MyPunchbowl, an eVite competitor that opened its doors early last year, has launched a ‘2.0′ version of its site that features a revamped interface and a very impressive custom electronic invitation creator.
MyPunchbowl CEO Matt Douglas says that his team has integrated improvements throughout the site for the new release, including an enhanced address book, the ability to send test invites (to make sure they appear correctly in mail clients), and various UI changes. And while these features are welcome additions to the site, the site’s most significant release is easily its invitation Design Studio.
Douglas, who worked at Adobe for years, says that his team has created a card designer that is similar in many ways to Adobe’s Photoshop. While the designer has a very intuitive and simple interface, it allows users to manipulate layer opacity, color, and texture with very little effort. Users are offered a library of pre-made cards as well as some basic templates, all of which can be customized to include user-defined text, fonts, and colors. While many users will simply choose one of the pre-fabricated cards, the flexibility afforded by the designer will definitely appeal to a large portion of MyPunchbowl’s userbase.
Of course, these cards will only appear in Email form for now, but Douglas says that the company is in talks with major printers. While there a many other places to get custom cards printed, the ability to send both electronic and traditional invites (especially ones that look so nice) could give MyPunchbowl a leg up on its many competitors.
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I tried using this site for an event last year and 80% of the respondents had the message end up in their junk email folder. Anyone know if they solved this problem yet? It’s a great site, however that is one deciding factor working against them.
Yeah, they had this problem early on, but they solved it. I can’t wait to try this.
What exactly does punchbowl do?
It’s an “evite competitor” what more clarification do you need?
What exactly do you do? Are you like 15 yrs old or something?
Tested it. Images do not show - ‘click to download images’ - how is that effective?
They should chat with the guys at Moo for printing rather than doing it themselves.
I definitely agree this can give them a leg up on their competition. My wife tried evite and socializr to create an invitation for my daughter’s birthday and she said they both stunk.
thats a pretty app.
http://gatesandjobs.blogspot.com/
I’ve been using Socializr for about a year now and couldn’t be happier. I evaluated several of the competitors before making the switch from Evite, and Socializr was the only one that had all the features I needed.
Too bad no one will ever dethrone Evite.
Once you have that kind of market share and notoriety, no one can touch you. I sent out invites from MyPunchBowl, Pingg and socializr and none of them went well, simply because people are only familiar with evite. I know these guys raised a million dollars but I don’t see them staying in business when that’s gone if they stick with an advertising-only business model.
I bet Yahoo probably thought that about Google. At first.
I was very excited to try this for my upcoming birthday but i found it very clunky. very disappointing they don’t have a clear navigation panel when making the invitations and the upload of Yahoo! contacts was very hit and miss.
Would love to use it when it’s working.
You gotta be kidding me. I guess kincaid’s been drinking kool-aid from the punchbowl. I figure these guys have gotta be on life support. They’ll never make it. VCs, recover what is left of your capital. TC put them in the Deadpool already.
On another note, the Crunchbase is worthless because it’s full of so many dead men walking. Start calling these guys out. They are dead in the water.
Why do these sites never offer an option to pull address from my gmail account?
Their new, fancy cards are definitely fun. Altogether, it will not take the typical MyPunchbowl user, or for that matter, an online event planner user, too long to orient themselves (through some poking, clicking, interacting), adapt and learn how to use the fairly Recognizable myPunchbowl event creation process — but they do have a few different spins on event planning. Check out my latest look at the recognizability of myPunchbowl…
http://tpgblog.com/2008/10/27/.....punchbowl/
Jeremy Horn
The Product Guy
http://tpgblog.com