NEW YORK TIMES – Mar 20 – Feeld app was released in 2014 by Dimo Trifonov and Ana Kirova, two graphic designers living in London, as 3nder. They hoped to appeal to individuals and partners looking to join or have threesomes. But after Tinder filed a lawsuit and the company rebranded as Feeld , the founders said they welcomed the opportunity to expand the mission of the app. "Feeld is a platform for alternative dating, for people who are beyond labels," said Ms. Kirova. ~35% of users are on the app with a partner, and 45% identify as something other than heterosexual. The company struggled to find funding at first. Many investors considered the app "adult entertainment," which venture capitalists tend to avoid. Eventually an angel investor swooped in to save Feeld, but the fact that the business is sex-related has presented other challenges. The money transfer app TransferWise temporarily blocked Feeld's ability to collect money for paid memberships. Mr. Trifonov also claims he was refused an office rental because the landlord didn't approve of the nature of their business. Now, the company is up and running more or less smoothly, with 20 people employed.
Category: Outlets – New York Times
Refrigerdating: When the Fridge Plays Matchmaker
NEW YORK TIMES – Mar 12 – The first time John Stonehill was invited back to his girlfriend's house, he headed straight for the refrigerator. "I came away knowing a great deal about her," Mr. Stonehill said. "Refrigerators are filled with clues about the people who own them." That idea gave rise to what he calls "refrigerdating." He helped Samsung come up with a Refrigerdating app to prove we are what we eat. The app works with Samsung's Family Hub refrigerator, which sells for ~$3K and has a screen in the door that can show you the contents of your fridge. The idea is that you can look at your phone while you're at the store to find out if you're out of milk. But the dating app lets you see the inside of someone else's fridge. Gleaning information from what we eat may be an unusual way to meet a mate, but does it reveal who we really are? A study in the journal Appetite found, for example, that risk takers tend to like spicy food. And researchers from North Dakota State University reported that people with a sweet tooth tend to have sweet personalities.
by Michele C. Hollow
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Tinder and Bumble’s Recent Advertising Efforts
by Jonah Engel Bromwich
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Goodbye Google+
NEW YORK TIMES – Oct 8 – Google is shutting down Google+, the company's long-struggling answer to Facebook, after it discovered a security vulnerability that exposed the private data of up to 500K users. The breach happened in March and Google did not warn its users about this issue because it didn't appear that anyone had gained access to user information, and the company's "Privacy & Data Protection Office" decided it was not legally required to report it.
For Online Daters, Women Peak At 18 While Men Peak At 50, Study Finds
NEW YORK TIMES – Aug 15 – A new study about online dating published in the journal Science Advances studied the "desirability" of male and female users, based on how many messages users got over one month on a "popular, free online-dating service". The researchers determined that while men's sexual desirability peaks at age 50, women's starts high at 18 and falls from there. The study results echoed data shared by OkCupid in 2010, in which the service found that men from the ages of 22 to 30 focus almost entirely on women who are younger than them. OkCupid also reported that as a man gets older, he searches for relatively younger and younger women, while his upper acceptable age limit hovers just above his own age.
Personals: A New Instagram Dating Community For LGBT
NEW YORK TIMES – Aug 4 – Old-school personal ads are the currency of Personals, an Instagram dating community built for lesbians; bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex and asexual women; and gender-nonconforming and nonbinary people. The page, which has 40K followers, works like this: Text-based personal ads are submitted once a month. Ms. Rakowski then publishes them as Instagram posts and tags the people who submitted them. Interested parties can get in touch directly. Ms. Rakowski, 39, is a photo editor at Metropolis magazine and the creator of Herstory, an Instagram account that surfaces lesbian imagery from as early as the 1800s. This summer, she raised ~$48K on Kickstarter for a prototype version that will still use the typewriter font and gender-neutral aqua palette. Instead of swiping, users browse a continuous feed, much like the user experience of Facebook or Twitter.
Engaged Couples Reach Out To Dating Apps To Invite Them To Their Weddings
by Alyson Krueger
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The Story Of Raya, An Exclusive Social Network
NEW YORK TIMES – June 27 – Raya first appeared several years ago as a dating app aimed at people in creative industries. It has expanded into an invitation-only social network populated by movie stars, fashion designers, pro athletes, tech executives and too many Instagram models to count. The app costs $7.99 a month, but joining is no small ordeal. Prospective members are evaluated by an algorithm and human gatekeepers. ~8% of applicants are accepted. There are other elite dating apps, such as the League, which reportedly has 300K active users. But Raya may be the first app that has successfully created an atmosphere of intimacy and trust while revealing almost nothing about itself. Its website contains no mention of investors, founders or staff members, and the company has never spoken about its origins. Keeping up Raya's values and mystique is partly why Mr. Gendelman, a self-described introvert, has chosen to stay quiet. For years, he avoided publicly identifying himself, even hiding his job from some friends and family. He has kept the company small – Raya has just 13 full-time employees – and has raised only a few small investment rounds. But slowly, Raya is beginning to step out. The company recently acquired Chime, a video messaging app started by Jared Morgenstern, an early Facebook employee who is now Raya's COO. It introduced a real-time map feature that allows users to opt in to sharing their locations with other members. Mr. Gendelman would not share financial information but said that he expects Raya to become profitable this year.
Millennial Couples Don’t Rush Wedding
NEW YORK TIMES – May 29 – Young adults not only marry and have children later than previous generations, they take more time to get to know each other before tying the knot. Helen Fisher, an anthropologist who studies romance and a consultant to the dating site Match.com, has come up with the phrase "fast sex, slow love" to describe the juxtaposition of casual sexual liaisons and long-simmering committed relationships. The eHarmony report on relationships found that American couples aged 25 to 34 knew each other for an average of six and a half years before marrying, compared with an average of five years for all other age groups. Both men and women now tend to want to advance their careers before settling down.
by Roni Caryn Rabin
See full article at New York Times
Furor Erupts In China As Sina Weibo Bans Gay Content
NEW YORK TIMES – Apr 15 – With hashtags like #Iamgaynotapervert and images of hearts and rainbows, tens of thousands of Chinese residents took to social media over the weekend to protest efforts to censor gay-themed images, videos and cartoons. Sina Weibo, a Twitterlike site, said that it was trying to limit the spread of sexually suggestive and violent content and that it would target cartoons, pictures, texts, short videos and romantic fiction. The site said its aim was to promote a "clear and harmonious" environment. Many activists saying that its attempts to limit free speech had gone too far and that gay people were being punished because their culture was considered out of the mainstream. Ma Baoli, the founder of Blued, a gay dating app, said the country's lack of sexual education had exacerbated a culture of intolerance.