MEETME CORP – Nov 7 – Q3 revenue was $10.1M. Mobile revenue reached another quarterly record of $2.9M, up 65% YOY and 12% sequentially from the Q2 of 2013. Net loss improved to $1.5M, compared with a net loss of $2.6M in Q3 2012. Monthly active users (MAUs) increased ~37%, averaging 5.34M. Mobile MAUs increased 36% to 2.66M.
See full article at MeetMe Corp
This post also appears on SocialNetworkingWatch.
DIGITAL TRENDS – Nov 8 – New dating app 'Pure' is more focused on hookups than Tinder. Users don't have to link their Facebook account to Pure. Their presence on the service is minimal. Users photo and information is only hosted on the app for an hour at a time; then it's all wiped away until they make it available again. First five attempts to hook up are free. If Pure gets one thing right, it's the privacy factor.
THE JEWISH WEEK – Nov 6 – Jzoog.com, a new Jewish dating site, is set to launch this week and it will allow anyone to serve as a matchmaker on the site. Users will pay for tokens, which will be used to contact someone. A smile, which is similar to a poke, is 50 cents, while sending a message is $1, or two tokens.
by Alan Zeitlin
See full article at The Jewish Week
TECH HIVE – Nov 6 – Hula apps lets users share their STD test results in a friendly way. The app also helps users find nearby STD testing centers, share their status, and receive reminders every 6 to 12 months when it’s time for another test. The app “unzips” their results only for people they choose to share them with.
by Caitlin McGarry
See full article at Tech Hive
MEETME CORP – Nov 7 – MeetMe partners with Pinsight Media+, a mobile media company powered by Sprint. Under the agreement, Pinsight Media+ will manage the mobile advertising inventory for MeetMe on iOS and Android through the end of 2014.
See full article at MeetMe Corp
This post also appears on SocialNetworkingWatch.
BLOOMBERG – Nov 6 – FriendFinder Networks won court approval to seek creditors’ votes on its restructuring plan, which would turn the company over to noteholders. FriendFinder will seek court approval of its reorganization plan to exit bankruptcy at a hearing scheduled for Dec. 16. The company sought bankruptcy protection Sept. 17 listing assets of $465.3M and debt of $661.9M. The restructuring would cut about $300M in debt and reduce annual interest expenses by ~$50M. The reorganization plan is supported by ~78% of the holders.
by Michael Bathon
The full article was originally published at Bloomberg, but is no longer available.
NEWS OBSERVER – Nov 6 – Catalyst is a new location-based app that allows users to find potential matches nearby without exchanging private contact information. Users who check in can view recent photos of other Catalyst users in the same location and “like” potential matches. Private messages do not occur until both users become friends upon request.
by Rachel Butt
The full article was originally published at News Observer, but is no longer available.
TECH FIEBER – Nov 5 – Over 5M singles are now using German flirt app Lovoo. The app sees ~25K new users every day. The app uses GPS technology to locate potential mates nearby.
by Sachiyo Tanaka
See full article at Tech Fieber
OPW INTERVIEW – Nov 6 – Deepak Kamra has been an investor with Canaan for 20 years. He invested in Match.com in 1995, Bharat Matrimony in 2006 and most recently Zoosk, earning him the nickname The Love VC. Here is our interview with Deepak. – Mark Brooks
How does a CEO of an iDating site get your attention now?
Online dating is only one of the areas I invest in. Over 20+ years in the industry I have invested in only three of them – Match, Zoosk and Bharat Matrimony. I am always interested in the latest dating concepts, and it’s a very creative entrepreneurial world out there right now. The best way to reach me is through an email via our website at www.canaan.com.
What are you looking for in your next iDating industry investment?
I am looking for the same things I have always looked for since we invested in the first round at Match.com. I am looking for ideas that can scale quickly and those that are highly monetizable. Taking advantage of new platforms like mobile, social and geo is a big advantage. It’s pretty easy and inexpensive to launch a dating site right now, but not so easy to grow it to a meaningful scale in a sustainable way. Also anything that attracts a younger audience is interesting, since it is the biggest and fastest growing part of the dating market, but someone needs to figure out a way to make money from that audience, and advertising alone is unlikely to suffice as a source of revenue.
It seems some people have time, and some have money? Do you think dating sites could be charging more? Are they leaving money on the table?
Yes, yes and yes. But users are a skeptical bunch and need to perceive value for the money they are paying. And with competition from free sites, there is always pricing pressure. So you need to really offer something unique and useful to charge more. Or maybe you need to move away from the traditional monthly subscription business model?
Are you a fan of using facial recognition on Google Glass? Is that the next killer app in iDating?
I think facial recognition would be awesome if it was available. From what I have heard, Google Glass is not planning to include it, at least not initially. And people would have to get over the creepy factor of strangers on the street knowing who they are and everything public about them. Instead of everyone being recognizable, there would have to have some sort of opt-in gate. A dating site is exactly the kind of quasi- private network which could allow the facial recognition feature to be of real value for those who wanted to participate. I think facial recognition has so many other uses outside of dating, for social and business applications, and I am looking forward to new entrepreneurial ideas in that space.
What else are you excited about in iDating, right now, and for the near future?
Mobile and Big Data are the trends I am following right now. Companies like Zoosk are busy working those angles and are phenomenally successful at it. There is lots of innovation at sites like Grouper, HowAboutWe and Coffee Meets Bagel, but it takes time to scale the offline, real world aspects of those businesses. Apps like Tinder are getting a lot of press, and I look forward to hearing about how they intend to make money.
IDG NEWS SERVICE – Nov 5 – Ancestry.com is using Hadoop as the cornerstone of a new DNA service that looks for users' relatives. eHarmony uses the service to refine its process of matching. Hadoop has excelled at comparing thousands of variables across millions of different entities. The system first uses algorithms to predict how happy two potential matches would be if they were married. eHarmony must also predict how attracted two potential people would be to one another. Gauging attractiveness between two people is where the use of big-data-styled machine learning comes in. The service keeps track of a wide range of additional variables of its members including distance. The farther apart two people are geographically, the less likely they are to pick one another from a list of candidates.
by Joab Jackson
The full article was originally published at NetworkWorld, but is no longer available.