PR WEB – Jan 9 – FirstDate, the leading online dating site in Scandinavia, was among four national companies chosen to sponsor the independently owned public broadcasting network in Sweden.
Month: January 2014
Christian Connection Launches Subway Campaign In London
Reasons Why Dating Sites Are Busy This Week
HTXT.CO.ZA – Jan 9 – The week of January 5th is Match.com's busiest week of the year.
- After drunken hook-ups over the holiday season is time to start afresh.
- New Year’s resolutions that centre on love life.
- Less parties, more routine, less money
- Valentine’s Day is approaching
- People are realizing their sell-by-date is approaching
by Jo Crawshaw
See full article at Htxt.co.za
RecruitMe Patent, Que?
OPW – Jan 8 - eHarmony and Match and Date were sued first. They were successful in getting the patent refined and limited. It still stands, they settled for negotiated annual licensing fees, and now the rest of the industry is under the gun. Your letter may be in the post next!
But, can someone please explain this patent to me/us? Here is the RecruitMe patent number 5,623,660.
See our prior post on RecruitMe Patent Troll Takes Aim At iDating Industry.
SinglesAroundMe Introduces Shifting GPS Patent
PRESS RELEASE – Jan 8 – SinglesAroundMe, a social discovery mobile dating app, revealed it’s patent pending Position-Shift invention which allows mobile users to choose who knows where they are and when. SinglesAroundMe launched in 2010 and has 2M users in 100 countries.
Spark Networks Introduces Good Deed Dating
CHRISTIAN TODAY – Jan 8 - ChristianMingle has come up with a new service (Good Deed Dating) that will give the opportunity for singles to get to know one another while volunteering in their communities. Singles will volunteer through projects like food banks and community gardens. The programme will initially run in Los Angeles on 11 January, and Houston and Dallas during the Valentine's Day weekend in February.
Neo4j Interview With CEO Emil Eifrem
OPW INTERVIEW – Jan 8 – What do Snap Interactive, Bang With Friends, Hinge and Meetic all have in common? They all use neo4j graph database.
Neo4j is an open-source graph database, implemented in Java. The developers describe Neo4j as "embedded, disk-based, fully transactional Java persistence engine that stores data structured in graphs rather than in tables". Neo4j is the most popular graph database around, and was developed by Neo Technology. – Mark Brooks
What's a graph database, and why should the iDating industry care?
It’s a new type of database that is optimized for querying connections between people, things, interests, or really anything that can be connected.
The iDating industry cares about interactions and connections. Those two concepts are closely linked. If someone has a connection to another person, through a shared friend or a shared interest, they are much more likely to interact.
How do most iDating databases work in comparison?
Conventional databases, such as MySQL and Oracle, are not designed to help figure out if two people share a connection. They were designed to quickly retrieve specific information about an individual, such as for computing a payroll. Using these type of databases, there is no efficient way to figure out even slightly complex connections.
For certain types of queries, such as friends of friends, a graph database is 1000 times faster than a relational database. This is important for mobile devices, and for building web pages quickly. People will not wait 60 seconds for your query to complete.
What kind of benefits have your clients seen?
More connections, and more interactions.
Interactions are much more likely when there is a connection between you and the person you are looking at. Neo4j enables our customers to model and make sense of the friend data for millions of users. If you find a friend of a friend online, you are three times as likely to connect to that person than to a stranger. For a friend of a friend of a friend, you are twice as likely to connect than if there is no relationship.
Many sites are bound to the second degree, but expanding to the third degree creates an explosion of value. The 3rd degree provides huge volume. People have hundreds of friends, but thousands of FOF and tens of thousands of FOFOFs.
With Neo4j, our customers easily expand to the third degree. It works natively, and with no tricks. Using MySQL, it is difficult to come up with a reasonable solution. With any relational database, there is no efficient way to find 3rd degree connections.
You power BangWithFriends. Do you work with any other dating sites or apps?
Yes, in addition to Down (previously Bang With Friends), we power Snap Interactive, Hinge, Avalable (Singles Solution), Meetic. Additionally, there are some other dating sites that are building new features in Neo4j as we speak. (David Fox, Big Data Engineer at Snap Interactive, recently spoke at GraphConnect conference in New York).
What's the cost for using Neo4j, roughly?
We provide pricing options that match where the company is to its stage of growth. For startups, it’s $12K per year for a commercial subscription. We also have free trials available for evaluation.
Who should readers contact in order to find out more?
Henry Taylor, hank@neotechnology.com. He can point you in the right direction for getting up and running with Neo4j.
The Secret Wife Of Walter Mitty
Overall, its very solid exposure for eHarmony. One wonders just how much control they had over the scripting process. eHarmony is indeed thoroughly laced into the movie. From the opening scene, the interstitials of an eHarmony rep/matchmaker calling Walter, and a somewhat awkward segment towards the end of the movie where Walter actually meets the rep in person. Great exposure, but…
There’s definitely some artistic license in the portrayal of eHarmony services. A rep calling out? Really? The rep was very casual and gave fairly basic feedback, and disclosed info about other members incoming winks. The movie got 50% on Rotten Tomatoes from reviewers but scored 79% from users. It was a fun ride, and it was good to see eHarmony get this much-needed exposure.
I guess I’m most intrigued with their choice of character in the rep. It was a really uncomfortable segment when the rep met Walter in person. This really felt contrived, un-entertaining, and not a particularly good portrayal of eHarmony. The character just seemed hokey and daft, and not really a good reflection of the industry. On the other hand, the reality of the new matchmaking services that eHarmony will offer will surely over-deliver on this casual and homey depiction of their services.
Next, I wonder how Corbin Bernsen will write Christian Mingle into his new movie…named “Christian Mingle”, no less!? We’ll review it as soon as we can get a copy. – Mark Brooks
Affiliate Network Payouts Spreadsheets Updated
OPW – Jan 7 – We've just finished another update of our affiliate network payouts overviews. We've added Tradedoubler´s offers for northern Europe countries to the list. PepperJam was sold to eBay last year and, unfortunately, we no longer have access to their offers. You can download the spreadsheets from the links below:
- Affiliate Network Payouts, v.15, January 2014
- Affiliate Network Payouts Comparison, updated Jan 6th, 2014
They are also available under "Research and Reviews" on InternetDatingAffiliates blog.
SNAP Interactive Q4 2013 Highlights
PR NEWSWIRE – Jan 7 – Total revenues for the Q4 '13 increased 2% to $3M YOY. As of Dec 31, 2013, AYI.com had ~78K active subscribers. New subscription transactions increased 3% on a sequential basis compared to Q3 2013, even though advertising and marketing expense was reduced by ~11% over the same time period.