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.
Category: Outlets – Tech Crunch
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.
Grouper Talks Competition
TECH CRUNCH – May 30 – Grouper has been around since 2011. The service matches users with singles they may enjoy canoodling with, but asks that each party bring two of their friends for a group date. Grouper was founded by Michael Waxman. In his opinion, Grouper has a leg up on the competition because it facilitates real-life meeting, whereas traditional dating sites and social networks are more focused on letting you message and look at photos.
Zynga Tells CupidWithFriends To Stop Using ‘With Friends’
TECH CRUNCH – May 17 – Zynga has told the makers of the dating site CupidWithFriends that they need to change the site’s name, because it allegedly infringes on Zynga’s trademarks. CupidWithFriends was built by the startup Apartment 7. The site launched a couple of months ago, allowing users to build and edit dating profiles for their friends. There’s also Bang With Friends which was recently booted from the Apple App Store.
Apple Boots Bang With Friends From The App Store
TECH CRUNCH – May 17 – Less than ten days after Bang With Friends made its mobile debut on the iOS App Store, Apple has seemingly changed its mind and given it the boot. The guys behind the app tried to chaste things up a bit for Apple, changing the name for the iOS to “BWF". The Android app, meanwhile, is still just “Bang With Friends”. A page put up by the team says they’re “working with Apple to get BWF back in the App Store shortly”.
New Dating Startup: WednesdayNight
TECH CRUNCH – May 13 – With a new startup called Wednesday Night, users connect their Facebook accounts and are then given three recommendations. If they’re interested in dating one of them, they then pay $50 and are set up with a date on Wednesday night at 8 p.m. They’re also connected with a dating coach who can provide advice via email or text. The website comes from the team of Jared Tame and Teng Siong Ong who are already working on two other dating services — Flock and CupidWithFriends. (They sold their previous startup, Y Combiantor-backed GraffitiGEO, to Loopt.)
Are You Interested Makes 2M Connections
TECH CRUNCH – May 9 – Are You Interested has been in the online dating game since 2007, predominantly focused on the Facebook platform as a way to connect people. In the past few months AYI launched a new feature that connects you with friends of friends. There are ~20M Facebook profiles connected to AYI and 3M active users per month. And since they implemented their friends of friends feature in March, AYI says that ~2M connections have been made through the new feature. Matching friends of friends is the “next big thing”. Another startup that’s been around since last year is Coffee Meets Bagel, and it could be said that they were the first ones to match friends of friends together, albeit at a much smaller scale.
by Jordan Crook
See full article at Tech Crunch
We asked Cliff Lerner, CEO of Snap Interactive, to comment. He said:
"We're very excited by the user reaction and early data around connecting through your mutual friends. The new feature is increasing engagement, with US women being 41% more likely to connect with a man when there's a friend in common. It's also providing viral growth opportunities with 1,000's of users messaging their friends directly to learn about a potential date.
We look forward to continuing to iterate on meeting new people through mutual friends as well as building a deeper mobile integration. Our mission is to improve the online dating experience for meeting new people. We believe we are uniquely positioned to offer the friend functionality due to our Facebook scale of 20 million Facebook connected profiles, ensuring users have a robust experience to meet through their friends."