MyPunchbowl

10 Evite alternatives: The good and the bad

I recently used Evite to send invitations for a party at my house. Overall, I was pleased with the experience. The selection of invitation styles was huge. The invitee tracking tool was informative. But the site's user interface made it too complicated to send an invitation. Worse, Evite hasn't really embraced the social networking space--there's no Evite app on Facebook nor Twitter integration. And the closest it comes to going mobile is sending SMS invites and offering a mobile site.

So I set out to find some alternatives to Evite to see if they could provide a better service.

CircleUp Though it's not specifically designed to provide invitations and tracking, CircleUp does let you invite others to an event and track their attendance. The page detailing whether or not invitees will be attending the event is especially good. But CircleUp simply isn't as useful as Evite, nor as convenient.

Crusher I like Crusher. It's simple and clean. Creating invitations can take less than a minute. But if you're the type who wants to tweak an invitation to fit your needs, the site also has a CSS editor. You can add video, chat, photos, and much more. It's great for the Web geek and the Web novice alike. And it's better than Evite.

Enclude Unlike Evite, Enclude lets you send e-cards. But its invitation creation tool doesn't provide as many planning options as Evite's. And if you really care about the design of the invite, you'll find fewer cards on Enclude. I also wasn't impressed with its invitee tracking tool. Simply put, it's no Evite.

Facebook Most of the people who I would invite to a party are my friends on Facebook anyway, so creating an event and sending out an invitation through the social network is quite convenient. Creating an invitation in Facebook takes less than a minute. Everyone can see who will be attending the party. Attendance tallies are updated as soon as the invitee responds. If you don't need to invite too many people outside of your Facebook friends list, Facebook is a fine invitation tool. It's much simpler than Evite.

Invitastic Invitastic is ugly, too simple, and unable to compete on any level with Evite. That said, it might come in handy when you want to quickly send out an invite to a couple friends and you don't want all the extras Evite provides. But even in those circumstances, I'm hard-pressed to find a reason to use Invitastic instead of other simple services, like Zoji.… Read more

MyPunchbowl rolls out birthday reminder service

MyPunchbowl has a new service for remembering people's birthdays.

Designed to keep you from forgetting when it's somebody's special day, you can set up reminders that can be sent to both you and your friends. To do this, the service has employed a system that pesters your friends to add themselves to your personal database. In the process, the hope is that they'll join the system too.

Right now you can do this via e-mail, IM, Twitter, and Facebook. In all cases, it sends out a quick mm/dd/yyyy request to your contacts, along with … Read more

MyPunchbowl gets new look, snazzy invite designer

Web party invitation and management service MyPunchbowl on Tuesday relaunched with a new look. While mostly a new paint job, the big, new feature is the invitation designer, which has been renamed as a "studio."

Where the service's former system had users simply picking colors, pictures, and some ready-made templates, the results of using the new tool resembles a real life paper invitation. Users can still select things like the coloring and background, but there are new flourishes like colored ribbons, textured backgrounds, and various form factors that mimic proper card stock.

All of this amounts to … Read more

$2.1 million for invite start-up MyPunchbowl

Contour Venture Partners is the lead investor in Series A funding for Punchbowl Software, which is behind the event-planning and invitation site MyPunchbowl.

Total cash raised was $2.1 million; the other investors in the round include Intel Capital and eCoast Angels.

Previously, Framingham, Mass.-based Punchbowl Software had raised seed funding from Intel and eCoast.

MyPunchbowl's team said that the fruits of the Series A round will be visible soon, with new features and new hires on the way. But invitation start-ups are in a tough spot; IAC's Evite is as big as most of its smaller … Read more

'Hangover' Facebook app is Pokemon for Bluto and Frank the Tank

I don't normally review Facebook applications. I also don't normally install too many on my profile unless I actually deem them useful.

This is an exception.

"Hangover," a Facebook application game created by invitation start-up MyPunchbowl, is utterly pointless and a bit convoluted, but I found it strangely appealing. Maybe that's because it's so off-the-wall.

Essentially, Hangover is like the Old School or Animal House version of kiddie card games like Pokemon. You start out with 10 virtual "cards," one of which you can display on your Facebook profile, and the point … Read more

Figure out who's bringing what with MyPunchBowl's checklists

There's something to be said about Web services that have been set up to help people coordinate things in the least stressful way as possible. I dig sites like CircleUp (coverage) that offer a way to set up polls, or to solve quick logistical questions within a group, without requiring the creator or the users to agonize over the interface and execution. That's why MyPunchBowl's new checklist feature is pretty much the best addition to a party-planning service yet.

The idea is simple: you, as party creator, make a list of things you need for the party. … Read more

Phonevite does party invites by phone, not email

Phonevite is a new free invitation and RSVP service that turns your Web browser into a personal assistant of sorts, letting you call a large group of friends, family, or contacts without having to spend all day on the phone. Instead Phonevite provides an asynchronous solution, giving you an easy way to record a personalized invitation message using your computer's microphone, and send it out to a list of hand-picked phone numbers. From there you can send out the "invitation" right away, or schedule it in for a later date.

When an invitation goes live, Phonevite will … Read more

Update Roundup: invites, searches, and wiki VoIP

MyPunchBowl adds themes, public events. The invitation service we've been keeping an eye on since its January launch has updated with several user-requested features (75, according to its blog). One of the new additions is themed invitations, a feature we asked for in our original hands-on MyPunchBowl review. Also new is the option to create public events, so people can share a party's URL instead of requiring the host to manually go in and send out invites. Our favorite theme? Pretzel Day.

Clipmarks gets searchy with ClipSearch. Clipmarks, the Web bookmarking service, has added a search engine to … Read more