Today we launched a group of new features, mostly focused on giving our hosts more ability to customize their invitations. The new features make it easy to crop photos and choose fonts, colors, and layouts. We've also added some formatting control, which is something many of our hosts have asked for. These new features will are found in the invite layout tab. Rather than go into detail, writing about something that's really a visual and esthetic thing, I'd suggest giving the new features a try!

Our development team has also been hard at work finding and fixing the bugs and glitches that are inevitable in a web application like pingg. We do our best to make every release and new feature perfect, but we're only human and things do sometimes get through. I'd like to thank our hosts who've taken the time to write to support@pingg.com to ask questions, and let us know about problems they discover.

Matt Harrop
co-founder

Every May, tens of millions of people tune in to The Today Show to watch as couples compete for their dream wedding on Today Throws A Wedding: Race to the Altar. Not only is the winning couple married live at Rockefeller Plaza in an elegant ceremony, the couple is then thrown a luxurious reception at the world famous Rainbow Room followed by a 5-star tropical honeymoon. It's truly the wedding of a lifetime for the winning couple, as no expense is spared.

This year, The Today Show chose to go online and used pingg to design and send custom wedding invitations for the big event. The benefit of sending online invitations was that within hours of the winning couple, LaDonna and Darnell, being selected, their invitations had been designed and sent. As pingg also offers the option of sending both digital and print invitations from one place - the couple did not have to choose whether to send their invitation via email or postal mail. Thus guests also recieved a traditional print invitation a few days after the email invitation.

The elegant pingg invitations featured a beautiful image of cherry blossoms which brought the wedding theme, "East Meets West," to life. The unique cherry blossom image was found using pingg Plus+, our proprietary custom search tool. Pink, the bride's favorite color, was then selected as the background color, for the ultimate custom online invitation.

Over the course of the next two weeks, the producers and wedding planners were able to easily and simply keep track of guests / rsvps, send reminders ("don't forget to bring your ID for check in at security"), and add last minute names to the list. The day before the big event, wedding organizers exported the complete guest list for easy check-in.

With a pingg invitation, not only did the winning couple get a beautiful custom invitation, but they and their guests also enjoyed a custom wedding event web page that featured photos from the couple's engagement day, the couple's submission video for the Today Show, and a place for guests to post notes to the happy couple.

Needless to say, pingg was thrilled to be part of Today Throws a Wedding: Race to the Altar festivities. We wish LaDonna & Darnell great happiness.

Have a wedding, engagement party or shower in your future? Design a memorable custom digital and print invitation, with pingg.

Margo Spiritus
VP, Marketing & Business Development
pingg.com

This past Thursday, pingg was featured on the front page of USA Today's Life Section in a story by Olivia Barker entitled: “You Are Not So Formally Invited With An Electronic Wedding Invitation." We were thrilled to have been such a large part of the feature and to have had the chance for two of our consumers to share their wedding invitation stories.

We were also thrilled that the article allows us to now discuss both sides of the digital vs. print debate as it concerns more formal events. Many “old-school” etiquette experts would argue that a wedding is no place for digital invitations, and that notion is something that pingg has always taken into consideration, which is why we offer hosts the opportunity to send both digital and print invitations. Because pingg allows you to create actual customized digital invitations, rather than a link to a web-page, when hosts create their guestlist, we allow them to choose which guests should receive digital invitations via email and which guests should receive the printed invitation via post (pingg does all of the mailing), or, alternatively, hosts can choose to send both an email as well as a printed invitation to all of their guests.

We at pingg think that it is the combination of the online webpage/event management site as well as the ability to print custom invitations, that allow hosts to have their cake and eat it too, i.e. to seamlessly fuse the feel of print with the advantages of online management. For those brides who want the keepsake of an invitation, not only can they keep the printed invitation and store it in a wedding album, but they also have the opportunity to build the online webage as a virtual keepsake by posting pictures, uploading videos, including a personal note or poem on the webpage invitation, as well as the ability to see their guests comments and well wishes.

Judging by the enormous number of people using pingg to send their wedding related invitations—whether they be engagements, showers, brunches, bachelor/ette parties and reception invitations—brides and grooms are agreeing with our philosophy that digital invitations only enhance the event planning process.

We here at pingg hope that people will continue to enjoy and discover the quality and intimacy that arises when you are given the opportunity to share more of yourselves with your friends and family via a digital and custom printed invitation, than you would be able to using traditional invitations.

Margo Spiritus
VP, Marketing & Business Development

We here at pingg appreciate all of the bloggers that have taken the time to review our site - from mom blogs, designer blogs, eco-friendly blogs, tech blogs and more. We always appreciate when a design/fashion blog singles out pingg as the most design-conscience and artistically-oriented online invitation site. This feedback has proven to us that hosts enjoy the many stylized photographs, designs, and of course the fact that we send an actual invitation rather then simply an email linking to a sticker-like clip-art un-differentiated web page. We thank people like Maggie, who on her blog called Extraordinarily Nice, wrote, "With the introduction of Pingg, maybe people will stop using Evite. I hope so, as Evite's templates make my eyes bleed." Perhaps a bit drastic… but we are hoping to put an end to that epidemic.

Since this isn't the first time that we've heard a refrain like Maggies, we've spent a lot of time selecting original, virtually-unseen designs that style conscious hosts will be excited to use and discover. For those who choose to use the free invitation, as opposed to uploading their own images or buying a custom photo from pingg Plus+, we've worked hard to curate an amazing collection of invitations. Some of our new favorites are designs that come from our web branding agency extraordinaire, P.S. New York. They are a series of eight sparking lights images that can be found in the “patterns/textures” category under “Themes”. The pink/green version seems to be a favorite. It has already been popular for engagement invitations, weddings, showers and dinner parties.

Our Designer Series is the place were we give our users the opportunity to use original artwork from established, as well as up-and-coming artists, all for free. We recently added two new artists, an extremely talented illustrator and graphic designer, Jennifer Daniels as well as a unique mixed-media artist, Stephanie DosReis. We urge you to check out each of our designers to add that extra unique stylized quality to your own personal event.


In order for you, the host, to have as many options as possible in creating your personalized invitation, we are continually adding artists to our Designer Series on a regular basis. Of course if you are an artists yourself (graphic designer, illustrator, painter, photographer, mixed media etc.) and are interested in participating, please email us at artists@pingg.com.

We hope you enjoy all of the new invitation additions. It is our goal that hosts discover new designs and invitations that will inspire their events each time they visit pingg.com.

Since we launched pingg a few months ago, we've received hundreds of emails with questions, comments and suggestions.  We always love to receive feedback from our hosts, since real world experience from our customers is truly an invaluable way for us to find and solve problems which otherwise we couldn't find just by theorizing in the office.  For the past month, our development team has been hard at work on a major overhaul of our user interface, and we went live with the update this afternoon.  We made a number of changes, some small and some large, all with the intention of making the system more clear, more useful, and generally easier to use.

First, we've split the process of creating an invitation from managing the event.  Rather than use the same web pages to create a new invitation and also manage and update the event, we now have a page dedicated to each process.  There's no need to navigate between them, the pages simply know when an invitation has been sent, and change to match the context.  By splitting the process into two pages, we've been able to simplify them both.  Features and functions that are only useful after an invitation has been sent now won't clutter up the creation process, and vice-versa.

On the creation side, the most significant changes are:

• The status box, with the preview and send buttons included have been moved to the bottom of the page.
• The extra space on the right side of the page has been used to give the invitation creation functions more room, making them less cramped.
• It's now easy to select the delivery method for invitations on a guest by guest basis.  Now you can choose which guests to invite by email, postcards, or SMS one by one.
• Reminders and thank you notes are now more flexible, and also more straight forward.  We've set up some defaults that people will be happy with, and also made it easy to change their content, and when and who they're sent to.

On the event management side, we've made more extensive changes:

• The most important event reporting features are now at the top of the page.  The summary of RSVPs, Guest Count, and other key event information are front and center, so it's easy to find out what's happening with your event at a quick glance.
• An event activity log has been added to the event report.  The log shows a running list of activities, letting you watch RSVPs come in, and generally track what's happening with your event on a line by line basis.
• The activity log can be downloaded as a .csv file, and loaded into Excel or another spreadsheet.  This feature is useful for professionals, and anyone else who wants to keep detailed records.
• The guest list function has been enhanced in a number of ways.  There are now easy to use buttons to add guests to your invitation, edit your guest list, and also print or export your list. 
• A powerful bounce fixer has been introduced.  With one click you can bring up a list of invitations that failed to be delivered, and take immediate corrective action to get the invitations to these recipients.
• Your guests +1 count and the names of their guests are now editable.  If one of your guests emails you, or lets you know directly that they're bringing someone, you can now update their RSVP and keep your head count accurate.
• We've introduced a reply feature to your guests private messages.  With one click, you can send a private message directly to any of your guests, right from the guest list.
• Creating and editing reminders, messages and thank you notes is now a one step process.  Each type of message can be set up on one screen, with no need to go through a confirmation process. 
• Reviewing and updating your current invitation has been centralized into one tab, and it's now easy to resend your invitation to selected guests, or all your guests if you so choose.

Overall, we've streamlined the process of creating and managing an invitation and also introduced a number of frequently suggested features.  As always, we appreciate all of your input and are excited to keep introducing new and improved features based on your comments and feedback. Please let us know your thoughts on any of the above changes or any additional changes that would facilitate your event planning by emailing us at support@pingg.com. Thanks for reading and we look forward to bringing you more news from pingg.