Month: August 2006

Online Video Market to Grow Tenfold in Five Years

Posted on August 7, 2006

Video_chatMARKETING VOX — Aug 7 — The market for online content services worldwide is expected to expand by a factor of 10, growing from about 13 million households during 2005 to more than 131 million households by 2010, reports market research firm In-Stat. The number of broadband households is expected to double between 2005 and 2010, to more than 413 million. 

The full article was originally published at Marketing Vox, but is no longer available.

Mark Brooks: Online personals firms need to consider voice and video strategies now.  Voice and video are the future.  Voice and video and mobile (with Location Based Services) are the combination killer app for internet dating.  Which service will combine all three first, I wonder?

AOL Search Data Shows Users Planning to Murder Wife

Posted on August 7, 2006

OPW — Aug 7 — Markus Frind, CEO of PlentyofFish.com, from his blog 'The Paradigm Shift'… 

Markus Frind – AOL, http://research.aol.com, released a list of 20 million + searches by 500,000 AOL users.  Contained in this list are social security numbers, credit cards and other personal information.   There are some truly scary things in this database.  There are hundreds of searches from people looking to kill themselves and even more scary are searches from users that seem to be looking to commit murder.

Check out the search history for  user 17556639: how to kill your wife, wife killer, how to kill a wife, poop, dead people, pictures of dead people, killed people, dead pictures, murder photo, steak and cheese, photo of death, death, dead people photos, http://www.murderdpeople.com, decapatated photos, car crashes3, car crash photo. 

This is the very data that google won a legal battle to keep from the government. I think because of the data contained in these search results the government is going to be taking a lot closer look at the search industry and things will definitely change. Techcrunch has more on it here.

Mark Brooks: This story made Reuters and the Financial Times earlier today.  I was interviewed for an Associated Press piece on this back in January.  I don't have a problem with the government seeing search data in the aggregate as long as it is completely anonymous and identifying searches are removed from the data (i.e. people searching for their own SS numbers).  Markus thinks AOL, Yahoo and MSN are crazy for passing on the search data to the government because the government will surely use it to create new regulations.  Markus told me via IM "Yahoo and AOL could fall under the definition of social networking as users have a profile and Yahoo even bills their search as 'social search.'  What will lawmakers do?  Will this industry be facing regulation?"  Good point.  Your comments please.

OnlineBootyCall, Only a Single Marriage

Posted on August 5, 2006

Obclogo1bn3SEND2PRESS NEWSWIRE — Aug 3 –  OnlineBootyCall.com, a division of Mobeze, is proud to announce that they have received only one confirmed report of marriage since their Web site's inception three years ago. "Reaching the one million member mark with only a single reported marriage is a tremendous accomplishment," Moses Brown, Founder and CEO said.  While most dating sites focus on lengthy profiles and complex matching systems, OnlineBootyCall.com prefers a simpler approach; the sign-up process can be accomplished in less than one minute.  OBC makes 30,000 connections each day; that equals one marriage per 32,850,000 booty-call connections. "Nobody else can boast that kind of success," Brown said. The OBC membership base has grown through a very generous referral system: $100,000 in cash prizes to members. Every member who refers at least five people during the course of one month is placed in a random drawing for $1,000; five winners are picked each month.  he Booty Call Ten Commandments guides members towards success. The first commandment is "Thou shall get out before the sun rises." FULL ARTICLE @ SEND2PRESS.COM

Mark Brooks: Casual dating sites (Sexsearch.com, AdultFriendFinder) are doing very well, alongside the personality profiling 'serious dating' sites (eHarmony, PerfectMatch, LoveHappens).

Record Year for AnastasiaWeb Dating Tours

Posted on August 5, 2006

AnastasiaPR NEWSWIRE — Aug 3 — Nearly 4000 women attended AW social events this year, internationally. The tours are fully organized from air-tickets and hotels, to sightseeing, to the social events where the single members finally meet each other, in person. OnlinePersonalsWatch.com editor, Mark Brooks, recently commented, "There's a need for more singles events. Singles, online daters, need to occasionally pry themselves away from the computer and go and meet 20 new people in one night. Even if they don't meet a new partner, they're having a good time and doing something that's good for the soul. Meeting, partying." Nate Elliott, Jupiter Research said, "I think the offline singles services are the only other format that can compete.  Events have advantages – they're fun, social activities, and there's no substitute for meeting someone in person."  At AnastasiaWeb's last event in Odessa, Ukraine, more than 400 women attended, with 50 male members from more than six countries.

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

Luvoo Sued For No Call Violations

Posted on August 5, 2006

Luvoo_2KOLR 10  — Aug 3 — Missouri Attorney General Jay Nixon is suing Luvoo.com, a California-based online dating service, for violations of the No Call law.  Nixon says more than 140 Missourians on the state No Call list reported getting calls from Luvoo.com in June. A temporary restraining order will block Luvoo.com from calling Missourians on the No Call list.

Social Networking Gone Bad

Posted on August 4, 2006

DARK READING — Aug 2 — MySpace, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Friendster, are susceptible to SQL injection attacks. SQL injection-type attacks can do a lot more damage than a worm or adware: They could provide an attacker with access to a social networking site's entire database, for instance, says David Aitel, CTO of Immunity. "Every site is based on PHP in the front and MySQL in the back," he says. "As you sign up and fill in a form or login, if the site isn't doing the proper check of characters, an attacker could insert a SQL command and get access to all usernames" or other data about MySpace, he says. Social networking sites don't collect the type of personal data big-time hackers crave — social security numbers, credit-card numbers, and bank account data. But they could be used to stage an attack on that data. "MySpace could be used to get a dropper Trojan on a machine and set up a stakeout post," Cole says. "When the user goes to his or her corporate site, it would go ahead and steal his login credentials."  Or if a user gets infected on LinkedIn, for example, his banking information could be stolen when he does online banking. 

The full article was originally published at Dark Reading, but is no longer available.

Mark Brooks: Really? Your comments please.

The Brimming Melting Pot

Posted on August 4, 2006

IndiaNEW DELHI — July 7 — ~21.4 million Indians use the net once a month or more, up ~21% over 2005. Add in occasional users and the total comes to ~25 million urban Indian internet users. Assuming some marginal usage in the rural areas as well, the all India penetration should be ~2.25%. 46% of regular net users access the net (non-exclusively) from a cyber café.  53% are accessing it from offices and 40% from homes. 

The full article was originally published at Juxt Consult, but is no longer available.

Mark Brooks: China and India are burgeoning markets for online personals…with some significant and unique challenges. Modes of payment are right at the top of the list of challenges. Mobile phones are a preferred method. Both Shaadi and Bharat Matrimonial have opened offices which provides a means to more easily accept cash payments…along with more personalized service. The lessons they learn from these real world services could be very valuable in developing new concepts for matchmaking/personals services in the USA and Europe. Yahoo has interests in both Shaadi and Bharat Matrimonial now. Match, your move. 

The Biggest Social Networking Company You’ve Never Heard of

Posted on August 4, 2006

Logo_community_connectPR NEWSWIRE — Aug 2 — The first niche online social network, Community Connect continues to innovate online social networking with the re-launch of their properties: AsianAvenue, MiGente, and BlackPlanet.  16 million registered members and 500 million monthly page views. (Blackplanet has 14 million registrants).  Launched in 1997. Recently upgraded features on BlackPlanet and MiGente include: — Enhanced photo management, User-generated news, Professional networking tools providing new ways, Video section, Free instant messaging, Improved Personal Page tools. FULL ARTICLE @ SYS.COM

Mark Brooks: Community Connects story is inspiration for entrepreneurs interested in developing niche dating and internet communities. Niches work. Choose carefully, shoot for the holes in the market and seed your word of mouth campaigns carefully. Community Connect spent NOTHING on advertising until 2006. Now they are becoming more aggressive as more competition springs up. Blackplanet is their mainstay community. They make money from advertising, jobs (Monster.com) and personals.

Yahoo Hitches Indian Wedding

Posted on August 2, 2006

BharatlogoRED HERRING — Aug 2 — Yahoo and Canaan Partners have invested $8.6 million in Bharat Matrimony, a leading Indian personals site. Canaan led the round, which was the first outside funding for Bharat Matrimony, a nine-year-old company whose matrimonial service focuses on serious relationships rather than dating. This is Yahoo's first investment in India other than in its own development center in Bangalore. Bharat Matrimony claims to have facilitated more than 500,000 marriages, including that of CEO Murugavel Janakiraman. "We will use the funds for expansion as we target the Indian diaspora in the U.K. and Southeast Asian countries," said Mr. Janakiraman. It charges $10 to $15 per month for its services and provides 40 physical stores for customers without Internet access. It also runs jobs, real estate, autos, and general classifieds sites, and will put the new funding toward developing these verticals as well as opening hundreds of stores. In March, Sequoia Capital India, then called WestBridge Capital, invested $8 million in People Interactive, which runs a matrimony portal, Shaadi.com. As of Tuesday night, Yahoo India Matrimony was still syndicating personals from Shaadi.com, even though it's a close competitor of Bharat Matrimony.

Mark Brooks: I'm most interested to see how Bharat's roll out of more physical locations in India goes. Singles will pay more to get more services. Great Expectations, The Right One/Together Dating, Table for Six and It's Just Lunch lead the way in high end service oriented matchmaking/dating services for the masses. However, they still only reach a small portion of the potential market that online dating sites are captivating. Online services fall short for service. Singles don't want online dating. They just want to date suitable, potential suitors. A sizable portion of the online dating market want a little more handholding, more service, and will pay for it if it leads to more (good) dates. I don't think they will pay $3000+ a year, en masse. I do think they will pay $500-$1000 a year. That price base would support some phone based assistance and matchmaking. Let's see what happens this year, with Yahoo learning from Bharat.

Bean Town Wired for Love

Posted on August 2, 2006

BostonPR WEB — Aug 2 — Those looking for love might want to consider Boston, recently ranked the No. 1 city for online dating according to the annual Forbes Best Cities for Singles report. The Forbes report, conducted since 2001, takes several considerations into account: culture, nightlife, number of single people, cost of living alone, and for the first time this year, the popularity of online dating. 12% of recently engaged or married people meet online today. Match.com provided the number of active members in each metro area Forbes ranked, per capita. The following cities ranked as the best cities for online dating:
1. Boston (No. 2 overall),
2. Denver/Boulder (No. 1 overall),
3. Seattle (No. 7 overall),
4. Washington D.C./Baltimore (No. 9 overall),
5. Raleigh-Durham (No. 6 overall),
6. Orlando (No. 24 overall),
7. Tampa (No. 35 overall),
8. Minneapolis/St. Paul (No. 14 overall),
9. San Francisco/Oakland (No. 4 overall),
10. Las Vegas (No. 21 overall)
FULL ARTICLE @ PR WEB

Mark Brooks: This is great intell. for entrepreneurs considering starting a regionally focused dating site.