some of the Ponoko teamPonoko is perhaps Wellington’s hardest to categorise tech startup. The general idea seems to be to around empowering ordinary people to design items that Ponoko will help them manufacture and distribute.

This admittedly sounds a bit vague until you’ve been immersed in the service, as several of the Wellingtonista (and many of our readers) have been. In fact, it’s now possible to buy fellow Wellingtonista Sue’s designed-by-Sue, built-by-Ponoko jewellery via the Ponoko site, with more to come.

So we are all very excited about what Ponoko has to offer, and that view is shared by the people at TechCrunch, who invited them and a handful of others out of a field of 700 start-up hopefuls world wide to present to today’s TechCrunch40 conference in San Francisco.

This is a fantastic achievement (the immediate evidence being the occasional 503 bandwidth errors on the Ponoko site after co-founder Dave ten Have‘s presentation) and we hope this is the foundation for further and bigger success!