THE MORNING SHOW – June 26 – Christy Edwards Lawton is the brains behind Righter – an app designed to help President Trump fans find one another. "I had a demand coming from some veterans and men, masculine men who felt that they were being suppressed a bit," Lawton said. "So I decided to launch an app for conservatives, and men and women who were seeking traditional values and monogamous dating, and were sick and tired of hookups." Lawton has also previously said feminists weren't allowed on her app.
Month: June 2019
Tinder Launches “Right to Love” Feature to Support the Equality Act
BUSTLE – June 25 – Members of the LGBTQ community still aren't protected from discrimination under federal law. But in an important move forward, the Equality Act was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate in March 2019. The bill passed the House in May and awaits approval by the Senate. Now, during Pride month, Tinder's #RightToLove feature encourages people to contact their senators in support of the Equality Act. Tinder's #RightToLove campaign, which includes a PRIDE Slide in New York City that will donate $10 from every trip down the slide to the Human Rights Campaign in support of the Equality Act, is a call to action to ensure everyone's rights are protected under the law.
Half of Dutch Young Adults Use Dating Apps
NLTIMES – June 25 – Nearly half of Dutch between the ages of 18 and 34 are active on dating sites or apps like Tinder, Happn and Grindr. Just over half of all Dutch think that getting a date online is just as normal as using more traditional methods, according to a survey among 1K Dutch people by research agency Ipsos, and researched by Rutgers and the Volkskrant. In total, one in five Dutch have an online dating profile. Tinder is the most popular dating app, with 13% of Dutch using it, followed by Happn with 3% and Grindr with 2%.
by Janene Pieters
See full article at NLTimes
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China’s Millennials Are Mourning the End of an Era in Online Hook-up Culture
QUARTZ – June 25 – Tencent, the Chinese technology giant that operates messaging app WeChat, has shut down an anonymous chat function, called "drift bottle". On drift bottle, users could "throw" bottles containing either a text or voice message into a virtual ocean or "pick up" floating ones. The function allowed users to stay anonymous, but people could also exchange contact details through the bottles. Tencent announced in December that it would suspend drift bottle on both QQ Mail and WeChat, after it found that users had been spreading pornography or soliciting prostitution on the platform. In April, the company said it would officially shut down the chat programme on QQ Mail on June 24. It has not said whether drift bottle would be resumed on WeChat. For many of China's Internet users, particularly those born in the 1980s, drift bottle was a go-to-place for finding either friendship or romance online. With the rise of local dating apps and social networks such as Momo and Weibo, drift bottle is now largely an object of nostalgia for China's Internet users.
Match Stock Rides Tinder App, Overseas Growth as Taboos Die Out
INVESTORS.COM – June 25 – Shares in Match have shot up 75% from a year ago despite Facebook moving aggressively into dating. Match stock popped 7.5% to 71.74 on the stock market today. With the gain, the company is trading less than 5% below a buy point of 75.38. The company gets nearly half its revenue from Tinder. Overseas growth in markets such as India, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea is key for Tinder and other products. In April, Match hired Ravi Mehta as its new chief product officer. Mehta had served as Facebook's product director for youth engagement. At Facebook, he helped develop Lasso, a competitor to the popular TikTok short video sharing app. Match is adding video to the Tinder app. Still, some analysts are cautious on the Match strategy. In May, Goldman Sachs analyst Michael Ng upgraded Match stock to neutral from sell.
Tinder Celebrates World Pride With 30-Foot Rainbow Slide in New York City
Tech Companies ‘Must Take Responsibility’ for Dating App Safety
IRISH TIMES – June 25 – Tech companies must take responsibility for the use of their apps by sexual predators and not leave it up to women to take extra measures to keep themselves safe, the National Women's Council of Ireland (NWCI) has said. "Women should be able to use dating apps without fearing for their safety," said NWCI director Orla O'Connor following the jailing of rapist Patrick Nevin. He was jailed on Monday for 12 years for attacking three women in the space of 11 days after meeting them on Tinder. Dublin Senator Catherine Noone called for all sex offenders to be banned from using dating apps for life, saying it was "common sense" to restrict these people from interacting with others online. "People should always take precautions on dating apps but they should also expect some level of security vetting when using these apps. By introducing measures that will ban individuals convicted of a sexual crime, we can begin to provide this level of security."
Couples Who Meet Online Are More Diverse
PEW RESEARCH – June 24 – According to recent Pew Research Center analysis, couples who meet online are more likely to be diverse. But this can be explained by the fact that online daters tend to be younger than those who meet offline, and younger people are more likely to be in relationships with people who are different from them, regardless of how they meet. In the study (which included 3,394 U.S. adults who are currently married, in a relationship or who have ever previously been in a relationship), the median age of people who met their partners online was 36, compared with 51 among those who met their partners in another way. Three-in-ten of those who say they met their partner online report that their partner is a different race or ethnicity, compared with 19% of those who met their partner offline.
Mary Meeker’s 2019 Internet Trends Report
TECH CRUNCH – June 24 – Bond Capital founder and former Kleiner Perkins general partner Mary Meeker made her presentation onstage at Vox/Recode's Code Conference in Scottsdale, Ariz. on Tuesday. Meeker first crafted a report of this kind, which underlines the most important statistics and technology trends on the Internet, in 1995. This morning, Meeker highlighted slowed growth in e-commerce sales, increased Internet ad spending, data growth, as well as the rise of freemium subscription business models, telemedicine, photo-sharing, interactive gaming, the on-demand economy and more. Here's a look at all 333 slides.
Nabil Ghaly Is the Engineer Who Says OKCupid Ripped Off His Patent
HEAVY.COM – June 24 – Nabil Ghaly is an engineer, an inventor, and a business owner. He is also the plaintiff in a case which charges that Humor Rainbow, the parent company of OkCupid, illegally used technology that he had patented over 15 years ago. Ghaly says that he sent repeated letters to Humor Rainbow to alert them to the fact that he had already patented the technology. He asked them to sign a licensing agreement but, he says, they declined. That's when Ghaly decided to bring the matter to court. Ghaly's patent infringement case opened on June 20 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. Ghaly filed for a patent for a hand-held matchmaking device in 1999. His system would ask participants multiple choice questions in order to create a profile. The device would store that information and then use it to determine whether participants were compatible with each other. Ghaly charges that back in 1999, this was a brand new idea and that he deserves credit for his prescience. His complaint charges that OkCupid didn't file for a patent for a mobile dating app until 2013 (that patent was granted in 2017). It's not clear whether Ghaly also intends to go after other dating apps for patent violation. Humor Rainbow settled a previous patent violation lawsuit from the parent company of JDate. The patent describes a computerized system for deciding whether two people are interested in each other. Under the system, the two people are notified if they are mutually interested in each other.