Ms. Pische (Google+)

Daily deals were on the rise last year, and for a few heady months everyone got really excited about them. Groupon's copy was still cute and quirky and hadn't yet begun to tip over into cloying; 2-for-1 skydiving lessons were still a happy novelty; this reporter even interviewed for a Google Offers copywriting gig (and no, she didn't get it).

But then came that faint gloom cloud, and suddenly the daily deal business model was being called into question. And frankly, it got really, really tiring to delete emails from Groupon, Living Social and Google Offers on a regular basis for coupons we would occasionally buy and then never use.

That's why we're thankful for Unsubscribe Deals, a new web application from a "recovering lawyer" named Edwin Hermawan and a West Village waitress named Lea Pische. In one easy step, the app connects to your Gmail account and automatically unsubscribes you from the deals emails you signed up for, including Groupon, Amazon Local and Daily Candy.

From an email Ms. Pische sent us:

We started at a hackathon. At Pivotal Labs if you must know. We were trying to hijack a Pivotal Labs engineer and find our mythical tech cofounder. All we got were awkward interactions and a random conversation about postgreSQL.

While stumbling home, we started checking our text messages and emails... and we kept getting these emails from daily deal sites. My ESPN digest and fantasy league update totally got lost.

So we woke up, called our our favourite Polish front end coder and a favor from my Muay Thai sparring partner (he happens to be a really good designer that I could never ever afford) and made UnsubscribeDeals.com.

We help the 99% that get flooded by daily deal emails. What side are you on?

We think Ms. Pische and Mr. Hermawan might have careers in creative writing or PR should this whole Unsubscribe Deals thing not work out.

Mr. Windolf (twitter.com)

It's billed as an iPad magazine, but Punch--which we first reported on last week--is less a magazine than it is a clever collection of culturally relevant apps and games. Revolving around pop culture topics that range from the highbrow ("Hedge Fund or Organic Farm?") to the low ("Closet Case," where you can dress up a paper doll version of Rick Santorum), Punch is a re-imagining of the iPad format, delivered to us by a cabal of Manhattan media folks, including Daily Candy founder Dany Levy and former Radar editor Maer Roshan.

Now, Punch has announced that it has tapped Jim Windolf to serve as the mag's first Editor in Chief. Mr. Windolf has a long-established media career--he'll be leaving his position as a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, where he's served for over a decade, to join the Punch team. (Spoiler: he also worked at the Observer for nine years before joining Vanity Fair.)

"I feel good about it," Mr. Windolf told Betabeat by phone. "I wanted to learn something new and didn’t want to get stuck on Print Island in case that’s going to be overwhelmed by digital media. When David Bennahum showed me the prototype they had of Punch it blew me away. It gave me a lot of ideas, and it looks like fun."

It will be interesting to see how Mr. Windolf will fare with the transition from the world of print, which he's worked in for over 20 years, to an entirely digital publication. But considering his breadth of experience, and the enthusiasm he has for the new medium, we'd say Punch is lucky to have him join the team.

To learn more about Punch, check out this video the team created to explain it, which made us actually l-o-l.