The original DemoGirl is very busy planning the wedding of the century, and she’s got a long list of things that need to be handled. One Web site she might want to check out is Divvyus — the site offers a simple application where you can quickly create a shared task list.
There is nothing to sign up for, but you must keep track of the URLs for your Divvy (as the lists are called). You’ll receive a public URL that can only be used to claim tasks and mark them as done. You will also get an admin URL where you can edit, add or claim tasks.
Divvyus might be helpful for my baby sister…um, I mean for DemoGirl to start delegating those wedding tasks.
To see Divvyus in action, watch the screencast below:
Remember the days of sending out real paper invitations to your friends and then waiting patiently by the phone for them to call with their response? OK, so some of you are probably too young to remember those days, which is unfortunate since it’s a much more personal way to introduce your event to your friends and family. Evitations are the norm these days and, sadly, the chance of actually receiving an invitation in the mail is very rare.
RSVPhere is a site that wants to blend the convenience of online party planning with the ever-so-rare paper invite.
All you need to do is create an RSVPhere account and add all of your event details. You can even ask questions of your guests that they’ll need to answer when responding – Things like, “What type of wine do you prefer” or, “Do you have any dietary restrictions” are extremely helpful when planning an event. After you’ve added all of your info you’ll create a code that guests will need to respond to your event online. This code, along with an event ID, will be printed on your paper invites that you send to your guests. Instead of sending out a response card (and hoping that nobody loses it or forgets to drop it in the mail) your guests can simply enter the code into the RSVPhere site and respond with a few clicks. They don’t need to sign up for anything and it just takes a minute. As the party planner, you also save some cash on stamps.
To see all of the great features of RSVPhere, watch the screencast below:
Siri is a virtual personal assistant that lives in your iPhone. It can help you find a place to get a bite to eat, show you movie listings, and even remind you to call your Mom on her birthday.
You have two options when using Siri – You can type out what you’re looking for or you can say it to Siri and it will do its best to figure out what you’re saying. For example, you could simply tap “restaurants” and then choose what type of food you’re looking for and where. Siri will grab reviews, menus (if available) and even allow you to add notes to your selection. You can then map it, email it, or save it to your Siri bookmarks. You can also choose the “say it” option and say what you want. I tried saying, “Shutter Island, San Francisco” into my phone and Siri immediately recognized that I was looking for movie listings for “Shutter Island” in San francisco. It brought up theaters close to me and gave me the option to reserve tickets.
You can say things like, “remind me to call the dentist” and Siri should send that info into the reminders section of your account and allow you to add a time for Siri to email you and remind you to call the dentist. This only seemed to work about half of the time. Sometimes it would recognize “remind” and sometimes it would think I was saying “find”.
Another little problem I had was with finding restaurants near me. Siri doesn’t seem to know of any pizza places closer than 10 miles to my house – And that is definitely not the case. It was also telling me that some restaurants were much farther away from my location then they actually are. With that said, this is definitely not a deal breaker for me as Siri does much more than just find restaurants and set reminders. You can request a cab, get the current weather, set dinner reservations, and pretty much anything else that you would have a real personal assistant do. Except this one is free. Get Siri in the iTunes App Store here.
First of all, let me say that I will try to make this my last post (for a while) about anything wedding related. It just so happens that I received a note from the founders of MyWeddingBinder yesterday and after using it a bit today, I really feel that it is a very useful tool. Since I spent so much time testing it out I figured it would be worth my time to go the extra mile and share my experience with you.
Disclosure: I am currently planning a wedding so please excuse me if I get over excited. I can’t help it.
MyWeddingBinder gives you a space to plan and organize the details of your wedding. Everything from your guest list, to your vendors, to the seating chart, to your budget – it’s all there to help you keep track of the madness that lasts just one day.
Now I know that there are a lot of sites out there that can be used to help you plan your wedding. The problem with most of these sites, however, is that they do not focus just on your wedding day – they focus on shoving ads down your throat (a bit extreme, but it’s pretty much true) for things like dresses and floral arrangements that most people can’t even afford. What I’ve found (and believe me, I have looked and looked) is that most wedding planning sites put your actual wedding planning in the background and pictures of extravagant ceremonies and merchandise in the foreground. And that’s why they’re free. So fine.
MyWeddingBinder is not free. In fact you can’t even set up a free trial account to test it out. There’s a fee of $29.95 to create your account, but once you’ve paid you have an ad-free, clean and organized space to plan out your special, and costly, day. At first I was a bit turned off by the fact that I couldn’t test the site out before handing over my credit card but then, after they were kind enough to let me use a test account for free, I realized that this is something that’s worth paying for. I’m not sure if it’s worth $29.95 yet, but it definitely made an impact. I think some additional features are needed to warrant the price tag. This is my wish list:
I want a way to customize the table set-up. As it is now there are only round tables available to create your seating chart.
Adding guests is a pain. You have to add them one at a time, click on “save”, and then click on “add guests” again. Maybe add an “Import your address book” feature.
How about a blog to keep your guests up to date on wedding day details?
A section to upload your inspiration photos
If you want to see all of what MyWeddingBinder can do, watch the screencast below:
Google City Tours is a Labs project that has some pretty helpful features for people planning a trip to an unfamiliar city. You can begin by entering in the name or address of the place where you’ll be staying. From there, Google City Tours will load a map with various points of interest that you can walk to from your originating point. Each destination shows an approximate amount of time it should take you to walk as well as walking directions from point A to point B to point C…
You can also remove and add points of interest to the map and include the number of days you’ll be in town so that your sightseeing can be spread out over a few days.
I really like Google City Tours, especially because my Mom is coming to visit me in San Francisco next month and I would love her to map out all the places we can walk to from her hotel. With that said, these are my issues:
How do you save your Google City Tour? I couldn’t find a “save” link anywhere.
Can you share your City Tour with, for instance, the person who’s visiting?
I’d like options to switch from walking to driving to public transit. My Mom is NOT going to walk to the Golden Gate Bridge from Union Square.
Of course, Google City Tours is in Labs, which means that it’s a work in progress. Those are just some things that I think should be at the top of the “to-do” list for the people working on it .
To see Google City Tours in action, watch the screencast below:
As some of you may know, I’ve got wedding planning on the brain. And it’s stressing me out. A lot. Thankfully there are a ton of online tools that are easing a bit of the stress. I honestly don’t know how anyone planned a big event, like a wedding, without the help of the Internet. I don’t even want to think about that! I can’t even think about that. This leads me to the event planning site MyPunchBowl. I knew that MyPunchBowl was a great site for planning parties and managing events, but I didn’t know that they had an entire section dedicated to weddings! (Thanks Paisano!)
MyPunchBowl Weddings gives you a quick and easy way to send out engagement announcements without the cost of expensive save the date cards. In fact, it’s completely free to use (although there is a premium account which gives you more customization and ad-free announcements).
I’m not quite ready to send out save the dates, but when I am I think this just may do the trick.
To see MyPunchBowl Weddings in action, check out the screencast below:
Thinkmeter gives you a way to quickly get opinions and advice from friends, family and co-workers. You can ask for opinions on anything from what color to paint your kitchen to what to buy your Mom for her birthday – and you don’t even need to sign up to use it. If you do sign up you’ll be able to track responses and comments left by the people included in your decision campaign.
To see Thinkmeter in action, check out the screencast below:
If you’d like to send holiday cards to your clients but don’t have the time or the money to buy, customize, and mail out plain old greeting cards, then eCards for Business may be just what you (and the happy little trees!) have been looking for.
Pingg.com, an online invitation and party planning service, is behind eCards for business and they were nice enough to set us up with our own account to try out the new service.
In short, eCards for business allow you to create eCards that are branded with your company logo, which you can provide to your employees to send out to their clients. The eCards can be viewed on a Webpage with a custom URL, via email, text message, and/or you can opt to have pingg print out and mail the cards to your chosen recipients.
A really great feature of eCards for business is a customized Splash Page that pingg will create for you. You can add a logo, choose specific card designs that you want your employees to use, and add notes. After your Splash Page has been created you’ll just need to point your employees to the URL and they can simply click on a link to create eCards for their clients with your companies branding and specific designs. You can also encourage your employees to use your company eCards to send their family members holiday greetings. Your eCard Website is also completely ad-free. (In my screencast I don’t make this point clear – note that if you sign up for eCards for business, there is no additional charge for removing ads). You can find pricing information and learn more about how pingg will create your customized Splash Page here.
To learn more about eCards for business and see it in action, check out the screencast below (best viewed in HD in full screen):
Duffel is a trip planning tool that allows you to clip and save ideas and links for places you are planning on visiting or for a vacation that you dream of someday taking.
Creating a Duffel is simple: Select the location of where you want to go, give your trip a name such as, “When I win the lottery,” and then choose to make it private or public. Your Duffel will then be created and open preloaded with suggestions of where to stay, sightseeing attractions, and notes that can be edited.
If you added dates to your Duffel (you don’t have to add dates, which is helpful since most of my trips are wishful thinking) then you can drag and drop notes and activities under each day that you’ll be in a location to create an itinerary. You can also invite friends to join you on Duffel and allow them to collaborate with you. You can add other Duffel users as contacts so that in the future you can easily invite them to collaborate on a trip.
Probably the most useful aspect of Duffel is the bookmarklet. It allows you to add any Web page that you’re viewing to a Duffel and add notes, phone numbers, and addresses. So if I find myself on a Website for a luxurious hotel in Paris, I can simply click on “Add to Duffel” and add it to my “When Pigs Fly” trip. To see Duffel in action, check out the screencast below (best viewed in HD in full screen):
SeatGeek is a service that wants to help you get the best deal on tickets to concerts and sporting events. It uses a history of ticket sales to predict whether or not prices will drop and then compares prices from sites like StubHub, eBay, and TicketCity.
Begin by searching by venue, artist, or team and then select the event you would like to attend. SeatGeek will then search multiple ticket sales sites and tell you weather or not to buy or wait for prices to drop.
You can view the seat numbers as well as the face value of the tickets compared to what they’re currently being sold for. If you don’t mind the price then you can continue on to buy the tickets. Otherwise, just lick on “subscribe to alert” and you’ll be emailed if the price drops.
SeatGeek is currently limited to Major League Baseball Games and select concert venues, but hopefully they’ll have a wider range of events available to track sooner than later. As of today, SeatGeek helped me see that I can get a better deal on tickets to a Giant’s game I want to attend…let’s hope their prediction is correct.
To see SeatGeek in action, watch the screencast below (best viewed in HD in full screen):
.
