OPW – Sep 24 – Mobile is hot, and Far East markets know mobile best. Think South Korea and China and Japan. So Marc Lesnick will run a conference in China next year to shine a light on how dating and matchmaking sites are innovating and what they're focusing on. This should be fascinating and inspirational. Watch this space.
Post by Mark Brooks @
STOCKMARKETWIRE – Sep 23 - Cupid has announced that in H1 2014 the adjusted EBITDA loss was reduced to £2.8M (H2 2013: £3.3M). The company plans to launch both an innovative new mobile matchmaking app, 'Tangle', and Uniform Dating in the US on a new platform. The management expect the company to be cash generative in the Q4 2014.
GEEKWIRE – Sep 18 – LikeBright, the social dating company that participated in the Techstars Seattle program in 2011, reeled in money from Microsoft Ventures and prominent investors, and acquiring other startups, is shifting gears and launching a new anonymous chat app. So why didn’t LikeBright work out? While Reveal is mobile-only, LikeBright was on desktop and aggregated information from Facebook to help match those looking for a partner. The company has raised another $1M this year to build Reveal. In beta tests, Reveal had 6K chatting users send more than 800K messages. More than 60% of those chatters returned to the app.
by Taylor Soper
See full article at Geekwire
SALON.COM – Sep 19 – Cuddlr is a new app that launched in the iTunes store last week. Users sign up with Facebook and browse nearby cuddle partners. If they like someone, they send them a cuddle invite. They have 15 mins to accept. If all goes well, the app then leads them to each other for a cuddle in public or private.
TELEGRAPH.CO.UK – Sep 21 – Many country-loving singles aged 18-26 join Young Farmers, an organisation with 25K members that arranges ski trips and dances for young country dwellers. Lucy Reeves and her sister Emma failed to meet anyone through Young Farmers, so they founded Muddy Matches in 2007. The site has now 100K members and 50% of its traffic is via mobile. Muddy Matches launches a new app, destined to become 'Tinder for country types'.
by Anna Tyzack
See full article at Telegraph.co.uk
Mark Brooks: MuddyMatches gets 55k hits a month according to Similarweb. Mostly in the UK. The big daddy in this niche is FarmersOnly.com with 1 million visit a month mostly in the USA. It's hard to believe the farming dating niche is so huge. But farmers are in demand, and they have good coin to spend on dating. They don't have so much time to be going to bars.
IB TIMES – Sep 19 – 61-year-old Audrey Ruden is suing Richard Easton Matchmakers. She paid $100K to be introduced to 15 quality, marriage-minded men within 13 months. She stated that neither of her first two dates showed interest in marriage. When she complained to Easton, he became hostile and rude, and stopped returning emails and voicemails. Under New York state law, a dating service that charges ~$25 is required to provide a minimum number of referrals per month, and if it doesn’t deliver for two successive months, the client can cancel the contract and get a full refund minus a cancellation fee.
FAST COMPANY – Sep 17 – Japanese birthrate is among the lowest on earth, and the number of marriages is in decline. Many Japanese people don’t seem like dating sites. Some of the biggest ones position themselves as more social than romantic. Nikukai, meaning "Meat Meeting,” is an app designed to get groups of men and women together for Korean barbecue. Another app, Furendo Tossu is a site for meeting new people with common interests. Pairs, a dating app linked to Facebook that, along with MatchAlarm, NikuKai, and Yahoo Omiai, is one of the country’s most popular. Online dating in Japan has a shady history. People preferred anonymity, opting for cartoon avatars instead of photographs. On Pairs, photos regularly crop out distinguishing features, or instead show a favorite pet, stuffed animal, or an original drawing, expressing the user's taste. Another reason online dating has a seedy rep is baishun, meaning "to sell spring," with “spring” referring to youth or virginity. Baishun is the practice of Japanese teenage girls selling sex to older men online.
by Taylor Beck
See full article at Fast Company
Mark Brooks: Marc Lesnick will run an Internet Dating Conference in China next year that will focus on mobile dating, along with advances and innovations in the Far East markets.
TELEGRAPH.CO.UK – Sep 16 - Invisiblegirlfriend.com (and invisibleboyfriend.com) is a new site, still in private beta, that claims to provide social and real world proof that a user is in a relationship. Users create their own girlfriend, give her a name, choose her age and photo and create her personality. The site also provides a real-time interactive texting service. The whole thing is weirdly reminiscent of the virtual relationships which are becoming increasingly popular in Japan. More and more Japanese men are conducting online romances with what are essentially intelligent computer games known as "otaku".
by Helen Coffey
See full article at Telegraph.co.uk
LA BUSINESS JOURNAL – Sep 16 – Spark Networks, the company behind ChristianMingle.com and JDate.com, has cut its workforce and expenses. The cuts are expected to save the company ~$5M a year. The company did not disclose how many jobs were cut. Spark earlier reported that it had 201 full-time employees as of Dec. 31.
by Melissah Yang
See full article at LA Business Journal
L.A. BIZ – Sep 16 – One-time investment banker Max Fischer got into online dating by launching LinkedUp!, a mobile dating app that draws user data from LinkedIn. The site soft-launched in March and today rebranded as BeLinked. Users sign up for BeLinked via their LinkedIn profiles, and the app pulls a profile photo, name and age from that network. They select dating preferences filtered by gender, age, distance, industry and school, then swipe through potential matches. If two users mutually swipe right, they can chat via a built-in messaging function.