PR NEWSWIRE – Oct 8 – Etai Hugi, a 32-year-old Israeli bachelor, created a site called MillionSinglesProject.com. MillionSinglesProject is a huge image board, with pictures of singles. Users choose the space (tile) upload a picture, describe themselves in 45 characters, share their link to Facebook, LinkedIn or other social media sites, and pay a $1 fee to be forever commemorated on the singles' wall.
Month: October 2013
Affinitas Launches Prestige Singles
GRUENDERSZENE – Oct 10 – Affinitas, the company behind eDarling, is launching Prestige Singles, a new dating sites exclusively for academics.
Spark Networks Relaunches Believe.com
MARKETWIRED – Oct 10 – Spark Networks relaunches a new site, Believe.com, that offers advice and inspirational messages for Christians.
Noonswoon Interview With CEO Peter Panas
OPW INTERVIEW – Oct 8 – Noonswoon is a mobile dating app that launched in Thailand this year. Noonswoon is a winner of 2013 AIS startup contest, and has recently raised $400K. Here is our interview with CEO Peter Panas. – Irena Brooks
What is Noonswoon's founding story? What is your background?
Mickey Asavanant and I co-founded Noonswoon in 2013. We're both still single and personally motivated to build a dating company that doesn't suck. Mickey previously co-founded a dating company which grew to 2.5M users and is now part of the Match.com family, and I've been working in product management at larger Internet companies, e.g. Priceline, Yahoo, Amazon, MySpace.
How does Noonswoon works? Would you say Noonswoon is Asia's CoffeeMeetsBagel?
Noonswoon introduces singles to one quality match per day. CMB is probably one of the more similar western dating companies, but our functionality is geared much more toward the needs of an Asian audience. The goal of finding love remains the same.
What's your business model?
We're still optimizing the business model, but in essence users pay to be introduced to other quality singles.
How many active users do you have?
40K. We see ~1k new users per day.
How do you spread the word about Noonswoon?
Our users are our top evangelists spreading the word about Noonswoon.
Who do you consider to be your biggest competition in Thailand?
We don't really have any serious direct competition here. The local market is primarily still comprised of offline dating agencies.
Have you launched in other Asian countries?
Not yet.
What's the market like in Thailand? What is the biggest difference between US and Asia?
Dating culture in Thailand is still very different from the US and Europe. Asians place much more importance on privacy.
Congratulations on the $400K funding. What is your plan on using the money? What is your priority?
Hiring the smartest people on the planet to join our team.
Where do you want Noonswoon to be in the next 18 months?
We want to establish Noonswoon as the leading dating company in Asia.
CEO Of Oasis Dating Network To Speak At iDate In Brazil
WEBWIRE – Oct 8 – The South American iDate conference is taking place on November 21-22, 2013 in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Dave Heysen, Oasis Dating Network’s CEO, will discuss online dating in Argentina and Colombia.
Deepak Kamra – The Love VC
PANDODAILY – Oct 7 – Deepak Kamra has been an investor with Canaan for 20 years. He invested in Match.com in 1995, Bharat Matrimony in 2006 and Zoosk, earning him the nickname The Love VC. He’s been keeping his eye out for Match.com 2.0, for Web 2.0 and the 21st century. He believes he’s found it in Zoosk. He passed up Ok Cupid, which didn’t have the revenue, and eHarmony, which was too limiting to daters.
by Carmel DeAmicis
See full article at PandoDaily
See all posts on Zoosk
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See all posts on Match.com
This post also appears on InternetDatingInvestments.
TED Presentation: Amy Webb – How I Hacked Online Dating
TED – Oct 2013 – Amy Webb liked the idea of online dating algorithms. After one bad date left her in a restaurant with a $1300 bill she created her own algorithm. She crunched some numbers and used dating sites as databases and came up with 72 data points. She wanted someone Jewish, who worked hard, wanted two children, etc. She prioritized the 72 points and built a scoring system. 700 and she'd email somebody, 900 points for a date, and for 1500 she would consider a relationship. This worked well but Amy hadn't considered the competition so she created 10 fake male profiles to gather data about the women in the system. One month later she did another analysis and realized she had to dumb down her profile and show some skin. She found her guy and married him.
Credit Ratings Matter In Dating
FINANCIAL REVIEW – Oct 7 – ~57% of men say credit scores play into dating decisions, compared with 75% of women, a US survey has found. That social dilemma is about to hit Australia. Credit ratings agency and data analytics group Veda launched its personal credit score system this week, which will allow customers to access and manage their own credit rating.
by Jemima Whyte
See full article at Financial Review
Mark Brooks: Credit ratings show two things. Ability to pay, and willingness to pay.
Both of which are useful morsels of information for daters. Behaviors
give a clear indication of people's characteristics. So it makes sense
credit ratings be incorporated into iDating. Hugely controversial, but
sensible. The only format that would work is to allow iDating users to
opt-in to showing off their shiny gold standard credit ratings.
Pacific Region Entrepreneur Of The Year, Markus Frind
BC BUSINESS – Oct 4 – Congratulations to Markus Frind, founder and CEO of POF, the 2013 Pacific Region Information Technology Entrepreneur of the Year. Frind began POF back in 2003. POF now claims 3M daily users and 71 employees. Today Frind is focusing on staying ahead of trends and technologies. Since the site launched its app in 2011, up to 75% of its users are now landing on the site via a mobile device.
Twine: A Dating Site With No Faces
THE DAILY BEAST – Oct 6 – Twine is pairing users up on a “personality first and looks later” basis. First, matches are made through interests listed on Facebook. While chatting, users see only a blurred-out photo of their match, which doesn’t become clear until they both agree to reveal themselves. Since the release in August, the app has seen ~120K downloads. At the moment, getting men on board is a hurdle for Twine. The women/men ratio is 16:1.