PRESS RELEASE – Apr 25 – iovation, the Device Reputation Authority protecting online businesses from fraud and abuse, announced that the rate of fraudulent online transactions it stopped in Europe is 60% greater today than a year ago. The rate of fraudulent transactions originating from Europe jumped from 1.3% from January to March 2011 to 2.1% from January to March 2012 and showed upward movement every quarter in between. The top three European countries for online fraud over the last year were Romania, Lithuania and Croatia according to iovation. From April 2011 to April 2012, iovation stopped 15M fraudulent online transactions in Europe.
Month: April 2012
Online Dating & Matchmaking Symposium, New York, June 14th
OPW – Apr 23 – Murdock Capital Partners is hosting Wall Street's first Symposium for the Dating and Matchmaking industry. The Symposium will be a one-day event scheduled for June 14th and hosted at the 3 West Club, a private club venue. It is scheduled to begin at 9:00am with a continental breakfast and a series of presentations by the senior management of established companies that have an important presence in the industry. While lunch is served, a guest speaker will discuss the current state of the industry and the issues that define the trajectory of the industry. A cocktail reception for presenters, attendees, and guests will begin at 5:00 pm. The cost per presenting company is $10,500 all inclusive.
Brian Bowman, theComplete.me CEO, To Keynote On Social Discovery At iDate LA
WEBWIRE – Apr 23 – Brian Bowman will provide the keynote address at the 9th annual iDate West Coast Mobile Dating Conference. The event takes place on June 20-22, 2012 at the SLS Hotel in Beverly Hills, CA. Bowman is the CEO/Founder of theComplete.me, the Internet’s first social dating network. He is the former VP of Product Match.com, VP of Community Yahoo!, and CMO Reply.com.
Arranged Marriage For Hindus In 21st Century America
HUFFINGTON POST – Apr 23 – Kamna Mittal and her husband moved to the Bay Area soon after they were married in India in 2000. In addition to being in a new country, the couple were new to each other. Their marriage had been arranged. Now a mother of two, Mittal counts herself lucky that it worked out, but 12 years later, she wants to help Indian-American singles in the Bay Area meet directly. Within Indian culture (which is predominantly Hindu), marriage is as much about families coming together as it is about couples coming together. A family also might hire a marriage broker to help the process along. These days, matrimony websites can serve the same broker role as the "aunties." Bharatmatrimony.com has more than 20M profiles worldwide. The website's CEO, Murugavel Janakiraman, said 10% of clients are immigrants to the U.S. or American-born Indians. Indian immigrants tend to look for the same religion, caste and region, Mittal said. American-born Indians might want somebody who is Indian, preferably raised in America, too. 90% of Hindus in America marry within the faith, according to the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.
Hate Dining Solo? Site Offers A Solution
CNN – Apr 23 – A new website called Invite For a Bite serves as a sort of meeting place where women who hate supping solo can post invites and make plans to dine together. Cressida Howard came up with the idea for "the site I wanted to join but couldn't find." "I was listening to a BBC radio program that involved an interview with women who traveled alone for business or pleasure. They were all strong women who had no problem traveling alone, but the one thing they all got very animated about was how they hated eating alone," Howard said. Less than two months old, Invite For a Bite has already seen invites for get-togethers in places from New York City to Addis Ababa. For one, in some countries it is frowned upon for women to be out on their own, says Howard. And it can even be dangerous. Not that meeting strangers from a strange city in a strange place via the Invite For a Bite website doesn't bring up its own issues. Which is why Howard has devoted an entire page on the site to safety tips. Another issue addressed on the Invite For a Bite site is why it is for women only. "As soon as you introduce the idea of men and women meeting for meals, it becomes almost impossible to distinguish it from a dating site," says Howard. "No matter how many times you explained that it wasn't, common sense dictates that it would be treated as such by some people.
by Jill Becker
See full article at CNN
Cheek’d Is Online Dating In Reverse
TECH CRUNCH – Apr 22 – At Cheek'd website users fill out a profile and order a deck of cards, which say things like “act natural, we can get awkward later”. The cards also have a short ID code on them, with a URL for the Cheek’d website. When a suitor receives the card, the idea is that they’re so filled with curiosity that they enter the code on Cheek’d and are taken to user's profile page. Members pay $9.95 for a monthly subscription to keep their profile live. They have to pay extra for the cards which come in various sizes with corresponding pricing.
Lisa Ronis: A New York City Matchmaker
BUSINESS INSIDER – Apr 21 – Lisa Ronis has been in the professional matchmaking business since 2000. Since then, she has built a lucrative business around helping elite professionals, both male and female, willing to spend thousands of dollars in their search for love. At any one time, Ronis has as many as 100 clients, from both New York and beyond, who all pay $15K a year for her services. Ronis herself has not remarried since getting divorced at the age of 27. To critics who question how a matchmaker could be single, she maintains that she is still “very much a relationship person” and that her own extensive dating experience is a big plus for her business. Ronis herself dabbled in reality television, hosting a reality dating show titled “Manhattan Matchmaker” that aired in 2006 in Canada. According to Lisa Clampitt, a New York City-based matchmaker and founder of the Matchmaking Institute, the industry has grown from ~1,200 matchmakers nationwide in 2006 to 1,800 today. Yet few of these professionals are willing to work with older women, says Clampitt, so Ronis has little competition in that market.
by Melanie Hicken
The full article was originally published at Business Insider, but is no longer available.
SeekingArrangement.com Hosting European Launch Party In London
PR WEB – Apr 20 – SeekingArrangement.com, a dating site for sugar daddies and sugar babies, is going International. The website is hosting Sugar Rush: The European Launch Party at The Gore Hotel in London on May 20, 2012. The company plans to support all European languages by the end of this year to cater to sugar daddies and sugar babies in Italy, Portugal, Sweden, Netherland, Switzerland, Poland, Romania, Czech Republic, Ukraine and Russia. Tickets for the event are £40 for ladies and £80 for men.
Interview With Alex Furmansky, President And Founder Of Sparkology
OPW INTERVIEW – Apr 20 – Sparkology is an exclusive dating site for the upper crust. You have to have an Ivy league degree to get in. I interviewed Alex Furmansky to get the skinny on his new site. – Mark Brooks
What's your founding story? What sparked Sparkology?
A few years ago I had so many female friends in their mid-20's to early 30's. They were having so much trouble finding a man using traditional dating sites such as Match.com and eHarmony. They got over 30 messages a day from the wrong guys and ended up just ignoring them. I tried to experience this from a man's perspective. I spent the time to write a woman a long message only to find that my message ended up in the same inbox as the 29 other messages.
As a guy, your first interaction is proving that you're not a creep. This burden of proof is difficult.
So you're kind of on the matchmaking end of the market, I presume?
There are mass market dating sites, accessible and free for all and then there are the matchmakers that charge crazy amounts, but they're curative. I see us as a tech platform that allows us to do both. We're curative, we're exclusive. But at the same time we're scalable and self-directed.
What geographics are you going after first?
Since our market is educated young professionals, the most natural market is New York. After that it's the other large metro areas in the States, that includes San Francisco, L.A., Chicago, Boston, D.C.
Growing a dating site is a very costly affair. Are you looking for money now? How do you fuel the growth?
Last April we raised a pretty substantial friends and family round so capital is not an issue. Now that we are ready to scale even bigger, we've started to raise a seed round now.
If I were single, would I make the cut to get onto your service?
Most of our members are invited by existing members. If you're not invited by a member, then you can go to our homepage and apply. You supply your LinkedIn or Facebook URL and that's how we screen you. Everyone is a young professional. We do place a slightly higher standard on our men. All of our men are verified graduates of top universities.
So you're manually reviewing accounts then?
To verify your alumni status, there are two ways to do it. You can give us your lifelong alumni email forwarding address. We issue you a confirmation email to that address. Or our staff will call you and have a personal conversation with you to welcome you to the site and ask you questions about your college experience and verify that you went to that school.
We have a feature called Date Feedback that helps keep people honest. So after a date, you can leave feedback for your date that our concierges see. So far we've had 2 guys who have been false in their profiles and we've had no problem kicking them out within 24 hours.
What did they lie about?
About age and occupation.
How about the women? Women lie more often about their age.
So far we've had no complaints from guys and no negative feedback. In fact, I thought that this feedback would be used to flag the bad apples, but it's actually being used to share success stories.
I was very surprised about your price-point. It seems extremely low and fair. It's under the average of the industry. You're charging $10/month for women and $2-3 per initial communication for guys.
That's correct. I'm not here to usurp people, I'm here to deliver a fair service. The reason we require credit cards is to make sure the person is serious and committed. It stops the fake profiles. For me that's the core reason for charging people. Making guys pay to start a conversation is sort of a tax on spam. It's no longer cost effective to send out 30 messages a day. It's better to pick those two, three, four women that you like.
How are you finding new members to reach critical mass?
We have this thing called a Race to 1000 in every city. It employs some gamification where it gets everybody on board to create critical mass in order to start interacting. That's how you seed a city. As far as gaining new members, the beauty about our site is that it is exclusive and high touch. We do men-only events and women-only events. It is seen as more of a community that you are proud to be part of and talk about. We give cool rewards for people who refer their friends. We'll send bottles of wine or t-shirts.
Match.com has their Daily 5. Most dating sites send emails with matches. Are you going to be doing that?
I like that every email that you get from Sparkology, you view as a gift and you want to open it. So I think that barraging people with emails everyday is against our mantra.
How are you measuring success?
There are two elements of success. One is the business success, but I think the better sense of success is how happy the people are on the site. You can gauge that very easily with the number of messages on the site and how the message sending correlates with the output of the algorithm.
Check Him Out Gives Women 100% Control
WEBWIRE – Apr 18 – Check Him Out empowers women to “make the first move” and makes finding a man as easy as shopping for the latest fashions. Men must fill out their profiles and then wait to be added to a woman’s “dating shopping bag” before any contact can be made. Unlike typical dating sites where women are often harassed by unwelcome suitors, Check Him Out shifts away from the “meat market” atmosphere. Check Him Out will officially launch on May 7, but singles who join the website before midnight Pacific Time on May 6 will receive free credits.