Online event planning sites work well to let people know what is going on when and who will be in attendance. However, these sites lack the ability to handle more advanced logistics, such as travel arraignments, until now.
One such event planning site, MyPunchbowl is teaming up with leading travel site Kayak to launch the MyPunchbowl Party Center. This new area will work exactly as you might expect. Just as on Kayak, you can search flights, cars and hotels. Simply input the dates and you’re presented with options — all without leaving MyPunchbowl’s site.
“In this difficult economic climate, many travelers may need to price a trip before replying to an online invitation and now these consumers simply and quickly use the Kayak.com search widget to research prices and availability without leaving MyPunchbowl.com,” said Paul English co-founder and CTO of Kayak.
Both MyPunchbowl and Kayak clearly want to launch this functionality now as the high school and college graduation season begins. With some six million students will graduating this year according to the U.S. Census, that will mean a lot of families and friends moving around to see the event.
One type of event the company doesn’t mention in its list of possible examples seems an odd omission — weddings. Of course, most people hire very expensive coordinators for those and putting that together through MyPunchbowl might not exactly scream elegance. Still, it seems like the Party Center would be useful for other guests to have a place to set up trips for such events.
We previously covered MyPunchbowl here and here. Find our coverage of Kayak here.
Although Evite makes it simple enough to invite some friends to an event, MyPunchbowl thinks it’s found a better way.
Since we last reported on MyPunchbowl in January, the company has been tweaking its workflow-based event planning tools, and has just raised enough funding (less than $1 million) to keep developing for at least another year, according to founder Matt Douglas.
The site’s primary draw is its ease of use and end-to-end planning, from picking the date (the attendees are polled for the best time) to planning the after-party. It also helps users locate stores for their supplies.
New features have made it into the mix, including a “Party Animal” Facebook application that tells friends what kind of party personality they have, and an algorithm-based “pick-a-date” tool that weighs out the schedules of potential guests (including VIPs, who carry more weight) to land on an acceptable date for the event.
Douglas says the site is used for a lot of family parties, and other “mid-market” event planning from book clubs to baby showers. There are also a few corporate users.
Although he won’t give out specific details on the MyPunchbowl’s user base, Douglas told us that the site has higher-than expected traffic, and has been seeing 50 percent growth in users each month for some time.
Competition in the event planning space looks intense, but most of the startups active in the arena have chosen specific niches, and will be able to capture their own followings without invading each other’s territory.
Renkoo, for example, focuses on social networking and casual meetups. Another startup, MingleNow, helps users make it out to the nightlife, with a large list of bars and clubs, while Socializr also aims for a younger, hipper crowd. Evite, while it could develop user tools that mimic MyPunchbowl, is more likely to stick with the model that has made it successful since the dotcom era.
The potential for a strong entrant with a creative, all-encompassing approach to gobble down the small fry still exists, though — especially one with a strong mobile strategy.
For now, MyPunchbowl is avoiding monetizing the site through display ads. Instead, it plans to open partnerships with vendors, helping users secure any party supplies they need. To make money, the site is working on opening more relationships with vendors. A guest asked to bring the turkey to a Thanksgiving event, for example, might receive a targeted offering from Butterball.
Douglas, whose company is based in the Boston area, has three employees. The funding came from Intel Capital and eCoast Angels.
Pledging Facebook fast — Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg’s remarks to outside developers yesterday that they can build applications for Facebook and keep “all the revenue,” with no revenue share, drew the biggest response from the crowd, and was clearly the most significant announcement about the company’s plans for partnerships. And now, given our prodigious Facebook coverage lately, we’re declaring a Facebook fast for at least 24 hours.
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MyPunchbowl’s new technology to pick a date for events — When you’re organizing an event, it can be frustrating to find a date everyone can agree on. What’s surprising is that no site has come up with a good way to facilitate the diplomacy of event date setting. Punchbowl has just done that, with an algorithm that takes into consideration preferences of your invitees, needs of the host and of “VIP” guests, the ones who are really important. It gauges momentum around specific dates, as people start responding to a host’s invite and specified choices, and then figures out what to do in tie-breaking scenarios. Here’s video about how it works (RSS readers will have to click to site):
The three-person team is still looking for $1-3 million in VC funding, but is just about to finish an angel round to tide them over. Founder Matt Douglas says he’s lasted this long on reserves from his days at Adobe.
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The Google Way — Google vice president Marissa Mayer explains how Google’s co-founders trained new employees: “The way Larry and Sergey trained us is they just gave us way too much responsibility and yelled at us until we became the people they needed us to become. And so I’m going to try to execute that program - with less yelling.”
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“The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as ‘What shall I do tomorrow?’ and ‘What job shall I take?’ ”
Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, said gathering more personal data was a key way for Google to expand and the company believes that is the logical extension of its stated mission to organise the world’s information.
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Evite has long been the 800-pound gorilla in the online invitation area.
MyPunchbowl is the latest company trying to make a better version of Evite, by introducing better pre-party planning. It adds modern Web features for collaboration — via a chat board at any stage of event creation (see bottom of screenshot below). It also introduces a method of workflow (see left panel we’ve pointed to in the screenshot below). The process takes you through all the steps or organizing an event, from saving a date, inviting friends, vendor selection, and sharing photos on Flickr afterward; see arrow in screenshot below). We tinkered with it, without actually going through the whole process, and it is user friendly. Techcrunch also has a review here.
Co-founder Matt Douglas says Mypunchbowl is designed for bigger events, such as birthday milestones (Grandma’s 80th birthday, Joe’s 30th birthday), class reunions, graduations, Superbowl gatherings. In that way, it hopes to be more thorough than other sites such as Renkoo, Skobee and Socializr, Matt tells VentureBeat.
By the way, this site has been built by Matt, one other full-timer person, and two contractors. The Boston start-up is self-funded, though they are starting to look for venture money. It shows you how easy these things are to build.
The company is about to announce a deal with party supplier, iparty — part of MyPunchbowl’s service of letting users know where local supply stores are.
Online event planning sites work well to let people know what is going on when and who will be in attendance. However, these sites lack the ability to handle more advanced logistics, such as travel arraignments, until now.
Both MyPunchbowl and Kayak clearly want to launch this functionality now as the high school and college graduation season begins. With some six million students will graduating this year according to the U.S. Census, that will mean a lot of families and friends moving around to see the event.
Pledging Facebook fast — 
