MyPunchblog

This post written by Sean Conta, Founder & CXO

Besides web browsers, the program that I use most often and most successfully is definitely SnagIt. If you haven’t heard of it, SnagIt (made by TechSmith) is a screen capture tool plus an image editor. Basically it lets you capture an image of what’s on your screen (or a portion of it) and then you can edit that image, move things around and add text and arrows and stuff. That’s just the basics really, it does a whole lot more.

~disclaimer - there is no disclaimer! I have no relationship with TechSmith - I just love SnagIt!!~

I’ve used SnagIt for a few years now and I’d like to think I’m pretty good with it. But the best part of the program is that it doesn’t take long to get good with it. The Editor portion of the program has just enough of what you want to do. It’s like Photoshop but without all the slew of tools and buttons that you can’t easily figure out how to use and wow there are a lot of them and man all you really want to do is grab this line of text and move it a few pixels down! With the SnagIt editor you just draw a box around it and move it.

We find SnagIt invaluable for quickly testing out interface ideas or making mockups or pointing out something in an interface.

Enough said - if you’re at all curious they have a free 30 day trial. Seriously now, I don’t know anyone at TechSmith!! But maybe they’ll send me a T-shirt??

This post written by Stephanie Fader, Marketing & PR Manager

As you know from Matt’s post yesterday, we just launched MyPunchbowl Birthday Reminders — an easy and dependable way to keep track of the birthdays that matter the most.

We got some great press coverage about MyPunchbowl Birthday Reminders and I thought I’d share some of it with you.

Terrence Russell from VentureBeat writes:

 ”Although I’ve seen my share of reminder/event tools, what makes the Birthday Reminder service interesting is its call to action. Whereas Facebook and MySpace mostly leverage birth dates for gift giving/micro-transactions within their sites, the Birthday Reminder service folds seamlessly into MyPunchbowl’s activity driven focus by referring users to its party planning application and free eCards. From there, it kind of makes sense to transform static birthday reminders into…well, actual birthday parties.”

Josh Lowensohn from CNET’s Webware writes:

“Where the system holds real value is that it’s deeply tied into MyPunchbowl’s other services. For instance, if it’s someone you were never intending to get a gift or a real card for, you can simply use MyPunchbowl’s eCard service and send it to them using the information you’ve already gathered. By contrast, you can also turn around and begin planning a party right away using the built-in tools.”

So what do you think? Have you tried MyPunchbowl Birthday Reminders yet? Create your own birthday reminder list for free at http://www.mypunchbowl.com/birthday-reminders.

This post was written by Matt Douglas, Founder & CEO

By now I hope you’ve heard that we launched a new service today: MyPunchbowl Birthday Reminders. I’m really proud of how this product came together, and I hope that it will be very useful to our customers. I thought I’d take a few moments to explain why we decided to create this new product.

Birthdays are a big part of our business. Whether it’s on our party planning site or on our free eCards site, our customers love to celebrate birthdays using MyPunchbowl. Personally, I use MyPunchbowl eCards a few times a month to wish someone a happy birthday with a personalized eCard, and about once or twice a year I’m involved with planning a birthday party on MyPunchbowl. As the CEO of MyPunchbowl, I know it’s important to improve our birthday-related functionality.

I’ve always looked at reminder services and thought they were very useful — especially for remembering birthdays. A handful of years ago, my wife signed up for a birthday alarm service, and I’ve seen how she’s used it to remember important birthdays. While she uses a web-based service, most of the birthdays I want to remember are in my personal calendar. Although my calendar usually helps me remember (at least during the week), more often than not I find myself wishing that I had gotten a reminder before the actual birthday.

Before we started working on the birthday reminders product, I spent a lot of time looking at the existing birthday reminder services. Most of the existing sites that are out there are very outdated or too simplistic. One site that stands apart is Facebook (both as a native service and several Facebook applications). Isn’t *everyone* on Facebook these days? Why would we launch a new service that already exists as part of Facebook?

As I see it, MyPunchbowl Birthday Reminders solves a different problem. I don’t know about you, but like many Facebook users, I have hundreds of “friends” in my social network on Facebook. Frankly, I don’t care about most of their birthdays. MyPunchbowl Birthday Reminders are for the 30-40 people you actually care about, and want a reminder. We see it as a much more personal service for keeping track of those birthdays that matter (and especially useful for birthdays of people who are *not* on Facebook, such as kids, parents and grandparents).

We built MyPunchbowl Birthday Reminders so that our customers could build a useful list of birthday reminders — just the ones you want to make sure you don’t forget. In my list, I have my close friends, my nieces and nephews, my brothers, and other close family members (yes cuz, you made it in). My entire list is about 35 people. I don’t expect it to grow much, and it’s really comforting to know that I’ll get a few reminders before the actual birthday rolls around. And one of my favorite features? MyPunchbowl keeps track of the age of everyone on my list. Very useful.

If you haven’t set up your birthday reminder list yet, give it a shot: it will only take 5 minutes to get started and you can always come back and add more. Try it out for free at http://www.mypunchbowl.com/birthday-reminders

Here’s a screenshot of our new service. Let us know what you think in the comments of this blog post.

This post written by Stephanie Fader, Marketing & PR Manager

For some, Valentine’s Day is a wonderful excuse to go to dinner with a significant other, give each other chocolates, flowers, jewelry, and who knows what else? Others would argue that couples should be doing these things all year long, but we’ll let that slide.

With the anticipation of Valentine’s Day building for weeks if not months, what are all of the singles out there to do? Trust me, it’s pretty damn near impossible to ignore Valentine’s Day — it’s everywhere!

Even on MyPunchbowl we’ve got beautiful free eCards that you can customize for your sweetie with photos and video. People also used our site to plan Valentine’s dinners and brunches as well. Couples only?

So what’s a singleton to do? I’m very happy to say that MyPunchbowl’s got something for you too! You can grab all of your girls (or boys) and plan a fun night out. With Valentine’s Day on a Saturday this year, don’t stay home but embrace the single life with a night on the town. I will be!

We also have the perfect outlet for your Valentine’s Day disdain: Anti-Valentine’s eCards! Send them to your girlfriends, the guy who wronged you, or to someone you know that just loves to hate Valentine’s Day!

A few weeks ago, we launched MyPunchbowl eCard Studio. One of things I love about eCard Studio is that it gives me the ability to use MyPunchbowl for everyday occasions. On an almost daily basis, I find a reason to use MyPunchbowl eCard Studio. Consider a few example from the last week:

• A colleague of mine had some minor surgery, I sent her an ‘get well soon’ eCard
• My sister-in-law celebrated her birthday, I sent her a birthday card through Facebook
• My wife was having a challenging day at work — I sent her a “thinking of you” eCard
• A friend of mine turned 30, I sent him a birthday ecard

Obviously I’m biased, but I find that MyPunchbowl eCards are suitable replacement for traditional paper greeting cards. With a few clicks of a mouse, I can send a thoughtful, personal, and sophisticated greeting card. No run to the stationary store, no stamps required, no post office — and it’s free.

So who in your life are you thinking about today? Why not send them an free eCard from MyPunchbowl?

We’ve been working on a few interesting new features here at MyPunchbowl and I’m happy to be able to tell you about one of them today.

For many of us, the hardest part of planning a significant celebration is having enough time to pull everything together. How many times have you glanced at the calendar to see that the birthday party you were going to plan is only a week away? And how many times have you been surprised that a significant holiday has snuck up on you?

For those of you with a blog, we’ve launched a new feature to help you with this problem: the “MyPunchbowl Celebrations Widget.” Everyone has their own reasons to celebrate, and we’ve developed a handy-dandy widget so you can share your reasons with the world. Add your brothers and sisters birthdays (and your nieces and nephews) and choose which holidays to display too. You can change the theme and the color of the widget to match your blog’s color (and even choose the font). Then simply copy and paste the code to your blog, and you’ll have a personalized celebrations widget.

Here’s a screenshot of MY personalized widget, all customized just for me (if you want to see how this looks on my blog, head over to the MyPunchbowl blog):

If you have a blog, we hope you’ll give the MyPunchbowl Celebrations Widget a try to display your reasons to celebrate to the world. Oh, and stay tuned… we have a widget contest that we’ll be announcing soon.

It’s about 95 degrees in Boston today, so I suppose it’s not a surprise that I started thinking about July 4th.

Every year, my July 4th weekend is accounted for — my wedding anniversary is that weekend and my wife and I usually get away. As a result, I usually have to decline the 4th of July party invitations that I receive. I think last year I was invited to at least two 4th of July parties that we declined.

Yet even though I don’t participate in any July 4th party planning, 4th of July is a pretty popular event on MyPunchbowl. We have lots of 4th of July invitations to choose from and lots of great party tips and advice for your 4th of July party planning.

If you never have used MyPunchbowl before, why not get started today by sending a 4th of July save the date? You don’t need much information to send your save the date — simply put in the date and place of your 4th of July party and send it off to your friends and family. Come back a few weeks before the event to send your online invitations. Easy and simple.

Here’s are a few of the 4th of July party invitations that are available on MyPunchbowl:

I’ve been a big fan of Amazon ever since I’ve discovered their “Prime” shipping option. For $99 a year, Prime shipping offers you and four of your family members/friends the ability to order anything from Amazon and get free 2 day shipping. I’ve been a Prime member for two years now, and I’ve significantly increased my usage of Amazon as a result (full disclosure: after discovering Prime I bought a few shares of Amazon and have watched the stock double in this time period –woohoo!).

This morning, I noticed that Amazon has announced a new service called TextBuyit. After trying it out this morning, I’ve realized that this will literally change the way I shop forever.

Ever since I became an Amazon Prime member, I’d often jot down the name of the book or gift that I saw in a store, come back home and order it online. For the holiday season, this was very useful– since I have the physical addresses of friends and family already pre-loaded into Amazon and shipping is free we sent a few gifts along directly from Amazon. Easy and simple.

With TextBuyit, Amazon has taken it one step further. Now, while I’m in the store, I can text message Amazon the basic details of the item, and Amazon will text me back with the price. To purchase the item, I can simply text message back “1″ to Amazon. Pretty cool. Here’s a graphic that explains it all:

This new service will change the way I shop forever. Everytime I’m close to buying something in a store, I’ll check to see the Amazon price. With free shipping on Amazon, it will be a no-brainer to order from Amazon. I can literally be in the aisle of the book store (or electronics store) and decide to purchase on Amazon instead. Wow.

I believe that this will have huge implications for brick and mortar stores in the long-run. Amazon has just inserted their storefront into virtually every book, electronic, and grocery store in America. Amazon has just changed the way I’ll shop forever — a truly disruptive technology.

Damn, this web thing is pretty cool.

Happy Birthday to all of the people who celebrate their birthday on Leap Day!

A few weeks ago we rolled out a few “Leap Day Birthday” templates, and they’ve been quite popular. Based on this surprising popularity, I was curious to see how many people might actually have a Leap Day birthday. Here’s an interesting site about Leap Day birthdays that I found. According to this “Honor Society” there are about 200,000 people in US and 4 million people worldwide. My new goal: I want MyPunchbowl to be THE online birthday party planning site for Leap Day birthdays by 2012. With a little marketing, that should be achievable… (for you marketing geeks, talk about long tail!)

Here’s one of the Leap Day birthday party themes we rolled out:

For all of you who are celebrating today..Happy Birthday! Try and get 4x of everything (presents, cake, attention…). And don’t forget to come back and visit MyPunchbowl in 2012!

We’ve been pretty heads down here over the last week or so. It always gets that way around here right before a major new release. Today, we’re excited to tell you about the latest version of MyPunchbowl.

MyPunchbowl now includes a sophisticated party planning notification system, named “Buzz”, which tracks host and guests interactions as they happen. MyPunchbowl Buzz offers the host personalized alerts during every phase of party planning. Guests can enable their own alerts on the site by signing up for a MyPunchbowl account.

The MyPunchbowl Buzz notification system is a significant step forward for our app. We’ve built a robust notification system that’s capable of handing any kind of messaging– we’ll be rolling out RSS by the end of the week, with SMS and instant messaging to follow. MyPunchbowl is no longer a static party planning site –it’s now a constantly-updating system for every stage of party planning. Based on the platform we’ve built, you can expect some pretty interesting things from MyPunchbowl in the future– we’re building a Buzz API to allow developers to build custom apps around this data (think Facebook app, embeddable widget, Twitter etc). We’re really excited about how this opens up our app.

I’ll write more about MyPunchbowl Buzz in a future post. In the meantime, here’s a screenshot of a MyPunchbowl account with the new Buzz notification system: