Pulse2 Technology and Social Media News » Evite

Online Party Planning Website Punchbowl.com Acquires Rival Socializr

Amit Chowdhry — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 06:42:51 +0000

Online party planning company Punchbowl.com has acquired a rival called Socializr. Socializr was started by Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams. Both Socializr and Punchbowl.com compete against Evite.com, a party planning website owned by InterActiveCorp/IAC. The financial terms were undisclosed.

Punchbowl is about twice the size of Socializr. Socializr had raised about $3 million in funding and Punchbowl raised about $2 million.

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IAC Lays Off 25% of Evite’s Work Force

Amit Chowdhry — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 19:59:31 +0000

IAC/InterActiveCorp (NASDAQ:IACI) has laid off about 25% of their work force at Evite.com. Evite had about 38 employees and now they are down to about 29. Two of the executives that were laid off includes General Manager Rosanna McCollough and VP of Marketing Lariayn Payne. John Foley will be at the top Evite. Hans Woolley will be reporting to John Foley.

Evite has taken a hit on revenue which was generated mainly from advertising. Evite is also finding themselves heavily competing with social networking websites that have built in event invitations.

Evite currently has 22 million registered users and there are about 25,000 invitations sent each hour. Evite was launched in 1998 and has headquarters in LA, CA.

[via BusinessInsider]

Evite Relaunching Platform With JS-Kit Built-In

Amit Chowdhry — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 19:31:04 +0000

Evite is relaunching their platform to include some of JS-Kit’s features. Evite will be using JS-Kit’s commenting and poll system for event hosts to advance the way that hosts communicate with event invitees. JS-Kit will make Evite feel even more like a social network than before with the new features.

This new integration is in line with Evite’s plans to become more social network-like. Evite is rolling out photo sharing and stories after an event has occurred. Evite is the most well-known event invitation website. Evite receives about 15 million uniques per month, had 6 million parties planned per year, and had over 200 million invitations sent out over the last year. Evite competes directly with Facebook’s event management system.

JS-Kit recently acquired HaloScan, a comment service provider about 13 days ago. JS-Kit raised $1.2 million in Series A around August 2007 from The Entrepreneurs Fund III. JS-Kit is based in Hillsborough, CA. JS-Kit features are currently being used on over 500,000 sites.

Related Links:
Evite
JS-Kit
The Entrepreneurs Fund III