BUSINESS-STANDARD – June 11 – Chennai-based privately-held Consim Info, which owns BharatMatrimony.com, has changed its name to Matrimony.com. With this, the company would offer all its matrimony services under Matrimony.com. The company is planning to raise $100-$125M through an IPO this year. The company was running various matrimony brands under different names. (EliteMatrimony, PrivilegedMatrimony, AssistedMatrimony and PopularMatrimony). This would help it to offer various matrimony platforms and services under a single brand. So far, Matrimony.com has raised ~$20M.
Month: June 2013
The Future Of Dating Is Mobile
FORBES – June 11 – Sam Yagan, OKCupid co-founder, is convinced that the future is mobile. But even Yagan admits he hasn’t figured it out. “There’s no effective app for hetero hookups, Yagan notes. One of the two apps Yagan’s most keen on tackling is dating through your social graph. That’s what Tinder, the mobile dating startup that Yagan’s IAC/InterActiveCorp Hatch Labs incubated, is doing. Tinder is now a standalone company and IAC/InterActiveCorp is its lead investor. Tinder guys say they’re innovating on the whole process of dating itself. They’ve all experienced difficulties around meeting new people and agree that rejection sucks.
geoLunch Launches Lunch Meetup Site
PR WEB – June 11 – geoLunch is a social discovery website/app for finding someone new to meet for lunch. It can also be used for making new friends or business networking. Users sign in between 10:00 am and 1:00 pm and immediately see a list of other users in the area who are searching for a lunch partner. The search service only operates between 10:00 am and 1:00 pm but can sign up and edit their profile at any time.
The Economics Of Relationships
INDEPENDENT.CO.UK – June 11 – We tend to think that teenagers are now more sexually active. that's really not true. Teen promiscuity rates have fallen and there is an economic story behind it. It's become much harder for people who don't go on to further education to support themselves. Teens are responding to economic incentive. Divorce rates in the UK have been falling for almost 10 years. They have now fallen to where they were in 1977. One possible explanation is how they meet. The Internet opens up the market for dating and marriage, the pool becomes much bigger, which leads to people searching for longer and searching for somebody who is more perfect for them. Because women live longer we tend to think that they are disadvantaged. Early in life we assume that women are looking for a longer-term commitment and men for short-term relationships, but later in life, women are actually looking for short-term relationships and it's the men who are looking for the longer-term commitment because they're hoping to find somebody who will take care of them when they reach old age. When older people search online, the women are actually very picky whereas men actually become much less picky as they get older. A lot of older men end up with women who are older than them.
Americans Are Schizophrenic When It Comes To Adultery
COURIER POST ONLINE – June 8 – A Gallup poll on attitudes about 19 moral issues found that more Americans considered adultery more morally wrong than any other type of behavior — ahead of suicide and human cloning. More than nine in 10 said infidelity was immoral. But it appears that more people may be cheating on their spouses. In any given year, ~10% of married people — 12% of men and 7% of women — say they have had sex outside their marriage. Launched in February 2002, AshleyMadison has 19M members across 26 countries. The site was created when the founders discovered that 30% of people who were using singles dating sites were actually married or in an otherwise “committed” relationship.
by Michael Riley
The full article was originally published at Courier Post Online, but is no longer available.
1 In 3 Dating Dads Lie About Having Kids
MASHABLE – June 6 – A new survey by WhatsYourPrice.com found that one in three online-dating dads lie on their profiles about having kids. The main reason for this type of lie is male fear of rejection by a potential date. The survey found that more younger men lie about being a dad than guys over age 30.
Recent Changes To POF
HUFFINGTON POST – June 5 – Markus Frind is trying to eliminate those on POF who are looking to hook up rather than to find a real relationship. Frind attributes the recent increase in hook up offers to the increase in mobile application use. "We went from 20% mobile to 70% in a year-and-a-half." He relayed that the mobile app use is later at night and more casual with more condensed messages."When men send messages, they try to do it in the minimum amount of words possible," Frind noted. "So what they do is use certain combinations of words. So you pick 30 words and you block those words and you solve the problem." Feedback from his recent email and changes to the site has been overwhelmingly favorable.
by Elizabeth Denham
See full article at Huffington Post
Tastebuds.fm Matches People Based On Music Taste
METRO.CO.UK – June 6 – When it comes to forging new relationships, there is no doubt music can be a powerful connector. Tastebuds.fm is a new dating site that is using music to match people. When users register on the site, they include their favourite bands and link their Spotify, Last.fm and Facebook accounts. They are then shown people who have similar musical taste and can message them privately.
Hookup App Tinder
FORTUNE – June 6 – Tinder, the iPhone app, which debuted in October, connects to Facebook and displays photos from a user's albums. When a users clicks "yes" to someone who has also liked them, it's a "match" and both users gain the ability to chat with each other. If nothing happens, the other person may simply have not seen you yet. Tinder is strictly photo-based. Tinder came out of IAC's research and development arm. "We keep it sort of on the DL because it's much sexier for it to be a totally fresh startup," says Sam Yagan, CEO of Match.com and OkCupid. Tinder declined to release download figures but claims 58M matches have been made, out of 5.8 billion ratings. Co-founder and CEO Sean Rad claims he's heard of 20 engagements resulting from using the service.
Jiayuan First Quarter 2013 Financial Results
PR NEWSWIRE – June 5 – Q1 net revenue was RMB111.5M ($18.0M), a YOY increase of 27.6%. Operating income was RMB9.4M ($1.5M), with an YOY increase of 139.1%. The number of average monthly active user accounts was 5,188,638, compared to 5,434,692 in Q1 '12 and 5,123,265 for the previous quarter. The number of average monthly paying user accounts was 1,279,063, compared to 1,171,031 in Q1 '12.