VENTURE BEAT – Feb 12 - Hinge is today launching outside the U.S. for the first time, kicking off in London. Hinge uses Facebook to match people with friends-of-friends. Hinge will be launching in Canada soon as well.
Month: February 2015
Grouvly, Group Dating App, Raised $200K
VIRTUAL PRESS OFFICE – Feb 13 – Grouvly, Hong Kong-based hangout app, has just secured HKD 1.5M ($200K) in seed capital from international angel investors after only 4 weeks since its launch in early January this year. Grouvly sets up drinks between two groups of people: 3 girls & 3 guys.
See full article at PR Newswire
This post also appears on InternetDatingInvestments.
Elevated Careers By eHarmony To Roll Out In March
OC REGISTER – Feb 12 – eHarmony is building a job-matching service called Elevated Careers. The company expects to begin rolling it out to select job seekers in late March and make it widely available to jobseekers and companies by the summer. The site will use “big data” to pair people looking for jobs with available positions. Elevated Careers questionnaire would only take a job seeker 10 minutes to complete.
Match.com Is 20 Years Old
TELEGRAPH.CO.UK – Feb 11 – This year, Match.com celebrates its 20th anniversary. The site is responsible for 517K relationships, 92K marriages and 1M babies, according to Karl Gregory, Match.com UK manager. Its users are spread across 40 countries and exchange 415M emails a year. When Match.com launched in April 1995, there were only 25M Internet users worldwide, compared to 2.92B in 2015. Bill and Freddie Straus, aged 76 and 72, were among the first in history to have gone on an online date in 1996. Eric Klien created a 170-point questionnaire, covering users’ horoscopes, their preferred mode of transport, taste in music, etc. He called it the “Electronic Matchmaker” and uploaded to his private Internet database just after Christmas 1992. In 1993, Klien sold his questionnaire and the domain name Match.com so he could focus on a new mission. It was called the Atlantis Project and it aimed to build an independent city called Oceania in the middle of the Caribbean Sea. Match.com’s buyer was Gary Kremen. He purchased Match.com for $2,500 and launched it as a dating service on the open Internet in 1995. In 1998, he argued with his board and the company was sold. Its current owner, IAC, bought it in 1999 for $50M. Officially called “Synapse”, but known by insiders as the “magic sauce”, the Match.com algorithm is based on a streamlined version of Klien’s original matchmaker. The results of the algorithm’s sums are shown in users’ “daily six”: a series of previously-unseen, tailored profiles that are sent to users' inbox each day.
Tinder Faces Trademark Suit
LAW360 – Feb 11 – Web design company WildFireWeb slammed Tinder with a trademark infringement suit in California federal court on Tuesday, saying it had been using the "Tinder" name and a fire-themed logo for its content management system for nearly two years before the popular dating app came along.
Jess, Meet Ken Now Has 10k Users
BOSTON BUSINESS JOURNAL – Feb 10 – Ken Deckinger met his wife Jess through a female friend. "It worked for us, and we'd love to share the experience we had with other people," he said. They launched Jess, Meet Ken, a dating site that allows women to act as matchmakers. The site has reached 10K users in less than a year. The company aims to close a $400K seed funding round with angel investors in the coming weeks in order to boost sales and marketing and expand the service beyond Boston.
by Sara Castellanos
See full article at Boston Business Journal
Lovebook Creates Targeted Ad Campaign For Singles On Facebook
MASHABLE – Feb 11 – Lovebook is a new matchmaking service that helps singles find dates by buying targeted Facebook ads for them. The rates range from $15 to $60, it depends on how many people the paying user hopes to reach. After PayPal payment, Lovebook creates a separate Facebook page with three photos and a brief message about what is the user looking for. Lovebook then buys ads targeted to nearby Facebook users with similar interests.
The Perils Of Falling For The Matchmaker
OBSERVER – Feb 10 – For the past six year, Carly Spindel has worked alongside her mother Janis, one of the city’s most successful matchmakers. Her clients pay tens of thousands of dollars for her services and are typically 40+. When meeting her clients, she always wear a wedding ring although she is not married. “Matchmakers are making it all about the client,” said Lisa Clampitt, the founder of the New York-based Matchmaking Institute. “They listen, they compliment, pay attention—that is kind of what flirtation is. The person feels very understood, so they’re going to get a crush.” A divorced matchmaker in Washington, said she would wear her wedding ring in client meetings to fend off grabby guys. One day, though, she forgot it—the only day, in fact—and met the man who would become her husband. It seems that many matchmakers go into the business to meet romantic partners. The male clients are catches, too. They are successful and quite wealthy and are looking to settle down. “You’re not really supposed to date your own clients, but it happens all the time,” said Julie Ferman, a LA-based relationship expert. She estimated that 30 – 40% of married matchmakers have found their spouses through their own services.
Love Me: A Mail Order Bride Documentary
OPW – Feb 10 – Love Me, a “mail order bride” documentary film directed by Jonathon Narducci, came out today. Someone once told Jonathon that his Great Grandmother was a mail order bride from Italy, which initially spiked his interest in the subject. But his curiosity really took off when he received a spam email from A Foreign Affair while he was in college, studying film. He convinced A Foreign Affair and another International Introduction company Elena’s Models to participate in his interesting documentary which he filmed for a little over two years. Love Me follows a group of lonely men on their quest for love through the modern ‘mail-order bride’ industry in Ukraine. You can pre-order the movie on iTunes.
21Pictures Founder Interview
OPW INTERVIEW – Feb 11 – Michael Bond is the founder of 21Pictures, which uses behavioral matchmaking, of sorts. It's a very different sign up experience. Try it out. Users are limited to 21 matches at a time. And Michael calls the service the antidote to Tinder. Did you know that values and worldview are two of the top elements for matching? Read on…
What's your founding story?
In my day job I'm a science writer specializing in psychology and human behavior. Before I got married (two years ago) I used a few dating sites and it often struck me how little attention many of them pay to behavioral science, and particularly the kind of cognitive tendencies people use day-to-day when meeting people in 'real life' (intuitive decision-making, for example). The point of 21Pictures is to try to amend that, by allowing people to use their natural social smarts as much as possible. Describing yourself and assessing other people through pictures of their life, which is what 21Pictures is all about, is a way of forcing you to suss out potential matches intuitively. We reckon it's more effectively than words, which force a more rational approach better suited to problem-solving than picking a date.
When did you start the site?
I started thinking about it in summer 2012. Development took place throughout 2014 and the site launched on January 1st, 2015.
Why is iDating broken?
I wouldn't say it's broken, just that a lot of dating sites ignore scientific evidence about social behavior and decision-making. A good example is the ability to browse hundreds of people in search of a date, which you can do on most sites. Study after study has shown that this is a bad idea for making any kind of serious choice. Thus we limit users to 21 matches at any one time. This forces them to consider potential dates in depth rather than swiping away on the basis of superficial information. In this way, we're the antidote to Tinder and all those other apps that rely on GPS and instant response. We're aiming at a more considered, traditional approach.
Why and how are you using behavioral matchmaking?
We're using behavioral science in several ways. The intuitive visual-driven approach I describe above is one. Another is our decision to limit people's choice of matches. We also use a questionnaire about people's basic values and cultural worldview – factors that psychologists have shown are more reliable than interests or personality profiles for assessing compatibility. Our members answer 21 of these questions when they sign up (it takes them about two minutes on average). These questions are derived from the psychological literature. We don't pretend to give people perfect matches, but in matching them with 21 others who answer the questionnaire in similar ways to them it narrows the field in a constructive way. We certainly don't pretend to have cracked the secret of compatibility. We're just trying to make online dating a bit more like how it works in the real world, a bit like being at a singles party organized by a friend.
How do you define behavioral science?
The empirical study of human behavior.
How can it help dating sites do better?
I think it can be particularly useful for sites aimed at people seeking relationships. The science of compatibility is inexact, I'm not sure we can really call it a science. It's so hard to predict which factors are important for a relationships. But some things seem clear, e.g. the idea that opposites attract might hold for a few days or weeks but it is antithetical to good relationships. We know more about how people make decisions and the things that influence them. On 21Pictures we try to create an online environment in which users are more likely to make good ones.
Are any dating sites using behavioral matchmaking (very effectively) yet?
In my opinion, no!
What technologies will help us use it more effectively?
I'm not sure technology is the key here. In some ways technology is leading us astray: many dating apps make much of their GPS capability and instant connectivity but neither of these "advances" is significant when it comes to compatibility or helping people choose dates wisely. In the "real world", we are generally pretty good at picking out people we have something in common with, who we might want to know better. The important thing is to make it easier for people to use their natural social smarts online the way they do offline.
How are you driving site growth at this stage?
We're spreading the word mainly through social networks, friends of friends etc – in line with social network theory! – and also through the media and bloggers. We're not ready for big advertising or brand promotion campaigns, believing people will trust the concept more if they hear it via their networks. It would be useful to be able to promote the site via Facebook but its rules don't allow new sites like ours to do that which seems a bit unfair.
Post by Mark Brooks @