What do Facebook, Techcrunch and Ponoko have in common

Firstly a quick apology, that I’ve been very quiet on the blogging over the last few weeks as I’ve been up here making it happen around San Francisco, Silicon Valley and San Diego, and my writing now feels years behind the action thats been happening. Before I get up to speed I better backtrack and cover my own experience about Ponoko launching at Techcrunch for the history books. 3 things that went in Ponokos favor at the conference.

1. Post presentation panel focus on Ponoko: Ponokos presentation went really well, and discussion in the panel that followed the group of presenting companies quickly turned past session favourite Cake Financial to Ponoko and Dave was put back into action answering queries from the panel and co-host Jason on the floor. This sort of thing is key to standing out from the pack at these events and helps you get a name for yourself and gets the press and others tapping and searching for you at their laptops on the spot, builds recognition.

2. Targeted Investor Interest: At the close of day 1 I was speaking with Mark Jacobsen of O’Rielly Alpha Tech Ventures (The venture arm of O’Reilly) in a dedicated room of a PlanHQ VC customer First Round Capital, (They use the room to showcase their portfolio companies launching at TechCrunch). When discussing the most interesting and aligned investments for O’Reilly he quickly brought up Ponoko, which again is exactly how you want it to go, and was keen to meet them, VC’s need to have an immediate good feeling about you usually for it to go somewhere, and Ponoko had/has that effect with the right investors.

3. Lingering brand recognition: A nice piece of marketing and brand re-enforcement I thought was the Ponoko made wine rack sitting on the panel table, well past the Ponoko DEMO, a nice quiet backdrop for such anticipated and watched on stage conversations as Mike from Techcrunch chatting with Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. I haven’t got anything quite so physical or cool with planHQ to be remembered by, so I usually settle for wearing a cool shirt that stands out in a good way. The recent launch of PlanHQ at DEMO this week was no exception and I soon became known by the some as the guy with the cool shirt, you’ve got to back it up, but it gives a quick tick to the number 1 in marketing, get attention!