Ponoko 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!
The date for your calendar is Saturday 15th September for the BarCampWellingtonNZegov:
… making a difference to egovernment in New Zealand. We are a small country with a very well connected, vibrant web community. government 2.0 can happen here!
The day is being hosted by Fronde at their Queen’s Wharf office, is free and totally driven by you fine people in the community (‘BarCamp’ background and what to expect).
Seven things (after the break) that you can do now that will give us a government for the 21st century:
Lovely Blogs wants you.
Lovely Blogs is a chance to pimp your own ride, be the cherry on your cake, take the bull by the horns, kill two birds with one stone, count your chickens before they hatch, save nine with a stitch in time, roll and gather no moss and many other totally irrelevant moral ditties.
Go there, send in the questionnaire, and join the ranks of the fabulous. It will make you better looking and live longer.
Disclaimer: some or all of the above may not apply to you.
Plenty of people use the comments facility on blogs like this one (and that one) as a discussion forum, but unless you’re actually one of the blog writers you can’t start your own threads. But the Texture public forum allows anyone to start their own thread (as long as they’re signed up). Texture concentrates on nightlife, music, art & dining, but comments on anything about Wellington that you like (such as Thai food) or loathe (such as tagging) are most welcome.
They’re also starting to give away lots of free stuff, from tickets to Little Bushman or the Alternative Rugby Commentary to Floriditas vouchers. It’s all a shameless ploy to get people involved in the forums, of course, but then again … free stuff!
Just up the road, right next to Rimutaka Prison, Trentham Military Base and the police dog training venue, into the decommissioned General Motors assembly plant. The GM factory has been upgraded to become a new destination … the Bird Flu Pandemic Centre, we think. Or something more sinister?
Being the hep cool web cats that we are, the Wellingtonista has recently set ourselves up a Twitter account so that we can send out updates about what you should do with yourselves. If you’re already a twitter user, head on over to our account and sign up to receive the word from the streets, generally at a one-or-two updates per day rate. If you haven’t used Twitter before, we’ve got a little specific how-to after the jump.
The Wellington News Feed (an aggregated collection of local RSS feeds kindly supplied by our friends over at wellington.gen.nz, which we display in the right hand sidebar on the Wellingtonista homepage), is not only a rich source of grass-roots info about what’s going on in this lovely city of ours, it also offers the occasional good ol’ fashioned laugh.
From the indecipherable news events conveyed by the local shortwave enthusiasts, to the breathless match reports of Karori Slapperz AFC (“Wellington’s finest social football [team]”), there’s always something popping up that makes you think, ‘you’re in ma feed, mirthin’ up ma blogz‘. Or something.
Anyway, today’s laugh came from an inadvertant typo (at least, we hope it’s a typo): “pubic forum tonight“. The mind boggles…
On a recent visit ex-Wellingtonian photographer Jo Russ used her artist’s eye to snap a set of images which share a certain group characteristic; I’m not sure exactly what it is, but I feel like I’m looking at the mundane and the familiar from an outsider’s fresh perspective.
More after the jump.
The handy pocket-sized version of Webstock returns to Wellington on Tuesday next week. You might think it’s all for uber nerds and super geeks, but you would be wrong.
In fact, research just in has shown that attending Webstock Minis has been scientifically proven to make you more interesting, better-looking and all round more desirable. And, honestly, that’s regardless of how much you drink!
For your ticket price you can learn about some cool things like Second Life, the upcoming version of Firefox and all you can eat and drink.
The whole thing winds up with a debate entitled “Web 2.0 is all fizz and no substance”. Mike Brown, Sandy Mamoli and
Mark Cubey will uphold the proposition against Philip Fierlinger, Brenda Leeuwenberg and Che Tibby.
We are fully in the negative camp, because the team features one of our newest Wellingtonistas, Che Tibby.
Register for Webstock Mini:
http://www.webstock.org.nz
Occasionally, and only just occasionally my geek side shine though. This happens to be one of those days, so for your enlightenment and please I present The Wellingtonista in graph form.
In case all those colours confuse you this is what they mean…
…and if you are still confused, don’t worry I am also, but don’t we look pretty 🙂
If you want to see our graph magically populate check out. After which you can try your own web site.