MERCURY NEWS – Feb 5 – San Francisco sues MeetMe app, saying it illegally gives underage teenagers' personal information and geographic locations to strangers without obtaining valid consent. Children under 13 are not allowed on MeetMe.com and adults 18+ are not permitted to view profiles of children in the 13- to 17-year-old age group. But the lawsuit alleges the website does not verify the birthdates of users.
Category: Social Discovery
SinglesAroundMe Introduces Shifting GPS Patent
PRESS RELEASE – Jan 8 – SinglesAroundMe, a social discovery mobile dating app, revealed it’s patent pending Position-Shift invention which allows mobile users to choose who knows where they are and when. SinglesAroundMe launched in 2010 and has 2M users in 100 countries.
MeetMe Q3 Financial Results
MEETME CORP – Nov 7 – Q3 revenue was $10.1M. Mobile revenue reached another quarterly record of $2.9M, up 65% YOY and 12% sequentially from the Q2 of 2013. Net loss improved to $1.5M, compared with a net loss of $2.6M in Q3 2012. Monthly active users (MAUs) increased ~37%, averaging 5.34M. Mobile MAUs increased 36% to 2.66M.
See full article at MeetMe Corp
This post also appears on SocialNetworkingWatch.
MeetMe Teams With Sprint’s Pinsight Media+
MEETME CORP – Nov 7 – MeetMe partners with Pinsight Media+, a mobile media company powered by Sprint. Under the agreement, Pinsight Media+ will manage the mobile advertising inventory for MeetMe on iOS and Android through the end of 2014.
See full article at MeetMe Corp
This post also appears on SocialNetworkingWatch.
An Interview With Geoff Cook The CEO Of MeetMe, About Charm
OPW INTERVIEW – Oct 22 – We heard MeetMe intoduced a new app, Charm, and had a few questions:
What is Charm?
Charm is about having fun while meeting real people, real fast. We’ve always been about driving new connections and deepening relationships among our users. We believe substance and authenticity are missing from many social apps today. For example, studies have shown that the people who use FB the most are among the most unhappy, potentially because people are consuming a highlight reel of other people’s lives. Meanwhile, the popular dating app Tinder is photo only. We don’t think you can get a first impression of someone from a photo. If you are at a bar or coffeehouse you are attracted by personality as well as appearance. Ultimately we built Charm to show people are more than a profile photo, to enable the personality to come through.
Does Charm represent a ‘pivot’ in your business model?
We launched Charm as a standalone app because we think mobile apps are best when they are simple, doing only one or two things and doing them well. On a web site, you might be able to launch feature after feature into a menu, but on mobile that would only bloat the app. Mobile users visit for a few minutes a session and more than a hundred times a month. We view the audience for Charm as much the same as the audience for MeetMe and we heavily promote the Charm app to our MeetMe users, but we believe the simplicity of Charm as a standalone app will increase its potential.
We see much of the industry moving towards a portfolio approach, from IAC with Tinder, Okcupid, and Match; to Twitter with Vine; to Facebook with Instagram, Poke, and Messenger. We have said publicly we plan to launch 4 new apps in the next 6 months and Charm is the first of those.
What are the challenges of using video in the iDating space? What’s the upside of video?
Video slows down the consumption and presents some friction as users must add a video. At the same time, videos add a whole new dimension to apps like Tinder, and ultimately are more authentic. Photos can be 5-10 years old and be the best picture of a person ever taken. Videos don’t reduce a person to appearance in the same way as a photo does.
Will video be the new profile photo?
What’s changed is video has come into the mainstream on mobile only recently with Vine’s launch and Instagram’s recent update. Vine recently pioneered the short, looping video that enables creativity by stitching interesting videos together in a simple record-process. We believe this has dramatically reduced the friction to video creation and opens up natural opportunities for meet-new-people applications.
How’s the growth of Charm coming along?
It’s very, very early but we are pleased to see tens of thousands of users join in the first week.
MeetMe Launches Dating App Charm
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.
Swoon Puts Ladies First
MASHABLE – Sep 9 – Swoon, a social discovery site, overhauled its mobile dating app, opting for a new design that will resonate with its female users. Swoon also announced a new "Look Back" feature that lets users recall people they may have accidentally rejected. In October, the app will debut its first female-only feature: a messaging service that allows women to share a profile via text message with friends. Swoon isn't just built for women, it's also being built by women.
AtThePool CEO Interview, Alex Capecelatro
OPW INTERVIEW – Aug 20 – I used to run an adventure and social club in Silicon Valley. It was a singles club that wouldn’t admit to being a singles club. AtThePool.com reminds me of my little club. Yes, its great for singles, but that’s not really what its about. Here’s my interview with the CEO/Founder, Alex Capecelatro. – Mark Brooks
What is your founding story?
AtThePool has been live for just under a year. Our goal is to help people connect offline, so not too different from a typical dating site, except we're not focused on dating.
I had been moving around quite a bit in the States. I found incredibly difficult to connect with people around me. I began working on At the Pool when I was living in a town called Beacon, upstate New York and it was probably the most depressing time in my life. I was building a chemical manufacturing company out of an automotive garage, and it was extremely isolating. I tried Meetup, but it didn't really work up there. I tried Facebook but Facebook doesn't really help you meet new people. I tried dating sites and learned that a lot of people using dating site not for dating but to get out and meet new people.
So the initial thought for AtThePool was to create a really easy and fun way to meet new people in your area based on your interests.
I've got a whole ton of questions for you, but one question just is burning in the back of my mind, what were the chemicals in the garage?
Long story. I have a background as a chemist. I spent a number of years doing that. With a couple of friends out of MIT, we developed a new class of materials based on Aerogel, which is the world's lightest material.
I sold lasers, and we had to measure Aerogel, and it was very difficult to measure. Amazing stuff!
Our company was called Aerogel Technologies, and we were pretty much the only manufacturing plant in the world that's making Aerogel.
Are you a fan of traditional idating sites, or are they broken? What do you think?
Idating is getting more and more popular. It's here to stay, and it's just getting bigger.
Would you say you're more of a social discovery? You're discovering new people to hang out with.
The website is 100% social discovery but we have a new app that is coming out in about a month. The app is very different. The app is looking more at your existing relationships connecting to people nearby, and it's not so much about meeting new people. Meeting new people is interesting and exciting if you're in a new town, but on a day-to-day basis your existing relationships are overwhelming. You know a lot of people that you are not following up with, you know people who are probably right around the corner that you just haven't caught up with in quite a while. Social discovery is interesting, but I don't feel like it's an entire product. It's really a feature within a greater product, and that's how we are evolving our company.
What do you think of Meetup?
I have a lot of mixed feelings about Meetup. I love the mission. It's really good in the business community but it really doesn't resonate with the young community. Part of it is the design and the user experience. It's more than 10 years old. I feel like they need to reinvent themselves, or they are not going to stay relevant to the new crowd.
So how are you making money?
At this point we are focused on execution and growth. We are not focused on revenues right now. We do have a couple different models that are in the works and that we are experimenting with. The first one is launching sort of white-label pools, communities of people that have a reason to meet. There are pools we can white label and drop into conferences and other events we are getting a lot of attention and a lot of attraction to.
The other one is local deals. For example, we know who in Santa Monica is into yoga, into cycling or surfing, because that's how our interest graph is built. What we are doing is building a recommendation engine, and if we scale the right way that's a huge business.
How many members do you have now?
We are not disclosing the number, but we have members in over 95 countries. The growth has just blown us away, it's been pretty phenomenal.
Are you looking for funding?
We raised funds about 7 or 8 months ago, and we are well funded for the next year. We're not looking for money right now, we're just focused on executing/launching this mobile product, and just having a good time.
What is AtThePool and GetThePool going to look like in one year roughly?
I'm extremely excited about the mobile launch. Our goal ultimately is not one year out, but maybe five/ten years out. We believe the entire world needs to be connected. I want to be able to travel anywhere in the world, connect with the people around me, and be able to get offline.
1Mind Launches Question-based Matchmaking Platform
THE NEXT WEB – Aug 2 – 1Mind is a newly launched social discovery startup. The company uses an algorithm to help users find new friends based on answers they’ve provided in a series of questions. 1Mind offers two modes: vote or discover. With vote, users can offer their opinion about certain questions. With the other mode, it will display users based on their likeness score. 1Mind says that likeness score is a combination of user's personality type, votes he/she made in the app, and Facebook profile data.
geoLunch Launches Lunch Meetup Site
PR WEB – June 11 – geoLunch is a social discovery website/app for finding someone new to meet for lunch. It can also be used for making new friends or business networking. Users sign in between 10:00 am and 1:00 pm and immediately see a list of other users in the area who are searching for a lunch partner. The search service only operates between 10:00 am and 1:00 pm but can sign up and edit their profile at any time.