Month: October 2005

MARKET WATCH — Oct 27 — Apparently, about 4 million college students across the country are "facebooking" their classmates, whether to connect with them or just get more information about them.  News Corp and Viacom have shown interest in meeting with young Mark Zuckerberg, the 21-year-old Harvard dropout who started Facebook in his dorm in February 2004, and came into MarketWatch's San Francisco TV studios recently for an interview. Zuckerberg started the Facebook – essentially an online student directory — while he was a sophomore at Harvard. The psychology major tells me that it took about 10 days — during finals — for him to build the site. He decided to take a leave from Harvard his junior year and move to Palo Alto, Calif.  In the fall of 2004 former-PayPal-CEO-turned-hedge-fund-manager-and-angel-investor Peter Thiel — whose fund is up 60%-plus this year — gave Zuckerberg $500,000 to buy servers to support the growing audience base at Facebook. By 2005 Zuckerberg had raised $12.7 million, with Accel Partners leading the VC funding round with a valuation of about $100 million. Zuckerberg told me that the fee site is profitable and makes money from advertising (8.5 million uniques).  Users spend more time on Facebook than MySpace. ~70% of the nearly 5 million registered users log on daily. Zuckerburg met with Chris DeWolfe, MySpace CEO who saw the selling of his company to a big media company as a natural progression. (I heard the next step for DeWolfe is to launch a MySpace music label with Interscope Records.)  Zuckerberg doesn't agree entirely, stating that technology and engineering should be considered a big priority at today's media companies.  "What drives the site is an offline dynamic and culture around it." What he means is that the Facebook communities revolve around a particular school. He can walk out into the school grounds and see everyone he knows in the Facebook. If Friendster is any guide, it's difficult to maintain a lead in this rapidly changing media business. What happens when the Facebook saturates the 8 million college-student market?

The full article was originally published at Investors.com, but is no longer available.

Mark Brooks: As TV struggles to keep it's younger audiences hitched, advertisers will seek out the likes of Facebook for advertising.  This will become an ever more valuable property as it penetrates the most valuable segment of the younger demographics; college bound youngsters and alumni. What irks me is that I worked on hooking up the UC system with an early version of Plaxo in 2000; 'eturn' was set on becoming a self updating address book for the masses.  Alas, eturn, Planetall, DigitalMe, Swifttouch and Contact.com all headed south in the dotcom crash. 

ASBURY PARK PRESS — Oct 27 — According to Evan Katz, finding love on the Net need no longer be a dirty little secret.  Everybody's doing it so there's nothing to be embarrassed about.  It's a simple matter of ease and cost efficiency, Katz says. After all, admission is cheap.  Because text-chatting prohibits eye contact, users can miss the nonverbal cues that reveal more about a potential date than mere text on a screen, Katz admits.  "The strangest case I've heard was of a man who didn't bother to tell his date that he was a paraplegic until he showed up," Katz says. "It's understandable why he held back that information, but it's hard to overcome the surprise when you first meet someone."  Common-sense precautions also can help newbies avoid dastardly daters, Katz says. Some common tips include slowing down emotional involvement and being wary of people who seem too good to be true.  "Use the same cautions you'd use if you exchanged numbers with a stranger at Starbucks. Meet out in public, take your own transportation, that sort of thing."

Mark Brooks: TRUE lit a firestorm around online personals safety when it started offering background checks and initiated a legislative campaign to force online personals sites to state clearly on their home pages if they did not do background checks on members.  Next up…they are bringing into question the validity of competing sites personality profiles.  TRUE offers the only validated test, of course.

PR NEWSWIRE — Oct 24 — PrivateTel, a developer of privacy-oriented telecommunications solutions, announced of Daniel Kaluzny as CEO.  He will be charged with overseeing PrivateTel's portfolio of privacy-oriented solutions that ensure safer and more secure communications for online dating, social networking, real estate, and e-commerce Web sites.

The full article was originally published at PR Newswire, but is no longer available.

Mark Brooks: Email me at mark@courtlandbrooks.com if you would like a copy of the overview of anonymous phone calling services providers for online personals companies. 

PR WEB — Oct 26 — After being locked up in the Big Brother house for weeks on end this summer, a celebrity speed dater is now well and truly "out" and looking for a great night on the town. With the new craze sweeping the globe, what better way to meet 20+ single gay men than at a top speed dating event. Hosted by Xfactordates.com at London's No.1 Gay Members Club "The Shadow Lounge" in Soho. Since 2003, over 26,000 people enlisted the help of Xfactordates in their quest to find a partner; 30 cities.  RELEASE @ PR WEB

Mark Brooks: Speed dating provides instant gratification for daters.