LIVEMINT – Dec 25 – Tinder is seen urging its young users to enjoy the pre-adulthood phase in a new digital campaign titled ‘Adulting can Wait’ for India. Made by advertising agency J. Walter Thompson Delhi, the two-minute long campaign features a young woman navigating through a maze enjoying different activities and meeting diverse people. The maze is a metaphor for the life stage itself, as one navigates her way exploring the world and discovering oneself. Taru Kapoor, general manager Tinder India, believes that one’s experiences in her early 20’s serve as lessons in how to adult and eventually settle down.
Category: All Worldwide (non UK/Euro/US)
BharatMatrimony’s TV Commercial: “Find Your Equal”
ETBRANDEQUITY – Dec 20 – BharatMatrimony has launched a TV commercial “Find Your Equal”, starring MS Dhoni, which focuses on women’s right to equality in a relationship.
See full article at ETBrandEquity
Plenty of Fish Is Increasingly Popular in Mexico
FORBES MÉXICO – Dec 18 – With ~1M exchanged on the POF app per week, Mexico is starting to be POF's one of the most important markets. Mexico is a very attractive market because its users are very active and sociable.
AI to Change the Way We Find Romance
THE PEAK MAGAZINE – Dec 18 – In a partnership with Singapore Management University and AI Singapore, Lunch Actually is developing an AI chatbot called Viola. The aim is for it to possess the ability to send reminders of important occasions such as birthdays, suggest restaurant and activities, in the future, even dispense relationship advice. The chatbot will be fed with ~ 1.1B data points from Lunch Actually's database of feedback that it has collected over the years. The system will continue learning based on user interactions. Lunch Actually is one of the largest matchmaking companies in Southeast Asia, with ~1.4M users in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Hong Kong and Indonesia. When the company was launched in 2004, it was very much a brick-and-mortar business, with applicants meeting a consultant before an arranged date. Later the dating app Lunchclick was born.
by Karen Tee
See full article at The Peak Magazine
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.
Matrimony.com Launches Dubai Office
TRADE ARABIA – Dec 7 – Matrimony.com, a leader in online matrimony, has entered the UAE market through its flagship brand BharatMatrimony as part of its strategic expansion plans. The platform has inaugurated an office at Fortune Executive Tower, Jumeirah Lake Towers, Dubai, to serve Indians in the Middle East region. Matrimony.com, a publicly-listed company, is headquartered in Chennai, India.
See full article at Trade Arabia
Bumble’s Debut in India
Women in Shanghai Postponing Marriage in Pursuit of Career: Report
by Zhang Dan
See full article at Global Times
Priyanka Chopra On Her Investment in Bumble
NDTV – Dec 6 – In her first interview since her wedding with American singer Nick Jonas, Priyanka Chopra spoke about her investment in dating app Bumble. Calling herself a "tech fan" and someone who loves doing things "out of the box", Priyanka said that she thought that the app would be an "incredible platform" for women.
Personal Data from 30M Momo Users Reportedly Exposed
TECHNODE – Dec 3 – Personal data from 30M users of China's top dating app Momo is reportedly being sold for as little as RMB 200 (~$30). A Weibo user posted a series of screenshots from the Chinese dark web entitled "database of 30M Momo users" with a comment saying: "Momo's database is quite cheap." According to the screenshots, data on offer includes phone numbers and passwords. The data are from 2015.