MARKETWATCH – Oct 23 – 54% of online dates “seriously misrepresented” themselves in their profiles, according to a new online dating study by Pew. Some amount of dishonesty has always been a part of dating, says Dan Slater, author of “Love in the Time of Algorithms”. Men will add one to two inches in height, while women will shave 10 pounds off their weight, he says. Despite the pitfalls, 59% of people still say that online dating is a good way to meet people, up from 44% in 2005.
Month: October 2013
iDate Course On How To Start A Dating Business
OPW – Oct 21 – iDate organizers are launching a learning course on how to start a dating business. The registration is now open until November 4th.
The 6 week course programme:
- Week 1: Introduction to the Dating Business
- Week 2: Dating Software
- Week 3: Payments and Marketing
- Week 4: Customer Service / Offline Methods / Fraud
- Week 5: Mobile Dating
- Week 6: Scaling
and includes:
- ~7 hours of video
- weekly webinars for Q&A
- 2-Day Pass to iDate 2014 Las Vegas (a $1275 Value)
- Dating Factory Account
- Hub People Account
- Money Back Guarantee for 14 days
Speakers include: Marc Lesnick, iDate Organizer; Mark Brooks; Tanya Fathers, CEO of Dating Factory; Michael O'Sullivan, CEO of Hub People; Nick Tsinonis, Co-Founder of Scamalytics; Julie Ferman, Matchmaker; Steve Dean, CEO of Dateworking, and Kevin Feng, CEO of Moxy Media Group.
Cost of the course: $2700.
Down, the App Formerly Known as Bang With Friends, Relaunches on the iPhone
Speed Date USA Is Suing Match.com
LAW360 – Oct 23 – Speed Date USA Inc. filed a $5.65M suit against Match.com, accusing the dating site of prematurely breaking off a two-year contract and misappropriating its trade secrets. Match.com canceled 86 events. The suit also alleges Match.com terminated the contract upon learning Speed Date's trade secrets and used them to run its own speed dating events.
TrintMe Now Available For iOS
ALL FACEBOOK – Oct 21 – Facebook dating app TrintMe lets users express feelings to friends of friends, such as "you're cool", "coffee" and "romance". Those messages are stored for 30 days. If there is a match, both users receive notifications.
by David Cohen
See full article at All Facebook
Tinder Is Popular In Holland
SMARTPHONE – Oct 21 – Tinder has attracted 2% of the Dutch population. ~330K people are using the app now. 65% of them are 18 – 24 years old. The user base is growing by 10% every day.
by Otto Hijnen
See full article at Smartphone
POF On Verge Of Acquiring TRUE
COURTHOUSE NEWS – Oct 22 – True Beginnings filed for Chapter 11 protection in Texas last year, and POF.com agreed to a $700K asset-purchase agreement. Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott has objected to the asset sale due to privacy concerns. "True does not sell members' information to third parties without your permission," the website claims. But True.com's policy goes on to say that member personal information would be considered a transferable asset in the event the website was acquired or its assets sold.
by David Lee
See full article at Courthouse News
See all posts on True.com
See all posts on POF.com
This post also appears on InternetDatingInvestments.
An Interview With Geoff Cook The CEO Of MeetMe, About Charm
OPW INTERVIEW – Oct 22 – We heard MeetMe intoduced a new app, Charm, and had a few questions:
What is Charm?
Charm is about having fun while meeting real people, real fast. We’ve always been about driving new connections and deepening relationships among our users. We believe substance and authenticity are missing from many social apps today. For example, studies have shown that the people who use FB the most are among the most unhappy, potentially because people are consuming a highlight reel of other people’s lives. Meanwhile, the popular dating app Tinder is photo only. We don’t think you can get a first impression of someone from a photo. If you are at a bar or coffeehouse you are attracted by personality as well as appearance. Ultimately we built Charm to show people are more than a profile photo, to enable the personality to come through.
Does Charm represent a ‘pivot’ in your business model?
We launched Charm as a standalone app because we think mobile apps are best when they are simple, doing only one or two things and doing them well. On a web site, you might be able to launch feature after feature into a menu, but on mobile that would only bloat the app. Mobile users visit for a few minutes a session and more than a hundred times a month. We view the audience for Charm as much the same as the audience for MeetMe and we heavily promote the Charm app to our MeetMe users, but we believe the simplicity of Charm as a standalone app will increase its potential.
We see much of the industry moving towards a portfolio approach, from IAC with Tinder, Okcupid, and Match; to Twitter with Vine; to Facebook with Instagram, Poke, and Messenger. We have said publicly we plan to launch 4 new apps in the next 6 months and Charm is the first of those.
What are the challenges of using video in the iDating space? What’s the upside of video?
Video slows down the consumption and presents some friction as users must add a video. At the same time, videos add a whole new dimension to apps like Tinder, and ultimately are more authentic. Photos can be 5-10 years old and be the best picture of a person ever taken. Videos don’t reduce a person to appearance in the same way as a photo does.
Will video be the new profile photo?
What’s changed is video has come into the mainstream on mobile only recently with Vine’s launch and Instagram’s recent update. Vine recently pioneered the short, looping video that enables creativity by stitching interesting videos together in a simple record-process. We believe this has dramatically reduced the friction to video creation and opens up natural opportunities for meet-new-people applications.
How’s the growth of Charm coming along?
It’s very, very early but we are pleased to see tens of thousands of users join in the first week.
Acquaintable Is Now A Part Of LikeBright
OPW – Oct 22 – LikeBright, a dating sites that connects friends of friends, is acquiring another social dating site Acquaintable. Joel Rodriguez, Co-founder and CEO of Acquaintable, will be joining LikeBright as an advisor.
This post also appears on InternetDatingInvestments.
Pew Study: Americans Turn To Match.com And eHarmony
ASSOCIATED PRESS – Oct 21 – 38% of single Americans have used an online dating site or mobile dating app, according to a new study from the Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project. 59% of Internet users agree that online dating is a good way to meet people, up from 44% in 2005. Match.com is the most popular dating site, just as it was in 2005. No. 2 this year is eHarmony. 29% of respondents say they know someone who has been in a long-term relationship or married someone they met online, compared with 15% in 2005.
The full article was originally published at News Channel 5, but is no longer available.