1) What was your inspiration for starting Snapknot?

SnapKnot was started by me (Reid Warner) and my co-founder, Mike Rheaume. Mike and I were freshman year roommates from our days at Dartmouth College. Although SnapKnot is technically based in Massachusetts, Mike lives in Boston and I live in Orange County, so in reality we have a coast-to-coast operation.

I’m recently married and a casualty of the challenging wedding planning process (well, not really a casualty, but you know what I mean ). In particular my wife Eunice and I learned that finding a photographer was very difficult, stressful, and time-consuming. We were fortunate to end up with Jim Kennedy, a very talented and well-known photographer in Orange County. We consider ourselves lucky.

Mike was looking for his next career move and I was looking to get involved in something new as well, so after a series of brainstorming sessions we came up with the idea for SnapKnot, inspired in large part by my negative experience. We thought there was a better way for couples to find wedding photographers.

2) What differentiates you from other wedding websites?

We focus solely on the photographers and their work. Wedding photography is the one thing you will keep from your wedding day years later, so it is very important to get a photographer whose work you are happy with. It’s easy, fast, fun, and free for brides to find photographers to contact without wandering through a bloated site filled with all manner of vendors, advertisements, and unrelated information that distracts from the sole purpose of the site – connecting you with the perfect wedding photographer.

3) What do you hope to accomplish with Snapknot?

The site launched just two months ago on February 15th of this year and has already experienced tremendous growth: We currently have over 500 wedding photographers listed. We hope to have over 1000 by the summer, which we certainly believe is an achievable goal. Based on the positive feedback we’ve heard from photographers and brides so far, we feel we can be successful.

We simply hope to keep growing and hearing more success stories of couples connecting with wedding photographers through SnapKnot!

4) You site is very easy to navigate. Can you tell me more about the benefits to brides?

You hit on the main thing – SnapKnot is very easy to use.

In addition:
A) It saves time – brides only visit photographers’ websites after they know that a) they like their style, b) they are within their budget, and c) they cater to their location. No more endless Google searches.

B) It is free to contact and book photographers brides are interested in (SnapKnot does not receive any form of booking commission)

C) We also think it’s pretty fun to use! It’s always a pleasure to look through the many high-quality portfolios up on SnapKnot.

Because of the reasons above, we believe that SnapKnot helps make an otherwise stressful process much more pleasant for brides.

Readers – Let us know what you think? What do you want to see from Snapknot?

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• SnapKnot.com – Looking For Wedding Photographers Online (killerstartups.com)

Gaming companies have caught onto the fact that women make up a large percentage of the gaming community, especially when it comes to casual games. And, what a better way to appeal to women online than to focus on the wedding experience.

Dream Day Weddings has a series of wedding computer games that submerge you into the romantic side of planning weddings. Their latest adventure takes you to Italy. Dream Day Wedding: Bella Italia is the 6th in the series of Dream Day Weddings, each game taking you an an adventure as the “wedding planner” to different destinations including New York and Las Vegas.

The game is very much like Where’s Waldo with you searching for hidden pieces amongst a clutter of items. There is a time penalty and specific items to search for mixed within the story line of helping your wedding clients to plan the perfect wedding in Italy.

Dream Day Weddings has a loyal following as shown by the release of this 6th Dream Day Wedding Game. If you need a break from planning your own wedding, want to reminisce about a past wedding, or just want to try it out, go to this link here or watch the video to learn more.

Photos sourced from http://www.iwin.com
Video sourced from http://gamezebo.com

My Wedding Concierge: an iPhone app, search engine, all around wedding planning tool.

It is hard to categorize Phyllis and Philip Cheung’s wedding planning platform, My Wedding Concierge, but the best way to describe it is Google for Wedding Planning Resources.

My Wedding Concierge delivers a smart search engine and iPhone application to enhance the wedding planning process for tech-savvy brides and grooms. It harnesses cutting edge technology to help couples organize and identify vendors for their wedding day. AND, the iPhone app is completely FREE for wedding couples. I did a Q&A with Phyllis Cheung, My Wedding Concierge’s CEO to uncover some of the best of what My Wedding Concierge has to offer.

What inspired you to start My Wedding Concierge?
My husband and I started My Wedding Concierge when I was 7 months pregnant with my son and on bed rest. I was going stir crazy and he was about to get laid off when we decided to write an iPhone app for the wedding industry. I’ve been in the wedding industry for nearly 8 years with a marketing background and my husband is a software engineer. We saw a future with mobile marketing and decided to fulfill that niche since no one was doing it yet in the wedding industry.

What is your unique value proposition?
Our unique value proposition is that our current products focus on features that are complementary to existing wedding planning websites. Our website is structured in a search engine type format. We also have a wedding blog search engine where it’s a one stop shop for brides looking for information. She no longer has to visit several blogs looking for say, a red bouquet. All she has to do is type in “red bouquet” and all the different ones will show up from different blogs. Our iPhone app is the only vendor-centric app available. We chose to focus only on wedding vendors because our brides enjoy our full screen images and the ability to rate and store the photos for future reference.

What was important to you when building the iPhone application?
We wanted our brides to be able to find wedding vendors and inspiration on the go. It had to be easy to navigate and have full screen photos and enough information so that a vendor could easily replicate their website on our app. Our app also offers one touch email, one touch phone calls, and one touch to the vendor’s website that loads within the app so that the bride doesn’t lose her place.

My Wedding Concierge’s iPhone app is available via the iPhone apps store. Download it. Play with it. Let Bay Area Bride Guide know your feedback!

In the world of digital bliss, planning is very easily managed online. If it isn’t in your excel spreadsheet, or shared google docs, it might be your online calendar, or the latest mobile app. Whatever the case, increasingly daily tasks are completed online. Why not use those same principles when planning your wedding? When it comes to weddings, somehow it is easy to end up nowhere close to where you started out. With online wedding tools, life can get a little easier.

I’ve already covered Google’s free Wedding Docs, but there is so much more ground to cover when it comes to budget friendly and green eWedding options. Here’s a simple idea to keep things PRACTICAL, and more importantly BUDGET FRIENDLY – Integrate your Wedding Invitations and RSVP process online.

eCard RSVP Online

Wedshare.com is a great resource for online wedding invitations with a seamless integration into your wedding website.

Reasons why you should consider this option:

1) Save Money – Create beautiful designs that match your wedding website and send them instantly to all your wedding guests. When you add up the costs for the paper, custom design, envelope, postage, and reply cards, it will be a nice little bundle of savings.

2) Save Time – When you send the invitations out to your wedding guests, they can instantly reply with their response with just a click of the mouse. The wedding responses are populated into your wedding guest list hosted on your Wedshare wedding website. No need to create a manual wedding list because the process is complete for you.

3) Save Paper – This is obvious. No paper trail.

For those of you who still want paper invitations. I have an alternative option for you.

4) Zero-Carbon Wedding Stationery – You can still be GREEN! Wedshare.com partners with Wedvert.com to provide you with a “zero-carbon wedding stationery line. The paper used for the VERT line is made from of 100% PCW (Post Consumer Waste), and is FSC certified (Forest Stewardship Council). The paper is Processed Chlorine Free (PCF), made Carbon Neutral (CN), and can be recycled. Soy-based inks are used which are biodegradable and do not necessitate the use of toxic cleaners.”

And…you can still match your wedding invites to your wedding website design!

If you follow the philosophy, KISS, this is a great option. No need to make your wedding process more difficult, or more expensive than it needs to be. For the PRACTICAL and BUDGET wedding couples, this is for YOU.