TECH CRUNCH – Jan 25 – Men and women experience online dating very differently. Men typically send out hundreds of emails hoping someone will respond. Women can receive hundreds of emails a week, but respond to less than 2%. Most dating profiles are static and lack social network updates. For most social discovery startups, there is a significant cold-start problem. Few startups are funded well enough to afford the marketing required to achieve scale. No social dating site has gained meaningful traction: theComplete.me (10K), Yoke (10K), Circl.es (1K), LikeBright (1K), thedatable (200), and atthepool.com have struggled. With Graph Search, can Facebook reinvent dating, drive down the associated stigma? Just because someone’s profile indicates they are single does not mean they are ready for dating. On Facebook, receiving messages from strangers feels creepy. Facebook’s profiles are shallow. The real question may be how important is the dating market to Facebook? It will be a challenge to run so many vertical solutions: dating, recruiting, ratings, reviews, etc. Facebook can easily leverage their massive social graph to enable meaningful friend-of-friend introductions. They can create very detailed, self-updating profiles by displaying and structuring data from Pinterest, Spotify, Pandora, Yelp, Netflix, Amazon, ESPN, GoodReads and more. They can dominate real-time communication: chat, check-ins, poke, texting and Skype video chat.
Category: Outlets – Tech Crunch
Uber Partners With Grouper
TECH CRUNCH – Jan 21 – On-demand car service Uber is teaming up with Grouper. With a new program and promotional event called #UberGrouper, users can sign up for an exclusive deal in their city allowing them to use Uber as their luxury transportation of choice on their Grouper meetups. Grouper brings its members together for “Groupers,” which are basically like group dates.
Tagged Introduces New App – Sidewalk
TECH CRUNCH – Jan 22 – Tagged, the people discovery service with 300M registrations and 3M daily users, is stepping into offline meetups by launching standalone app Sidewalk that feeds you fun happenings in your city, as well as who you might run into where you’re hanging out. Building Sidewalk as a standalone app rather than as a feature of Tagged also protects the company. The idea is that you’ll open Sidewalk, discover something fun going on nearby, get off your butt and go there, and meet people. There are no gimmicks, forced ice breakers, or private messaging. Sidewalk also has less anonymity. The app is simply a portal to connection around real-life moments.
by Josh Constine
See full article at Tech Crunch
This post also appears on SocialNetworkingWatch.
Tinder: New Dating App Backed By IAC
TECH CRUNCH – Jan 4 – Tinder is a new dating app that focuses on the social and mobile aspects of dating. It launched in October and took off on a few college campuses. The co-founders say that they’re continuing to listen to users, tweaking the experience based on feedback and, with traction building, they’ll be looking to build off their seed funding from IAC and raise a series A in the coming months. CEO Sean Rad says that Tinder is resonating with college students because the app has taken a more subtle approach to dating, it is location-enabled. The experience is anonymous until someone you like returns your interest.
Social Discovery Platform At The Pool To Raise $1 Million
TECH CRUNCH – Nov 28 – At The Pool, a social discovery network that aims to be the anti-Facebook, has emerged from beta and is in the process of closing a $1M seed financing round led by Clearstone Venture Partners. In addition, the startup is adding some localization support for its growing international user base. At The Pool users sign up for groups (or “pools”) based on their background, interests and the type of people they’re interested in meeting. At The Pool then provides the matches.
SuicideGirls.com Creators Launch New Dating App: Let’s Date
TECH CRUNCH – Oct 30 – A team of SuicideGirls founders and an early employee have created a new dating app called Let's Date. Users sign up via Facebook Connect, but the service requires at least 50 friends to join. The service populates a member's “dating card” by analyzing their Facebook profile. Users may also hide their dating card from their Facebook friends. According to co-founder, Sean Suhl, “You just casually browse people’s cards and let us know your reaction and our system learns how to deliver better cards to you.”
HowAboutWe Provides Hand-Picked Date Ideas For Couples
TECH CRUNCH – Sep 27 – Helping couples to stay connected and in love is what HowAboutWe is all about. Each month, couples receive a DateBook with one-of-a-kind dates specifically curated for its users. For October, the company provides different dates, from a hike in Harriman State Park with pickup in New York to a private 3-course brunch at Kin Shop with Top Chef Harold Dieterle. After having subscribed for $80 a month, couples can fo on free dates, such as a Korean food cooking class. HowAboutWe has raised $18.5M so far. The service is currently available in New York City, with plans to expand in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, Washington DC and more in 2013.
Coffee Meets Bagel Lands $600K From Lightbank, Match.com Co-Founder
TECH CRUNCH – Sep 26 - Coffee Meets Bagel is a dating site that provides one match per day, every day at noon. The startup is now announcing $600K funding, led by Lightbank and including Match.com co-founder Peng T. Ong. It will be used to help Coffee Meets Bagel expand to San Francisco, where the startup recently moved its offices. The site is growing 50% month-over-month, setting up ~100K introductions which have resulted in 6K actual direct connections. 70% of users actively checking the service for matches every day. Coffee Meets Bagel is free, but it also uses a freemium model based around virtual credits to unlock the identity of mutual friends users share on Facebook.
by Darrell Etherington
See full article at Tech Crunch
See all posts on CoffeeMeetsBagel
This post also appears on InternetDatingInvestments.
HotOrNot Founder Launches Social Discovery Service
TECH CRUNCH – Sep 18 – Perceptual Networks has raised $1M in funding from an impressive group of VCs and angels. The startup appears to be focused on social discovery and mobile. It was co-founded by HotOrNot and I/O Ventures founder Jim Young, is developing a suite of products to make it easy for people to find the people they best connect with, whether they are looking for the right co-workers or employees, the right relationship, the right friends and activity partners or the right community to live in. Young founded HotorNot in 2000 and sold the site for $20M in 2008.
by Leena Rao
See full article at Tech Crunch
Mark Brooks: HotorNot is a hallmark idating brand, and (was) one of the most efficient dating sites ever built. Badoo acquired HotorNot in April from Avid Life Media who acquired HotorNot from founders Jim and James in Feb 2008.
This post also appears on SocialNetworkingWatch.
New Online Dating Startups
TECH CRUNCH – Sep 13 – Michael Cafferata, a firefighter, started VideoDate, a mobile video chat app. The entire experience, including filling out your profile, happens on a mobile device. The app will try to match you with other users, and if you and another person are interested in each other, you can do a video chat. You can’t just do a video call with someone who hasn’t approved you. The app is ad supported, but Cafferata says a paid ad-free version will be released later. Frimper is another video app. But instead of a mobile app, the company has gone with a Facebook app. There are two main components: matching algorithms and an online “speed-dating”. The speed-dating component is the catchy part, but Frimper is investing heavily on the algorithm. Frimper’s matching isn’t based just on what you say about yourself, but also about what other Frimper users you interact with say about you. Dateini solves a different problem entirely: What do you do once you’ve already got a date? The company provides a date-planning application described as a virtual concierge service.