Photos of Pownce Launch Available Here. You can add me as a friend on Pownce here.
Attended the big, well, small but big, Pownce launch party last night at Dennis Peron’s Pot Pad in San Francisco. This was the first time I’d ever been to Peron’s place and if you ever get an opportunity to visit, don’t pass it up. It’s more a museum to marijuana than anything, but there is some amazing stuff to shoot there. I could probably spend about 24 hours with a macro lens there documenting so much of the interesting counter culture art and political statements defending our right to toke up. One of the very cool paintings hanging at Dennis’ was this portrait of Brownie Mary.
For those of you who don’t know who Dennis Peron is, he is one of the most significant advocates for medicinal marijuana. Dennis cofounded San Francisco’s Cannabis Buyers Club and coauthored California Proposition 215 legalizing medicinal marijuana. He’s also run for both President of the United States and governor of California.
Anyways, he’s got a pretty interesting pot pad complete with hot tub, roof deck, and backyard, umm… gardens.
The Pownce launch was full of all the cool kids of course. Pownce Co-founders Kevin Rose, Leah Culver, Daniel Burka, and Shawn Allen were there. I hung out and talked cameras with DL.TV’s Patrick Norton for a while. Daniel showed me a cool Pownce app for the iPhone (pretty much everyone there was sporting and showing off their iPhones). The app’s not ready yet but it should be out in the next few weeks Burka said.
Daniel and I also talked about the great mp3 feature on Pownce for a while where users can share music with their friends. I think that this is one of the most innovative features of Pownce. The inevitable comparisons to Twitter came up a lot at the party but I have to say Pownce in my opinion is miles ahead of Twitter. While Twitter is great if you just want to message friends, Pownce takes it to a whole new level by introducing things like file sharing, a better reply system, etc. The result is that you feel like you are actually having a conversation with people rather than just talking at them which is how Twitter mostly feels to me. I’ve personally been using Pownce a lot more than Twitter these days and probably will continue to do so.
Daniel said that Pownce alrady has 45,000+ registered users so far for the invite only site. It’s good to see Pownce moderating their growth with their invite system. This will allow Pownce to better manage their growth and ensure that they can scale in proportion to the demand for their service.
I’ve got a few Pownce invites to give out by the way, first come first serve. If you want one shoot me a zmail on Zooomr (just address it to thomashawk) and include your email address and I’ll send you an invite out.
The party was pretty dark in most places so I had a hard time getting all the shots that I wanted, but you can check out the shots that I got over at the powncelaunchparty tag on Zooomr.
More from Scott Beale over at Laughing Squid here.
Update: Ok, all pownce invites given out now. I’ll post again when I’ve got more.