Category: All Interviews

Arthur Radulescu, CEO, ASE Softnet

Posted on January 20, 2009

Arthur radulescu OPW INTERVIEW — Jan 20 — Arthur Radulescu is the CEO and founder of ASE Softnet, the company behind several quite popular internet dating and social networking sites. – Mark Brooks

What is your founding story?
I started working in the internet industry almost 10 years ago. I had almost no idea about computers or programming. I spent the first 3 or 4 years working all the time including weekends, which allowed me to get all the information I needed in order to start my own company.

I had the advantage of discovering the Internet in its early stages. In the last 10 years we’ve built hundreds of websites including dating and community sites.

What are some of the top internet dating sites that you built?
One of the biggest and I think one of the most known websites, we’ve worked on few years ago, was a gay dating site Adam4Adam.com. Other websites, we’ve worked on, were Mary.com, PeopleFishing.com, MyPartner.com and Shopmania.com which is a price comparison and also social shopping community.

Which sites would you say you’re most proud of and why?
At this moment the website, I’m most proud of, is Shopmania.com because it combines everything we’ve learned so far. It’s a very large community of users in 25 countries and is translated into 15 languages.

What would you say is your site building philosophy?
I think we can always do better than what we did last time. With every new site we build, we try to bring in something new and this helps us to evolve. Also it’s important for us to work on some challenging websites that require interesting and complex solutions.

What are the main building blocks? What are the main technologies that you like to use?
We’re using PHP, Perl and MySQL. We’re also developing on Oracle. But what we like using most is PHP, Perl. It’s very fast and reliable.

What do you do better than your competition?
We’re not only doing programming, we offer programming consulting services. We’ve built so many websites and have some very good knowledge with internationalization and localization, adapting the software to different languages and regional differences. Even though it seems easy, it’s not. We have a very powerful mechanism that we developed for creating multi-language websites. There are many problems that can appear when you develop an international website starting with computer text and coding, formatting of numbers, writing directions from left to right or from right to left that could cause problems in design.

What proportion of your business now would you say is social networking and internet dating related?
It’s about 50%.

How is business now? The climate has changed a bit so have you seen things move in any direction?
We still have enough clients and I would not consider this a significant crisis. I think things are going to change in the next year and we’ll get back to normal. On the other hand, I think in such periods you have the opportunity to develop a new business because the competition is less significant.

I must say your pricing has been extremely competitive in the past. What would you charge for building a dating site like Date.com?
It’s hard to say. It really depends on the requirements. You need to consider more and you can’t build a website like Date.com from the first step. A website like this gets developed in time. There is a first version, then a second version and then it will improve. The website will need millions of users and this can’t happen in a month.

Say if you had 6 months to work on a site, what kind of ball park price would you say?
I would say from $30,000 to $50,000. But again we build the first version and then improve it. You can’t launch a perfect website. You need to understand this because this needs to be added to your marketing strategies. You have to wait 3 or 4 months to get the best conversion, to see the website is perfect and then okay you can put money into advertising.

The dating industry seems to be doing quite well right now surprisingly or not surprisingly really if you think about it. On the one hand, we were concerned about the slump and people bailing on their memberships but on the other hand it still represents a pretty good deal. So business is up.

Christian Wiklund, CEO, Skout.com

Posted on January 18, 2009

SKOUT_new_landing_pageOPW INTERVIEW — Jan 18 — This is Mark Brooks with Social Networking Now. I’m here with Christian Wiklund who is the CEO and founder of Skout.com. Christian thanks for joining us.

What is Skout‘s founding story?
The founding story is pretty interesting. I was actually snowboarding at Lake Tahoe 2 years ago and was figuring ‘why can’t I upload a picture from my mobile phone out of this beautiful mountain to share this with my friends and have it shipped to their web browser.’ So with that premise I thought of building a prototype with some of my friends that later became the co-founders of Skout.

We quickly transformed it into a location based social networking service. We thought that it would be pretty interesting to keep track of your friends, where they are what they are doing? Then it developed into ‘who is around me and what are they posting?’

i.e. ‘what strangers around me in San Francisco and what pictures did they post tonight? What is up in my town?’ All this from a little device. We then in 2008 created our user base and looked at what everyone is doing with Skout and it turned out that 83% said we’re using Skout for dating and flirting. The killer space is going to be dating and we decided to move full throttle into that space. That is why we’re now announcing that Skout is the first ever LBS social dating platform.

So are you relying on the telephone to tell the Skout service where people are at?
The core philosophy we have in the company is to not exclude people based on their device or based on what carrier they happen to be on. So we want to cover even the simplest handset, so as far as location goes if you don’t have access to a fancy device you can enter the location manually. You can actually tell the service I am in Seattle at this address or you can tell it I’m in L.A. at this address by entering it in clear text.

As the device becomes more sophisticated, for instance with the iPhone app, which we’re launching very, very soon, we take the GPS chip and just make a query to that and get exact GPS coordinates or cell tower coordinates. So depending on the device you have a different experience, more or less automatic.

So what are some examples of phones that will do location based services and talk to Skout right now?
iPhone is one. Android is interesting with Google Gears because it can actually make queries to the location API via the web browser? Skout works on any phone that can access mobile web, so we have built 4 different interfaces for the mobile web experience. We know what phone you’re accessing Skout from. So depending on the screen size and the properties of the phone we’re going to direct you to a unique experience, one of those four.

It’s very, very costly to support many platforms. We have to look at the mobile ecosystem. It’s more or less what the internet was in 1995 with a lot of platform fragmentation and a lot of big players who do not want to play well together.

So let me pose a scenario for you, it’s Friday afternoon and I’m sitting in a coffee shop and I sign into Skout and I would like to go on a date. What happens next?
What happens on Skout is we have passive and active Skout. So you actively open up a browser for your mobile web experience and you say I want to see other singles that match the criteria I’m looking for in the area. We’re going to make a query against our database and depending on how much traction there is recently in the area, we’re going to present singles to you, as close as possible.

So let’s say Sarah is 5 blocks away, you will be able to see that Sarah is 5 blocks away, you will not be able to see exactly the address but you’ll see the distance. You can then start chatting with her and look at her pictures.

You might be in transit, you might be in a classroom, etc. and use active scouting to look for profiles in your phone…who is close to where I am, who is active right now, who was active within the last 2 hours?

Then we have passive scouting where we set up something called the geo-sense. What is a geo-sense? That is when you say I want to meet someone who fulfills these different criteria and I’m willing to travel “x” amount of miles today. So then you put the phone in your pocket and as the match enters this geo-sense which might be a 10 block or 5 block radius, you’ll get a text message sent to your phone saying hey Mark we’ve found a match that just went online on Skout. She is 5 miles away, click here to start chatting.

You click on the link and depending on what device you have its going to open up the mobile web experience and you can instantly look at their profile and she’s going to be online so if you send her a chat message and start chatting instantly. So Skout is all about the conversation.

Can you also set certain criteria? So you would say I’m only interested in people within this age range who also don’t smoke and that sort of thing?
In the first release for the Skout dating release we have age definitely, we have been quite lightweight on other properties. We believe that love is about the conversation and not about algorithms. So we are trying a lightweight approach where the profile picture and your age and the conversation via mobile chat is going to help you decide if this is a good match or not. We believe timing, location, profile picture together with age is going to take you quite far.

How about video?
Six years ago I was able in modern Europe to do video conferencing on my cell phone. The phones in the US right now do not have this capability and I definitely see that coming. I see it as the next step. So if you look at the communication abilities of Skout, first you can do what we have now which is chat and the next step I see anonymous VOIP or an anonymous numbered call and talk to the person in the here and now and the next step will be video.

Skout is the mobile social network for the internet dating and social networking conference which is coming up in Miami on January 22 to 23. Can you tell us more about how that is going to work for the attendees?
Yes I’m very excited about this initiative. What is going to happen is everyone who comes to the conference is going to be preregistered on Skout. They are going to be friends with everyone else who is at the conference. What does that mean? You can instantly get an overview from your mobile phone what is going on at the conference.

Let’s say my business development guy is looking for a content exchange deal with some company. He can place the post in his phone, hey I’m Rich from Skout and I’m looking for content exchange deal, please chat me up. He can instantly get replies from other users at the conference.

We did our first actual real life case for this in San Francisco at a conference where there were 300 attendees and we had 70% signing in and using the service and chatting about the different panels. They sent pictures and they tied the conference together in a very interesting way. I think it will be very, very possible.

Is there any way we can live blog the sessions?
Yes definitely and we even have RSS feeds. So you could actually post an RSS feed from the conference, so anything that happens at the conference could go out to the outer world. Basically the text updates we have are very comparable to Twitter, so you can post 140 character text from your phone. If you want to take a picture you can take a picture, we also support video. So if you have a mobile device capable of recording video you can post it at Skout and its going to show up in the RSS feed tagged with the location, who sent it and when it was sent. Then other users at the conference can comment on the different media that is being submitted by the users.

Christian thank you so much for your time. You’ve been listening to Social Networking Now.

Here’s a demo of Skout on YouTube.

Robert Wuttke, Be2 CEO And Founder Interview

Posted on December 20, 2008

Robert_Wuttke OPW INTERVIEW — Dec 20 — You’ll be hearing more about be2. They are a rising star in Europe and are launching in the USA. The company is founded and run by Robert Wuttke, PhD. He’s a regular attendee at the internet dating conferences in the USA and Europe. – Mark Brooks

What is your background and the founding story of be2?
I have a PhD in sociology and history. I did my studies in Germany and Italy and then spent a year at MIT in Boston. I focused on sociology and have my first business experience in the media industry with Bertelsmann AG and Lycos Europe. At that time I became aware of the first internet dating products, which fascinated me because online dating can bring together people who would otherwise have had no chance to meet each other offline.

Congratulations on the round of funding you just received. What will you do with the 15 million Euro?
We are going to focus on improving our service, which has always been our priority. Then we’ll further expand our product into other countries. But in particular we want to start penetrating the markets we’re in now, serve those markets better and increasing our respective market share.

Why do you think personality profiling works well for dating sites?
There are different people with different needs on dating sites. One of the needs is to find somebody for a long term relationship. Typically people 25+ have put this focus much more up front. So for somebody, who is looking for a long term relationship, it makes more sense to find the compatible matches immediately instead of browsing through a database and finding out later whether the person is a match or not.

In general, how do you think personality profiling on dating sites can be improved?
They will get better not just by becoming more reliable in terms of psychology but also through other things like the expression of attitudes, preferences and interests with sophisticated algorithms, rather than just simple questionnaires. There are a lot of things that will be done over the next couple of years and I think we’re just seeing the beginning of what is going to happen. What makes the be2 test very strong is that the number of questions is very elegantly reduced. We don’t ask irrelevant questions and I think this is something that users appreciate. We are going to improve the test even more now.

I understand be2 has very aggressively opened up in a number of countries, over 30 countries at this stage. What are your lead countries at this stage?
We like the Spanish speaking countries, but also are intrigued in what’s going on in Europe overall and central Europe where we are less present at the moment. But this is something that will also change over the next year or so because we’re now going to use the funding to start penetrating markets better. Right now you can say be2 does not have a single location it would depend on in terms of revenues.

Are there any particular people that you would like to reach out to people in the next year or so?
I’m looking forward to continuing our dialogue with academics.

See all posts on be2

Eve Peters, CEO of MIXTT.com Interview

Posted on December 13, 2008

Eve peters mixtt OPW INTERVIEW — Dec 13 — MIXTT has a spin on the traditional one-on-one date that appeals to the younger set. Group dating. I spoke with the CEO and Founder of MiXTT, Eve Peters. – Mark Brooks

What is your background Eve?
I studied Economics and Public Policy at Stanford, then worked at Accenture and two different law firms.  Starting MIXTT was a major switch for me; I was gearing toward being a lawyer until I had the idea to start the company.

How did you come to found MIXTT.com?
I had used Match.com and JDate, and found that they weren’t a good fit for my generation, nor for people who were relatively social. I think the one-on-one date is becoming a less and less frequent occurrence for people of younger generations. So I had this idea that there should be a group dating site. There should be a way to meet people without having to set up a romantic date as on Match.com or E-Harmony. There should be something more casual.

At that time I headed down to Argentina to live there for a year. It had been a dream of mine, and it was the right time in my life. I had plans for volunteering and other sorts of work with non-profit organizations while I was down there. What ended up happening, though, was that I serendipitously came across an ex-venture capitalist, a tech CEO and a young entrepreneur all within my first couple weeks there. The business idea came up in conversation randomly, and all three of them, from their various perspectives, were highly encouraging about actually pursuing it.

How does it work from a user perspective?
A user signs himself up and then invites his friends to join a group that he creates. So, the friend groups have a group profile together, and people have their individual profiles as well.

You don’t have to have a group to sign up, you can sign up as an individual and find other people in your city that you might want to group up with. But the idea is that you go on there with different friends and you seek out another group of friends who are interested in meeting people.

How is the uptake with the groups so far?
Our growth isn’t as exponential as we would like it to be. It’s going slow and we’re actually seeing more people who are more accustomed to the traditional models – just signing themselves up and not creating groups. But, we do find the ones who are creating groups tend to be more active on the site. They’re communicating more with each other, sending messages and planning dates, etc. MIXTT is more friends meeting each other for play and for friendship, which can ultimately evolve into dating.

Is there any functionality within there to help people invite new people into the group?
Absolutely. There is a simple Invite to Group feature. So you can invite anyone that looks interesting. If you don’t want them to be permanently a part of your group you just send them a message and clue them in on the plan. Also each group has a social calendar where they post what they’re up to.

What happens when all 3 guys like a particular woman I wonder?
That’s a good question and it comes up a lot. I think what happens in that scenario is what would happen in real life. It’s no more magical then the way dating works in real life. In fact, it’s supposed to emulate the way people go out and meet each other in real life. Luckily, with groups of friends, I find that typically we don’t all go after the same guy. Everyone has his or her particular taste. So I’m sure that’s bound to happen here and there, but people will deal with it the same way they would if they had met that group of 3 girls or 3 guys in a bar.

How do you make money?
Ha – we don’t make money. Yet. We just launched in September, so our priority is really getting traction right now. Down the road the plan is threefold – ads, premium services, and affiliate programs. We have worked out programs with Open Table and Ticketmaster, so that when groups go to dinner, an event or a concert, they can do that right through the site, and we can capture a piece of each of those transactions.

Tim Rees, Internet Dating Affiliate Interview

Posted on December 6, 2008

DSC00051 OPW INTERVIEW — Dec 6 — Tim Rees is the former CEO of World Dating Partners. He’s back to being an affiliate. – Mark Brooks

What are you working on these days?
Since leaving World Dating Partners I’ve gone back to what I used to do beforehand. I used to be an affiliate for lots of different sites. I’m contacting as many different sites and systems as I can, charting them out and running with the ones that are making me the most money, which currently looks to be White Label Dating.

I used to have a company doing just this about 2 or 3 years ago, and it worked quite successfully for me back then. Now I’ve got even more exposure of the market, more knowledge so I’m trying to use that to my advantage and give it a better run and make it even more successful this time around.

What did you learn while you were at WDP?
Before I had worked there I had experience of being a member on different dating sites and also having promoted them as an affiliate. I had a lot of experience as an affiliate. What I didn’t have was the missing piece of the puzzle which was working within those companies and seeing how they work behind the scenes. Now I know what I can realistically expect from service providers and affiliate programs.

What are the main types of affiliates?
In terms of generating the revenues, there are different types of affiliates that can drive big traffic. There are big publishing media companies, there are some sites that may just have a huge subscriber base of their own that they can cross promote to, then there are more stereotypical affiliates that know how to market, where to buy the traffic from, how much they can buy it for and how to optimize their campaigns, monitor their landing pages and conversion rates. These are the affiliates that are able to generate big revenues by themselves.

What are they using?
PPC is the most popular marketing method and the easiest for affiliates to monitor. You should know exactly what your margins are before you go and buy the traffic. You don’t have to spend a huge amount of time building up your sites and getting natural traffic to it. It’s very difficult these days. You can just build a campaign, turn it on, optimize it and get rid of everything that’s not working.

How about you Tim, what are you doing?
What I’ve been doing over the past couple of months is testing the various sites that I’m promoting to find out what the conversion and retention rates are like. That’s something which can be difficult to obtain because you need 6 to 9 months to understand what is happening. But you are able to get some indication from the conversion and early retention rates as to whether or not there are any trends.

What I prefer to do is run some sites with low traffic first to build up my analytics. Then use those to build out more heavily invested PPC campaigns. It’s also possible to buy and generate traffic from many other sources other than Google, you just need to search for them. Providing you can separate all your campaigns and monitor each carefully you can quickly find out which are the best areas to focus and increase your spending on. Even when I am running a heavy bias to one system or site I still continue to run campaigns with others so that I have a point of comparison and if needs be I can switch.

At the moment for my own dating projects I am working mostly with WhiteLabelDating.com. I am familiar with all providers out there but seem to be getting best results through them. They have been very helpful and flexible enough to accommodate some of my custom requests which I need to continue to grow my business as quickly as I want. It’s still early days but the revenues are exceeding my expectations.

It’s no secret that I have big plans for my own in-house developed projects, but using a 3rd party like White Label for me is the best solution; there is no development time or costs, no heavy investment needed to hit critical mass and brings my revenues forward many months, immediately on to an aggressive growth curve.

Are there any favorite resources that you use for tips for affiliate marketing?
I use WebMaster World and Revenue Magazine to stay up on the industry and occasionally extract tips for affiliate marketing. One of my favourite sites is entrepreneur.com, a great resource with articles on most areas of running any business. A good forum to also visit is affialites4u.com. I also subscribe to .net magazine in the UK which keeps me up to speed with any internet developments.

What are you going to be doing for the next few months besides your affiliate work?
I’m very excited about a few areas of technology, like video streaming, content sharing and mobile. I’m testing a few products at the moment in these areas and developing some of our own. Early 2009 I’ll have some announcements which I hope are going to provide some interesting additional services for dating, social networking and mobile companies.

See all posts on WorldDatingPartners
See all posts on WhiteLabelDating

Merav Knafo, LookBetterOnline Co-Founder Interview

Posted on November 29, 2008

MeravmatchOPW INTERVIEW — Nov 29 — Merav and Dave know photography. They can help users take them, and crop them. – Mark Brooks

Can you tell us more about LookBetterOnline.com? How was the company founded?
I met my partner Dave, who used to be a photographer, on Matchmaker.com years ago. He told me how hard it was for him to find a professional photographer to take his photos. Then we started talking about it and came to the conclusion that there could be a market for a photography service just for people who date online and that’s how it started.

We decided to create a nationwide database of photographers so people can find somebody closer to them and don’t have to drive too far or even the photographer can come to them. So it’s all about convenience about finding those photographers. I am the web developer and Dave is the ex-photographer and he’s also the project manager. So it is a good partnership.

Why do people need accurate photos?
You can’t expect to find good quality dates with a photo that doesn’t do you justice. The biggest mistake people do is they use a snapshot from a holiday or from a party and others can’t really see what they look like and tell if they like them. Therefore they will be hesitant in writing to them.

Now a key distinction here from what I understand is you don’t do glamour photographs.
We don’t. It’s very important to us and that’s how we train our photographers. We don’t want people to look over done, desperate or look like they’re trying too hard. We want them to look natural. So that’s why we train our photographers to take the photos as much as possible in natural lighting meaning outside the studios if possible, not to use any backdrops or anything cheesy.

You’ve partnered with a number of internet dating and a few social networking sites. Who are your top partners?
Our top partners are big sites like Match.com, Cupid.com, ChristianCafé, J-Date, American Singles and a bunch of others. We also partner with a lot of dating coaches who realized very quickly that their customers need good photos. Some of them include it in their package.

Why have they partnered with you? What is the deal for them?
For the dating sites it’s very simple. They want their customers to be happy on their website. If they have a good photo, they have a better experience on the site and stay longer. Also dating sites use the photos to attract new customers. The other reason is commissions which is another source of revenue.

People go onto a personal site to ‘shop’ for people so it makes sense if they look good.
Yes I think sometimes it’s just dreadful. You go to a dating site and you think should I join it or not? You do a search and you see all these ugly photos, unattractive photos and I’m sure the people are not as unattractive as their photos but it just doesn’t make a really good impression.

People are not necessarily looking for super models but they do want to know what they’re getting into. They want to know when they go on a date that the person is going to look like their photos and there is not going to be any surprises.

Another common problem is cropping the photos. A lot of times people take a photograph and they’re way off in the distance or they’ve got other people in the photograph. So you created CroppingTool.com. Tell me more about that.
Cropping Tool is a really cool tool that allows the dating site to crop the faces of the photos and leave everything else aside. I know some dating sites are doing it manually or semi-manually. They have people sitting and cropping those heads out of the photos and it just takes a long time and it costs them a lot of money. We created this tool that does it automatically based on the location of the eyes and all kinds of other parameters. It took us 2 years to develop it.

What else do you have in the pipeline for the dating and social networking industry?
We just launched a new site called BetterBusinessShots.com which is for business photos. We would like to partner with business networks such as LinkedIn, real estate agent sites and whoever needs good photos. Our prices are very reasonable starting from $99 for a photo shoot.

We are expanding to other verticals like pet photography (BetterPetShots.com), babies and couples. We have a few in the pipeline… The reason we wanted to do this is because we have a database of great photographers. They’re already trained to take the photos the way we want. It took us a long time to create this kind of database of quality photographers. So why not use them for other verticals as well. So that’s going to be rolling out in the next couple of months.

See all posts on LookBetterOnline

Hannah Schwartz, RSVP CEO Interview

Posted on November 22, 2008

Hannah SchwartzOPW INTERVIEW — Nov 22 — RSVP is Australia’s favorite internet dating company. Here’s my interview with their CEO. – Mark Brooks

Do you think the Australian people are more accepting of internet dating these days? How does that compare with the USA?
There is still a lower penetration or uptake of singles who are online in Australia. We estimate that around 14% of our target audience is online and using dating sites comparing to 25+% in US.

The other thing we’re seeing now is that our members are much more comfortable talking about their experiences and saying they’re on RSVP. However we still have work to do to convince advertisers that a dating site is the right environment for their brand. About 10 to 15% of our revenue comes from advertisers. We are seeing more and more success with lead generation advertisers, those that get the fact that people come to our site and want to transact.

What kind of companies are advertising at RSVP?
The financial brands, those that are looking to get credit cards and mortgage type submissions. We’re also seeing cosmetics brands. Our biggest opportunity is around the fact that we are a very data rich site. We know a lot about our members. Of course, we don’t reveal their identity but we know their age, location, income level and we know, for example, if they’re a smoker or non-smoker or if they’re a single parent or not.

One of the best examples I can share with you is a campaign we ran for Nicabate which is a “stop smoking” product. We built a unique community for them that reached over 250 of our members who said yes they are smokers but they want to stop smoking. So that’s a perfect example of how we can take this data rich information and tailor it to an advertisers unique needs.

I think our ad opportunity is the same that the larger social networks are working towards, which is how do we utilize the information to create and target ads in a way that is appropriate? I think that we all are in this place of experimentation.

You’ve launched a number of RSVP Communities recently. Which have been the most popular?
We’ve launched over 25 communities. We just did this initiative within the last 2 months and to date 85,000 of our members have joined one of these 25 communities. Our most popular ones for example are food and wine lovers. We’re also seeing tremendous traction in adventure travelers and the dating life. Our first and foremost goal was to help our members, enable them to find like minded people. Now we are starting to get advertisers coming forward, some deals are just about finalized.

Congratulations on launching your anonymous calling product. How’s that working out for you?
We’ve worked with a 3rd party provider. It’s a way for 2 people to connect anonymously either through a land line or a mobile phone. Our members are telling us that they’re finding it very useful. It’s fair to say that predominantly those people, who are very active on the site, are using it. People who are new to the site probably are a little more cautious about it. And I think as awareness and understanding grows, its usage will continue to grow.

Who do you regard as your top competitors in Australia at this stage?
I’ve been in my role for the last 15 months and I would say the competitive landscape has changed in the last year. There is the growth of the social networks which are very popular but not necessarily a place people go to find dates.

We also see a growth of free dating sites. We’re actually benefiting from this. There is a lot of confidence around the fact that people on our site are serious about relationships. And if they’ve contacted you they’ve spent money to contact you and that gives you more trust as well.

So our membership is growing and we still remain the largest player. We’ve got 1.3 million members with 1,000 to 1,500 new members joining each day.

See all posts on RSVP

Violet Lim, Co-founder Of Lunch Actually Interview

Posted on November 15, 2008

OPW INTERVIEW — Nov 15 — I met Violet at the Matchmakers Conference in September. She’s runs Lunch Actually in Singapore. – Mark Brooks

Tell me about Lunch Actually.
My husband and I started Lunch Actually in 2004. It’s a company that arranges one to one lunch dates for business professionals. Ever since we launched 2 other branches. One is in Malaysia and one in Hong Kong in additional to our office in Singapore.

How does it work?
Client comes to our office for a face to face consultation and this is when we screen them. Once they decide to join, we start looking for suitable matches for them. Once a match is found we will arrange everything from booking a restaurant to reminding them about the date. After each date we require feedback which is very important because this is how we fine-tune what they’re looking for and then we set them up with their next match.

What do you charge?
Our fee ranges from about 850 sing dollars 1650 sing dollars.

And you have another site, Interact right?
Yes that’s right. Interact is a company that does something totally different. Eteract.com is an online portal where singles can go online and interact with each other. We have online speed dating, 3D chat rooms, so singles can dress up their avatar and send gifts to each other and that has worked very well for us.

I think the government has had some involvement with that?
The government doesn’t have a stake in it but in the past years the government has been very interested in the dating industry. They have set up a funding for the dating industry. It’s called Partner Connection Fund. So new dating agencies or active dating agencies can tap onto this funding, outline what their plans are get 50,000 sing dollars max. Eteract has tapped onto this funding and received about 49,000 from the government to develop the site.

So what’s next?
We are looking to start another branch once the one stabilizes in Hong Kong. Our next destination will be in Shanghai. Eteract is currently available in Singapore and once we’re done developing it (we’re still in the Beta) we are going to grow it out regionally in Asia and eventually worldwide.

Joel D Block, Ph.D., Personality Profiling – OPW Interview

Posted on November 8, 2008

OPW INTERVIEW — Nov 8 — Dr Block does personality profiling.  He’s available to help dating sites add personality profiling. – Mark Brooks

What is your background? Tell us about yourself.
I took my PhD at Syracuse University. Since then I have about 30 years experience working exclusively with relationships. Love and sex are my specialties and my 19th book on those subjects will be out next year. I’ve been honored by a professional organization as Outstanding Couple Therapist and I am a senior psychologist at a teaching hospital as well as faculty at the Einstein College of Medicine in NY.

Would you say you’re a fan of internet dating?
A big fan. There are a lot of people that I see, single men and women, who have been very successful; sometimes they are frustrated but that’s part of the process. They are way more successful online than they would be going to a bar or just other ways of meeting people. They have wider ranges of choices; they will most likely find other singles on the dating sites rather than at the pub. It’s also more affordable.

Who would you say in your opinion has the best personality profiling system right now?
Oh, tough question. I really haven’t studied every single test that’s out there. But of what I’ve seen, I like mine the best.

With the rise of dating sites, there are some people who have been trying to turn romance into a branch of applied mathematics. They’ve been trying to reduce decisions about love into statistical equations. It doesn’t
work.

What some people have realized is that love is too complex to be reduced to a peer reviewed article. I bring not only scientific credibility but after 30 years of working with couples, I have a sense of the poetry needed to match couples.

I have a compatibility test that has 24 questions which takes about 15 minutes to complete. The questions are the kinds of things that are engaging because people relate to them and they strike a familiar chord. The answers go from 0 – not a chance, all the way through possibly, likely, almost certainly, or for 4 points – definitely.

I hear there are 2 schools of thought. One school of thought says that you can most easily match people based on similarity. The other school of thought says that you end up with better matches if you match based on complementary factors. What are your thoughts on that?
I agree with both. A lot of relationships work because one person is dominant and the other one is submissive. Submission and dominance are two factors that are complementary. Then there are other factors like intimacy needs and social needs such as introversion and extroversion that are similarity factors. So I think that it’s not either/or but a really good test, as mine is, has both.

Are you a fan of the Meyers-Briggs test?
Not so much. First of all, Meyers-Briggs is not quite a compatibility test and it’s a little bit of a stretch in terms of using it on a romantic basis.

There are different versions but there isn’t a “romantic” version of the Meyers-Briggs. I’m not that set against it, it’s just not something I would prefer. With my test, I do the matches and I tell you what your chances are and why this person is a good match for you.

What’s more, there is an open offer: Any dating site that uses my test and matches a couple who marry—my team will pay for a Vegas Honeymoon!

You have a new book coming out, tell us more.
The book is The Real Reasons Men Commit, Why He Will—or Won’t—Love, Honor and Marry You. It’s a book primarily for women, although I’ve had a couple of men read it and really love it. In fact, Mario Lopez, considered to be the most eligible bachelor by People magazine, wrote the cover blurb and said he learned a lot from it. But it’s mostly for women and it’s how to find a commitment oriented guy and avoid the commitment phobic guy.

I did this book with a single woman, a Broadway actress, Kimberly Dawn Neumann and we developed several new concepts. One term we came up with is vulnerphobia. These are the men who are afraid of being vulnerable. Those men don’t have a strong enough sense of “I” in terms of themselves to create a “We” in their life. The idea of sharing, losing their independence, their sense of themselves, all those things frighten them. The book really goes into detail about how to separate the commitment phobic from the commitment ready. It will be out in December.

Can internet dating services work with you?
There is a growing trend for dating sites to have a group of psychologist-coaches to help people with their relationship issues. I think that is the coming trend and its one of the things I offer. I bring 3 decades of experience to the challenge. So, it’s not just about matching, but it is also about helping couples to make their love last.

I can bring a lot of services to the dating sites, like doing webinars, answering subscriber emails, that sort of direct contact. I’ve written books on most of the couple issues. I wrote a book called “Naked Intimacy”
that has to do with openness. Another book “Broken Promises and Mended Hearts” has to do with trust. I think that dating sites would really prosper from having someone not only help with the matches but help people maintain love; keeping love alive is tough.

Liz Wasserman, Mate1.com – CEO Interview

Posted on November 5, 2008

Liz_wasserman OPW INTERVIEW — Nov 5 — I talked with Mate1.com's CEO, Liz Wasserman on the subject of scamming. – Mark Brooks

What kind of scamming activity have you encountered at Mate1?
We've encountered a wide range of scamming activity. It's evolved over time partly, I think, because people in this industry have been pretty quick to adapt. Scams fall by the wayside as people adapt to them.

In the early days, almost all of it emanated from African countries that don't have laws against wire fraud. From what I could tell, the scammers basically set up call centers full of people who created thousands of fake dating profiles. They would pretend to be very attractive women in the U.S. who were "temporarily" in some African country and needed to get home. They would try to extort money via Western Union. We saw a lot of those, even from Eastern Europe for a while. We actually have a whole catalog of these schemes that we made available on the site (link: http://www.mate1.com/fraud/fraud_warning) because we wanted to tell our members what to look out for.

And then there are the ones you can't really prepare for because they're idiosyncratic. People who are looking for love can be some of the most vulnerable people out there. Anyone who has an attractive picture and can talk their way into someone's heart, basically can very often convince them to send some money. And those often tend to be minor scams, but we do catch them more often than not simply by having undercover customer service agents trolling the site all day long.

We've also used various technologies, like matching up IP's with locations to make sure people aren't misrepresenting where they are, but for the most part it's a matter of constant communication with our customer service department to find out what the latest thing is and to quickly adapt to it.

Have you found the number of scamming incidents increasing?
I think early on we developed a reputation as being tough on scams because it used to be one of our major preoccupations. It ate up a huge amount of our resources. And as we adapted and put in more technological mechanisms to prevent it, scammers who are in-the-know went elsewhere.

Have you found any ways to catch them pre-signup?
There are ways and a lot of them revolve around IP detection – knowing where the person is half the battle. There are certain areas that these people tend to congregate. We have a couple of mechanisms in place to try to shuffle out those people who are clearly suspicious. Luckily, scammers don't tend to be extraordinarily brilliant technologically, so we're able to outsmart them.

I hear the Russians are particularly adept.
We do catch quite a few in Russia and surrounding countries. Then there are some women in Russia who are borderline. You don't know if they're a scammer or just in a really bad situation and you have to be careful to distinguish between the two.

But, yes, they're highly intelligent and highly desperate so you have to watch out for Eastern Europe, for sure. I know there are sites that have blacklists which we do refer to from time to time. I don't know, though, if they're still as good as they used to be. They used to keep fairly up-to-date lists of these personas. There was one called Russianwomenblacklist.com. I think having central repositories that could be intranet shared by people in the industry would be really useful. You just wouldn't want to share it with the scammers.

Any other thoughts on how the industry might be able to work together?
I think people are pretty forthcoming with information in this business. Whenever you meet people at industry events, people like to talk and I think that's a great thing. Anything we in the industry can do to devote and share resources would, in the end, actually be money-saving for all of us. I think it would be great if we could all collaborate and help each other create the best anti-scam systems possible. I would certainly participate in such a thing.

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