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!