Cyber Planning

Innovative wedding technology for plugged-in brides and grooms. — Neil Hughes

Google Does Weddings

Do it yourself and save money with Google’s suite of online tools. The search giant features some of its free Web services as an all-in-one solution to plan and promote your big day at google.com/weddings. With Google, you can create a free wedding site, personalize your announcements with Picnik, create wedding planning documents with Google Docs and share your photos with Picasa Web Albums.
 

Be Your Own DJ

With a laptop loaded with a music library, you can cut out the expense of a band or a DJ from your wedding budget.  But buying hundreds of songs from online music stores like iTunes can still be costly. So here’s a simple solution: Build your perfect play list with rhapsody.com. For $10 per month, you can download all the songs you want from the site’s repository of 11 million songs from major artists.
 

Vendor Reviews

Wedding planning meets the power of online social networking at weddingwire.com, a website with more than 200,000 collected reviews of wedding vendors. The site also offers forums where users can connect with others, a list of popular songs for ceremonies and receptions, and a collection of wedding photos to help inspire your own unique ideas.
 

Broadcast Your Wedding

Share your big day with all of those who couldn’t make it by streaming your wedding live online. Plug the Microsoft LifeCam Cinema 720p HD Webcam ($49.99 at compusa.com or amazon.com) into a computer’s USB port and go online to ustream.tv, a free video-streaming service, to broadcast your wedding event to the world. The camera shoots video as well as still photos in auto-focus mode. n