Month: December 2018
Tinder’s New Ad Campaign Doesn’t Want Users to Find Someone
by Lisa Bonos
See full article at Washington Post
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Special Match Stock Dividend Could Fuel IAC’s Acquisition
INVESTORS – Dec 12 – Owners of Match Group stock may have wondered why the company announced a special dividend in October. IAC could be stockpiling cash for a major acquisition, says Brent Thill, analyst at Jefferies. IAC, which owns 80% of Match, took in $440M of the $560M special dividend, analysts say. “With an ~$3B in cash by year-end 2019 and a history of utilizing cash and stock in past deals, IAC has the capacity for larger-scale M&A.,” Thill said in a report published on Wednesday. “CEO Joey Levin recently stated in an interview that he believes IAC can digest close to a $5B deal.”
Q&A With David Vermeulen, Founder & CEO of The Inner Circle
BUSINESS MATTERS – Dec 12 – David Vermeulen talks about his ambition to challenge the way we date in an ever-increasing digital era.
Q: What is The Inner Circle's founding story?
A: The concept started when, at the age of 35, I had just got out of a long-term relationship. I was looking around on online dating sites and found they were too concerned with quantity rather than quality. I believed online dating was going to be the future but that it should be focused around the quality of matches. This sparked the idea and led me to launch The Inner Circle in 2012.
Q: Who do you admire?
A: I believe Donald Glover is the entertainment industry's most multi-talented creative individual of our generation.
Q: Looking back, is there anything you would have done differently?
A: When we originally launched, we hosted our first event in London and it turned into a massive party. We decided to have an open bar which didn't end up being the best idea. The combination of free drinks and English singletons made for some interesting scenes. Lesson learned!
Q: What defines your way of doing business?
A: Move fast, always improve, make mistakes and learn.
The Founding Story of Paktor
ENTREPRENEUR – Dec 11 – Paktor, best-known as a Tinder rival in Asia, was launched in June 2013. Since then, the app has launched in 12 countries, including Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, Indonesia, and Hong Kong. It secured funding from investors like Yahoo Japan-affiliate YJ Capital and Singapore's Vertex Ventures. The founders of Paktor are primary school classmates – Joseph Phua and Ng Jing Shen. After completing his MBA from University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, Joseph returned to Asia to start Paktor. The app, however, couldn't handle the high volume of users and crashed. He then reached out to Jing Shen, a University of Michigan graduate, for help, who at that time was working with Amazon as a software engineer and was a part of the team that re-architected one of the world’s first cloud computing services, S3. Today, Paktor has 15M users. In 2014, the founders launched its offline dating counterpart, GaiGai which specializes in matchmaking via its in-house matching system and personalization.
RealBlackLove Fills the Void for Relationship Minded African-Americans
NORTH CAROLINA BUSINESS NEWS WIRE – Dec 11 – Joseph Dixon decided to fill the void for people who are relationship-minded African-Americans. In 2013, with his background in web development, Dixon launched Charlotte-based RealBlackLove, an online dating site for African-American singles. RBL is currently at 200K members nationwide, but with its updated version, Dixon thinks it will hit the 1M mark within a year. In 2015, Dixon started professional matchmaking.
by Myah Ward
See full article at WralTechWire
The Meet Group: Live Streaming Can Ease Loneliness
DOWNLOAD – Dec 11 – In a recent study, Cigna, the health insurance provider, concluded that loneliness is an epidemic afflicting most Americans, but that Generation Z (18-22) and Millennials (23-37) suffer from feelings of disconnection the most. The study also found that those who engaged in frequent meaningful interactions were less lonely and those who did it daily felt even less isolated. The Meet Group, which owns social dating apps MeetMe, Skout, Tagged and LOVOO, was curious to see if the Live video chat component of its MeetMe app could make its users feel more connected. The company sent out a survey to MeetMe users, and of the 6K respondents, 70% reported that using the Live video feature very often made them feel less lonely. On average, as of Q3 2018, the platform had 117K broadcasters each day with an average of ~25M minutes spent in video daily in October.
by Joshua Rotter
See full article at Download
Coffee Meets Bagel Goes Anti-Tinder With a Redesign Focused on Profiles & Conversations
by Sarah Perez
See full article at Tech Crunch