Xconomy Boston

MyPunchbowl Reinvents Online Party Invitations

Wade Roush10/7/08Comments (1)Follow @wroush

Everyone has a neighbor or a relative who loves to throw parties—you know, the people who make their Halloween or Christmas extravaganza bigger every year, with more lights, lawn ornaments, costumes, and food. The folks at Punchbowl Software are a lot like that: they keep overhauling their Web 2.0 party-planning website MyPunchbowl, making it fancier and more useful.

Today Punchbowl took the lid off the site’s biggest redesign yet. “Many of our features have gotten a facelift,” says CEO Matt Douglas, “and our home page has been redesigned for conversion”—that is, to entice more people to sign up as members and to use MyPunchbowl’s main features, which include a utility for negotiating a party’s date, a save-the-date notifier, party-supply checklists, and photo albums for after-party sharing. The user interfaces for all of these features have also been revamped, Douglas says.

But the most prominent new feature is the online “Design Studio,” where hosts planning parties can create customized electronic invitations by choosing from a variety of clip-art options such as colorful backgrounds and ribbons. The company says the studio provides a “green” and “stylish” alternative to sending out paper invitations. And actually, the phrase “clip art” doesn’t do justice to the elegant designs Punchbowl has created as starting templates (click on the thumbnail at left for a closer look).

It’s been a busy fall at Punchbowl—the company announced just three weeks ago that it had raised $2.1 million in a venture round by New York-based Contour Venture Partners and existing investors Intel Capital and eCoast Angels.

Wade Roush is Xconomy's chief correspondent and editor of Xconomy San Francisco. You can e-mail him at wroush@xconomy.com or follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/wroush.