TECH CRUNCH – Oct 16 – Social discovery site MeetMe is launching a dating app called Charm. It works like Tinder but instead of swiping profile photos for yes/no, users swipe videos which are created the same way as on Vine. If two users like each other, Charm unlocks their chat functionality.
Category: Outlets – Tech Crunch
BangWithFriends To Change Name After Trademark Settlement With Zynga
TECH CRUNCH – Sep 30 – Zynga has accused BangWithFriends app of infringing on its “With Friends” line-up. They are both saying they’ve reached a settlement. It seems like a clear win for Zynga. Bang With Friends is now changing its name to "The Next Bang".
Dattch: Pinterest-Inspired App For Gay Women
TECH CRUNCH – Sep 21 – Dattch is a dating app exclusively for lesbians, bisexual and/or bi-curious women, designed by a female team. The app has just closed a £100,000/$160,000 angel/small seed round. "The gay female dating scene is badly served," says founder and CEO Robyn Exton. “Nobody was thinking about a female user, and actually how do women behave? What kind of triggers are they looking for?" So what are gay women looking for? Firstly, lots and lots of photos. Photos of where you live, what you wear, things you like, places you want to go. Dattch is taking its design inspiration from Pinterest. The app’s other focus is a text-based messaging feature.
by Natasha Lomas
See full article at Tech Crunch
This post also appears on InternetDatingInvestments.
Inside eHarmony
TECH CRUNCH – Sep 18 – Cribs is a new Tech Crunch TV series that takes you inside the walls of the hottest companies. The first episode takes us to eHarmony‘s office.
Skout Spams Its Users – Error Or Intention?
TECH CRUNCH – Sep 5 – Mobile dating app Skout raised $22 million from Andreessen Horowitz and is more than half a decade old. It also had a recent spate of spamming its users using other user profiles to drive activity. According to Skout, this was caused by a bug which is now fixed. A company with Skout’s scale certainly tracks its metrics and must have noticed the spike in messages being sent.
If Tinder And Snapchat Had A Baby, It Would Be Called Swipe
TECH CRUNCH – Aug 28 – Swipe is the latest in a series of “Tinder like” apps to pop up over the last year. GameChanger Labs, the startup behind the Swipe app, hopes to provide a bunch of features even after their users meet one another offline. The first feature it’s enabled allows users to send photos to their matches, and, just like Snapchat, have those pictures disappear after a period of time. The company is looking to add more interactions over time, including mobile games. The startup already has 15 employees working on building new features and interactions into the app, thanks to an undisclosed round of seed funding.
Coffee Meets Bagel Launches iOS App
TECH CRUNCH – Aug 22 – Launched in New York City in 2012, the startup is also today releasing its iOS app, which includes the same features as the free web service. Coffee Meets Bagel works like this: After signing up through Facebook, users can specify personal details as well as what they look for in a date. At noon each day, they receive one match, or “bagel” as the company calls them. They then have a time limit to either “Pass” or “Like.” If two people mutually like each other, they are put in touch through a private company texting line. Coffee Meets Bagel has raised $600K from Lightbank and has accumulated ~80K users. The startup has made ~1.5M matches, with 70% of members checking the service daily.
Hinge Brings Its Romance Graph To More Cities
TECH CRUNCH – Aug 8 – The problem with Tinder is women don’t trust strangers, so matches don’t turn into meet-ups. Hinge uses the same hot-or-not style but only shows you trustable friends of friends based on its “romance graph”. That’s led to insane retention in D.C., upcoming funding, and now an expansion to New York City with plans for Boston and Philadelphia. The app is focused on young professionals and grad students. It’s got 30K total users with an average age of 27, and has made 200K matches. 85% of those who download it are still active a week later, and 75% are still active a month later. You can only join if you already have friends on the app. Hinge will look to monetize through premium subscriptions that give you more insight into who is checking you out, or put you in front of more potential dates.
A Year Of Spam: The Twoo Experience
TECH CRUNCH – Aug 3 – Twoo's users have been complaining that they get unsolicited emails from the app, that the app messages all of their contacts without their understanding, and that it’s unclear how to delete their accounts. Twoo uses confusing tactics, from auto-selecting every address in your contacts book to making a “next” button that looks like it skips the email connect step but actually is just another “connect” button, to grow its user base. According to the site, Twoo has 15M active users.
Tinder Officially Arrives On Android
TECH CRUNCH – July 15 – Tinder mobile dating app is going multi-platform. Several weeks ago, the company created a landing page for the new app, saying that they would only make Tinder for Android available once they had received one million requests. They haven’t quite made it to 1M requests,but with over 800K already logged, the founders decided to pull the trigger anyway. Tinder has also begun to focus on international markets. 15% of its users are outside the U.S. The startup has begun focusing its international efforts on the UK, Canada, Australia, Latin America (Brazil and Mexico), Germany, France and Japan.