INNER WEST COURIER – Jan 17 – MayDate launched in November. It works by getting singles to start a 30-day MayDate campaign and request a few trusted Facebook friends to propose some dates, promising to donate to charity for every date proposed to them. MayDate is in partnership with Camp Quality, The Heart Foundation, Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience (AIME) and The Pinnacle Foundation.
by Rashael Habib
See full article at Inner West Courier
GEEKWIRE – Jan 16 – LikeBright, the online dating site that taps into the power of social networks to find one’s perfect match, has received funding from the Bing Fund, the newly-formed investment vehicle of Microsoft’s search engine. “Most single people meet their partners through friends, and lots of people like to set their friends up,” said founder Nick Soman. “We give them a simple, social and safe way to do this online." Soman declined to disclose the size of the investment from the Bing Fund. LikeBright previously raised $650,000.
by John Cook
See full article at Geekwire
This post also appears on InternetDatingInvestments.
OPW – Jan 16 – Have you heard of Teligence? They've only been in the voice, and mobile
dating business 25 years. Teligence has launched a mobile private
label service catering to straight and gay segments. This is most
suitable for internet dating companies to quickly and profitably extend
their offerings to mobile (iOs/Android/HTML5/Windows). Unlike most
private label products, Teligence partners retain ownership of their
users and can have direct billing relationships. Windows mobile is now
supported.
This is the first true mobile white label product, and partners can
fully define features, pricing. Payout is 70% of net revenues. This is
an established offering with existing sizable partners. Advanced
features include HD video, Location Based Services, voice messaging,
real-time chat and notifications when favorites are online. Email jack.vainer@teligence.net for a demo. (Teligence are a client of Courtland Brooks)
This post also appears on InternetDatingAffiliates.
BETAKIT – Jan 15 – Circl.es launched in March 2012 and currently has 10K users concentrated mostly in San Francisco, with a small audience in New York City. Circl.es connects to a user’s Facebook account and without creating any postings or notifications, presents potential dates through their Facebook profiles and basic information. The site touts itself as “built for people who hate online dating.” Circl.es presents potential matches based on proximity and if they meet a user’s criteria. There are other sites like Circl.es, such as TheDatable, yoke.me and theComplete.me (now LikeIt) also using Facebook to power online dating.
by Andrea Ozretic
The full article was originally published at BetaKit, but is no longer available.
NY TIMES – Jan 15 – Women in their 20s these days are lucky to get a last-minute text to tag along. Instead of dinner-and-a-movie, which seems as obsolete as a rotary phone, they rendezvous over phone texts, Facebook posts, IM and other “non-dates” that are leaving a generation confused about how to land a boyfriend or girlfriend. Blame the much-documented rise of the “hookup culture” among young people, characterized by spontaneous, commitment-free (and often, alcohol-fueled) romantic flings. The problem is that “young people today don’t know how to get out of hookup culture,” Ms. Freitas said. In interviews with students, many graduating seniors did not know the first thing about the basic mechanics of a traditional date. Relationship experts point to technology as another factor in the upending of dating culture. If the purpose of the first date was to learn about someone’s background, education, politics and cultural tastes, Google and Facebook have taken care of that. A lot of men in their 20s are reluctant to take the girl to the French restaurant, or buy them jewelry, because those steps tend to lead to ‘eventually, we’re going to get married.
PR WEB – Jan 14 – MyAKA.com, (My Also Known As), LA startup in the space of personal privacy, partners with Break the Cycle, a non-profit organization that empowers young people to end domestic and dating violence. Through this partnership MyAKA and Break the Cycle will work together to raise awareness of the increasingly common, but rarely talked about, issue of dating violence.
OPW – Jan 15 – Dan Slater is a former Wall Street Journal who freelances for NY Times,
Washington Post, Forbes and Mens Health. He's spent the last couple of
years embedded in the Internet dating industry. His new book, Love In The Time Of Algorithms is out Jan 24th and is published by a Penguin imprint. He's put a face on the industry, and shone a light on some of the companies and challenges we face. It's essential reading. You can pre-buy on Amazon or email mfox@foxbookshop.com for orders of 25+ books. Dan just wrote an article for The Atlantic about how iDating is changing society.
OPW – Jan 15 – I'm running two dinners in NYC in February.
On Monday 4th February please join myself and Dan Slater, author of the new book Love In The Time Of Algorithms for dinner.
On Wednesday 6th February I'm running a dinner for end-users and executives to meet and dine. Join us for Internet Dating Hullabaloo.
PRESS RELEASE – Jan 15 – Crazy Blind Date (CBD) uses math to set singles up on blind dates with a few hours notice. “People will say that CBD is too crazy,” said Sam Yagan, OkCupid Co-Founder (CEO Match.com), “But for a whole generation of young singles, it’s going to be a great adventure, and a great complement to traditional online dating.”
Users choose which nights to go on dates. Pick their favorite bar/coffee shop. CBD does the rest and sends a confirmation to both parties. One hour before the scheduled date users can anonymously IM, so they can find each other. After the date ends, CBD collects feedback. Users can vouch for their date by purchasing CBD “Kudos” for them. This incentivizes good behavior. The more Kudos daters collect, the more dates they get.
“Never before has a dating app allowed singles to pay on a per-date basis, and to vary that payment based on the quality of the date itself,” continued Yagan.
To celebrate the launch of CBD, OkCupid, has named today, “LOVE IS BLIND” day. Every one of the ten million photos on OkCupid has been removed from the site. Today they'll make their dating decisions based on words and wits alone. (CBD was designed in collaboration with Huge).
BOSTON GLOBE – Jan 13 – Finding a date by computer is commonplace today. Not so in 1965, when two student-run companies at Harvard rushed to usher in a new era of mating. Jeff Tarr decided he was fed up with coming home alone from mixers with Radcliffe, the women’s college across the way. Tarr raised $1,250 and recruited classmate Vaughan Morrill. He wrote a questionnaire that asked students to answer 75 questions about themselves and another 75 about their “ideal date.” He paid a friend $100 to program an IBM 1401 that would match questionnaires with similar responses. Tarr and Morrill distributed the questionnaire to Boston-area colleges. Students filled it out and returned it with a $3 subscription fee. Within days the student would receive a computer printout with the names, phone numbers, addresses, and graduating years of six people. By the fall of ’65, six months after the launch, ~90K Operation Match questionnaires had been received, amounting to $270K in gross profits. It didn’t take long before Operation Match met its first competitor. In the summer of 1965, David Dewan, an MIT grad, was preparing to enter Harvard Business School. Over the summer he drafted his own dating questionnaire and taught himself how to write code for the Honeywell 200, a car-sized contraption that, at around 3 in the morning, could be rented for $30 an hour from a small Boston mutual-fund company called Fidelity. He borrowed $10K from his grandfather to start his business. He called the service Eros and its parent company Contact Inc. He charged $4. In one distribution of questionnaires, he drew 11K responses at $4 each, or $44K in gross profits, more than $250,000 in today’s dollars. Things got ugly, fast. On September 29, 1965, campus police collared Dewan for the dubious crime of “distributing questionnaires without a permit.” The next day the Crimson splashed the news across its front page: “University Police Eject Man From Winthrop House.”