Ponoko’s Photomake Brings Your Doodled Designs To Life

by Jason Kincaid on September 25, 2008

Ponoko, the site that lets you build (and sell) products from homegrown design schematics, is about to make its service even more accessible. Under a new program called Photomake, you’ll now be able to produce tangible objects from doodles on a piece of paper - just snap a photo of your masterpiece, choose a material, and Ponoko’s laser cutters will do the rest. It’s a great idea, and I can’t wait to immortalize my favorite doodlings in black acrylic.

There are a few restrictions, but they are all reasonable. The demo video below explains that drawings should be done on clean pieces of paper, and photographed under good lighting conditions (fair enough). After submitting the photograph to Ponoko, the site will generate a preview of what the laser-cut design will look like. The video explains that this should look very similar to the original design, but there may be some subtle differences - this is likely Ponoko’s software determining what elements of the submitted design are actually possible to create using the company’s lasers. And because of the nature of the service, designs won’t be in 3D (unless you create interlocking parts).

Prices vary by the type of material (the site offers varieties of acrylic, wood, and a number of others) and the thickness of the design. The cost of two custom coasters printed in the demo was around $25, which seems perfectly reasonable for something that would make for a great gift.

Photomake may not be able to build anything as complex as a chair (though Ponoko’s main service could), but it has endless applications and a low barrier to entry. I could easily see it being used by children to make their parents gifts for the holidays, or by office workers looking to give their cubicles some character - I wouldn’t be surprised if it grows to become the most popular part of Ponoko’s business.

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Y Combinator’s SocialBrowse Launches To The Public

by Jason Kincaid on September 25, 2008

SocialBrowse, the link-sharing service that includes elements of web annotation, has launched its service to the public. When I first wrote about SocialBrowse as it entered private beta last June, I described it as a “Twitter for links”, but since then it has grown to become much more sophisticated, allowing users to leave in-line comments on articles across the web. The service is currently only available as a Firefox extension, with an Internet Explorer plugin on the way.

The site’s core functionality involves sharing links, which are distributed to your SocialBrowse friends using a Twitter-like “Follow” system. Users can view these links through the SocialBrowse homepage, a Firefox sidebar, or as tiny icons embedded on webpages. Whenever a user shares a link, a miniature version of their profile picture is embedded inline as part of the link on the page itself, so any members that visit the same site will be able to quickly see which pages their friends have found interesting.

The site has also recently incorporated an annotation system that allows users to leave comments on these links, which appear whenever you mouse over a friend’s inline icon. This feature has a lot of potential, allowing users to converse on articles across the web without having to use another site like FriendFeed or Twitter. That said, the execution still needs some work - the comment interface was a little clunky, and I had a hard time reading them on some pages because of their position on the webpage. A similar (but somewhat more robust) annotation platform is Dotspots, which launched at TechCrunch50.

Chronicle Your Life In Photos With LifeSnapz

by Jason Kincaid on September 24, 2008

Because of the abundance of photo hosting sites available on the web, it can be hard to track down every photo from an event you’ve attended. Oftentimes they’re scattered across multiple user accounts, under generic album titles like “Party”, making them hard to find and virtually useless for future reference.

LifeSnapz, a photo sharing site that launched at TechCrunch50’s DemoPit, is looking to give users a simple way to manage photos from multiple sources at a given event. To use the site, users first invite their friends to join their groups, where they can post their photo albums under discrete Events (for example, they could create multiple photo albums under the heading “School Graduation).

Collaborative photo albums are nothing new - many popular photo services allow multiple users to upload to the same album. But CEO Brian Hand says that LifeSnapz takes a different approach, by allowing users to group photos through time and space (namely, they are arranged by date and location data, when available). This information is used to compile an interactive timeline, which serves as a fun and intuitive way to browse through past photos (especially when compared to the thumbnail views offered by most photo services).

Use Google Moderator To Crowdsource Group Questions

by Michael Arrington on September 25, 2008

Google Moderator launched this evening, a simple tool that helps groups determine which questions should be asked at all hands meetings, conferences, Q&A sessions, etc. The idea is that there are always lots of good questions to ask in a limited period of time, but it’s hard to know which questions the attendees are most interested in hearing discussed. Moderator lets users add questions and vote on the questions of others, so the cream rises to the top.

Moderator was built by Taliver Heath as a side project and resides on Google App Engine. He describes the product on the Google App Engine blog:

I designed a tool in my 20% time that would allow anyone attending a tech talk to submit a question, and then give other participants a way to vote on whether or not that question should be asked. This way, the most popular and relevant questions would rise to the top so that the presenter or the moderator of an event could run the discussion more efficiently and in a transparent manner. The tool, which we internally called “Dory” after our favorite question-asking fish in Finding Nemo, quickly grew to other parts of Google including our weekly all-hands company meeting, as well as for our series of talks led by political candidates or distinguished authors.

Cramster.com: Your resource for Math, Science and Engineering courses

Cramster is a global study community that helps students across the globe understand math, science, and engineering. Students can share notes on the site, review practice exams, and walk each other through homework problems while using the service. The site is populated by college students, high school students, educators, and those that are knowledgeable on the subjects to help students.

Atmosphir: 3D Gaming 2.0

Atmosphir is a gaming platform that anyone can use to create their own immersive, 3D levels. The tool works by dragging and dropping level elements into place - pieces of land, bridges, hazards, etc. To play your level, all you have to do is hit “play” and you can even go back to the editor after entering gameplay. Atmosphir is available for Macs, PCs and Linux machines and was developed by Minor Studios. (Watch the video).

Grockit: Learning 2.0

Grockit is about questioning together. To this end, grockit is developing an online learning game where people can teach each other.

Grockit is an online, interactive learning tool that brings students together to answer quizzes with each other. The startup has raised $10 million for what it’s calling a “Massively Multi Player Online Learning Game”, which takes its cue from World of Warcraft and applies that game’s concepts to SAT-like study groups. Grockit features a chat room where students can talk with one another as they deliberate over questions. They can also award each other points for their insight. (Watch the video).

Google "In Quotes", another Google Labs Pet Projects

Google has just opened a new Labs project, called In Quotes, to the public. The site allows users to compare quotes from various political figures, displaying key excerpts from speeches and interviews that they’ve given recently.

By default the site is presenting quotes from US Presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain, contrasting the things they’ve said on such issues as Iraq, marriage, abortion, and the economy. Users can click a “Spin” button to compare two randomly chosen quotes, or they can choose to cycle through them manually. All quotes are pulled from Google News stories that have appeared in the last few weeks. There are 20 political figures available in the United States version of the site, with other editions available for Canada, India, and the UK.

The site’s About page explains that the quotes are meant to reflect an unbiased view of the news, casting aside the analysis that is present in most reporting. This may be true, but the site doesn’t seem to be utilizing any algorithms to determine how each keyword is used - some of the “quotes” are paraphrased, while others are being attributed to someone who didn’t say them in the first place.

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The Got Web Toys Daily is a blog digest that reviews and lists the newest web apps that are fun, engaging and productive, hence, the term, web toy. It's open for all bloggers who wish to try and test out something new, whenever they're tired of the same usual services or web apps they're used to.

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