ponoko is their introduction to not only personal manufacturing, but open source concepts. A recent partnership with Sparkfun now means a whole new generation of tinkerers can specify and purchase electronic components to go with their Ponoko products.
www.ponoko.com
