PRESS ZOOM — May 4 — Match.com offers wireless dating in the US and Japan and plans to launch in the UK by the end of this year. The American service launched in 2003 and has 120,000 subscribers who pay $5 to add it to their existing online service. Users access the site via WAP and search for matches as they would from the desktop – by sending them messages via SMS. Snog London will offer mini-profiles featuring a photograph alongside four "personality" questions. Match.com's European director Kevin Cornils stated, "nearly half the daters signed up for match mobile are under 25 – considerably younger than the average age on the website." Three-quarters of Match's wireless daters are male. Technology exists for dating sites to send you an SMS when a suitable match walks into the same bar. It could even alert you by flashing their photo to your phone.
The full article was originally published at Press Zoom, but is no longer available.
Mark Brooks: Location based dating is coming. It will be skewed young, and casual, to start with. Mobile dating will eventually dwarf online dating. I was surprised that few others seemed to agree with this at the mobile dating convention last year. But, we'll eventually all go 'star trek' with truly mobile computing 'pads.' One needs only to follow the wifi adoption curve to extrapolate this trend out. WiMax, Evdo… I'm using Nokia 9500 now. It sucks (slow, bad video, incompatible files, patchy connection, poor email), but eventually the likes of Nokia, Intel, Apple, RIM, Verizon, Docomo etc will get this convergence right and we'll move from our laptops to truly mobile devices. I look forward to the day.