PRESS RELEASE – Sep 17 – MeetMe,
the public market leader for social discovery, surpassed 1M DAU in the
US. Last month, the company announced the launch of Spanish and
Portuguese language options. MeetMe receives more than 60% of its daily
usage from mobile devices.
This post also appears on SocialNetworkingWatch.
VENTURE BEAT – Sep 6 – Andrey Andreev is probably one of the most successful entrepreneurs, and Badoo is the “sleeper hit” of the social networks. Badoo’s concept is simple. Upload a few cursory details and a choice image, ping on location-awareness and you’ll see who is in your immediate radius and who might be appealing enough to arrange to meet in real life. “Think of it like it’s a nightclub! It’s not just about sex,” says Andreev, slightly ruffled at suggestion that it's like a Grindr for straight hookups. “Some people use the service in this way. But, like in a night club, you bring people together and then it’s up to them to figure out what they want to do.” Badoo has achieved its 150M subscription level by virality alone. Launched in Spain in 2006, Badoo now has 6.4M users there, plus around the same amount in Italy, 8.2M in France, 9M in Mexico and 14.1M in Brazil.
by Linsey Fryatt
See full article at Venture Beat
This post also appears on SocialNetworkingWatch.
OPW INTERVIEW – Sep 4 – eHarmony does beautiful mobile apps! Arvind heads the product group and here’s what he had to say about eHarmony’s work on mobile dating. – Mark Brooks
Let’s talk about your pride and joy, the iPad HD app.
The eHarmony HD app was developed a little over a year ago. Our first iPad app was a very functional reproduction of what you would get on the site. We built an experience that was unlike any other dating app. It is warm and encouraging, rich and distinctive. When we demoed it at LaunchPad in 2011, Jason Calacanis said it was one of the most beautiful apps on the iPad in and out of the dating category.
What was the most beautiful part?
eHarmony has the relationship questionnaire that takes people 40-45 minutes to get through. We were able to get that down to 5 minutes.The other thing is we made it very visual and very touch oriented. We revamped the personality profile. We’ve turned it into a product that we call the “Book of You”. Your profile is literally a book, and we use the iPad basic gesture controls for turning pages.
How do you think eHarmony is vastly superior to a real world matchmaker?
We have compatibility, and I think matchmaking in the real world. It’s largely done through intuition. We have an algorithm that is based on research that’s over 30 years old. And then we have the size of our database. In general, your network is only as strong as the amount of people you have in it.
How many questions are on the mobile app?
There’s about a hundred, down from 270 questions.
So knowing that you wanted to have that fast, smooth experience, HTML5 is out the window. You couldn’t have really done HTML5?
There are more challenges. I think HTML5 is kind of in its infancy in terms of developers getting to know the ins and outs of it.
What’s eHarmony’s philosophy on geo-location?
I’d be a liar if I said that we’re not thinking about geo-location. Our user base isn’t exactly clamoring for it. So we have to do it in a way that is very responsible where people’s privacy is protected.
So how’s the Android app different?
The Android app largely mirrors the iPhone app. I think there’s one or two features that we don’t have on Android yet, and that’s just been a timing thing more than anything.
Is there much difference in the monetization between the two apps?
We do see two slightly different types of people that use the iPhone versus the Android. iPhone tends to be used more by women. But for monetization, we’re not seeing huge differences there.
In terms of monetization, you’ve gone the Apple route. So how useful is Apple in leading people? eHarmony’s advertising all the time. Do you really need Apple?
We are reaching new audiences with the product and we are able to do it in a very cost efficient way. So for the time being, it is something that we are keen on keeping.
Are you finding that you’ve got more marketing channels available to you now on mobile?
Absolutely. We are reaching a lot more people, and they’re different people than the ones we were reaching just through TV, radio or print ads.
In terms of the development of the application, were you entirely in house or did you have a portion of the team external?
We’ve fluctuated. At the very beginning we relied more on outside vendors, but as mobile has become a more and more important segment of our business, we have moved about 80% of it in-house.
Are they in USA or abroad?
They are all in USA.
What kind of login ratio is eHarmony seeing on mobile now?
We’re seeing around 30-35% of new customers coming from the mobile channel.
Are there any user behaviors that you’ve notice on mobile that surprised you?
Absolutely. We were pleasantly shocked, that we could get people to take a relationship questionnaire on a mobile device. The second surprise was the level of engagement.
You gather more data on users than most other sites. Why not suggest dates to people?
I can’t say that we haven’t thought of that.
What’s your vision for eHarmony mobile in a year’s time?
Geo-location will be part of it. I think giving people different ways to interact when they are in person also becomes pretty important. I think one interesting way to go is being people’s dating allies.
At SXSW social discovery was a hot topic. I wonder if there’s some potential for you to develop along a social discovery line?
There is and there isn’t. A lot of people don’t want those worlds to mix. It’s hard to think that someone’s going to say: “I need to find a hiking buddy, let me go to eHarmony.”
MASHABLE – Aug 28 – Snap Interactive is re-launching its dating site AreYouInterested.com as a social discovery site. AreYouInterested (both the site and the app) lets you sync your Facebook information to your profile and meet other people with similar interests. "Now you can meet people who share your interests, whether you’re looking for friendship or dating", commented Clifford Lerner, CEO of Snap Interactive. The site will operate on a freemium model. You can sync your Facebook account to the site and see what users you have things in common with for free. You can send one free message, but for any more you’ll need to subscribe. MeetMe and Tagged are two other similar sites that use social discovery to virtually introduce people.
by Kate Freeman
See full article at Mashable
See all posts on Snap Interactive
See all posts on AreYouInterested
OPW INTERVIEW – Aug 28 – MeetMoi is a hallmark mobile dating brand. A great app, built by a notable founding team. Here’s our interview with the CEO, Alex Harrington. – Mark Brooks
How did you come to start MeetMoi?
I'm not the founder. I was brought in three years ago. The company was founded by Andrew Weinreich and Jeremy Levy in 2007. Andrew notably wrote the original patents for social networking, which is presently held by Mark Pincus and Reid Hoffman of Zynga and LinkedIn, respectively. He saw social networking coming a long time ago and also saw the disruptive nature of mobile. He sort of foresaw back in 2007 that mobile was going to create opportunities for disruption in all types of industries. He saw dating as a field that could benefit consumer and potentially disrupt the status quo in the business landscape.
Wasn't he also the fellow behind Six Degrees?
That's correct. He founded the first social network of scale called Six Degrees.
How did it evolve up until the point you took over?
The mobile landscape has been reinvented probably four or five times since the company was conceived. When Andrew first started off, he envisioned it as a sort of a texting based interface. They quickly realized the opportunity was really on the mobile web. We launched our mobile web service in 2008. That's still going strong. More recently we have built out our service on app.
How would you categorize MeetMoi? It is not internet dating; what is it?
We use the online dating category as our touchstone. We've referred to ourselves as a mobile matchmaker, but it's an ongoing process to define what exactly our category is. Social discovery is also a good label as an industry term, but not particularly helpful when you're talking to consumers.
How is MeetMoi doing now?
We're doing great. We're in expansion mode. We're well capitalized. This summer is going to be a big rebirth of the company in terms of creating a higher profile and getting a significantly larger audience.
What platforms are you on now? You've got Android and iPhone?
That's correct.
Is there a dedicated iPad app?
There isn't a dedicated iPad app, no.
Are you on Blackberry?
No, we serve Blackberry users by having a capable mobile web platform.
Was it developed entirely in-house? Or how are you splitting the in-house versus outsourcing at this stage?
We do use outsource development help to extend our capabilities, but pretty much everything has been built in-house.
Where are you finding new members? How do you market out to them?
We acquire users principally through mobile.
How would you describe MeetMoi as differentiated from the competitors?
There are a number of people that have taken an approach to mobile which are natively online services that build quite nice mobile apps. Though they may build in features that are specifically geared to mobile, like location sensitivity, to the extent that it's not the main platform which their users have been habituated to use. The way we've always thought about it is that if it's natively mobile, your location is tracked in real time so that we can provide the best possible location sensitive matches. If you don't know your users' location information in real time, then is worse than useless because it's misleading. A lot of competitors haven't quite got that.
Have you dealt with women differently than guys or is it the same for everybody when it comes to geo-location?
I think for us, like most dating services, you design the service to be sensitive to the concerns of your female users. We have a lot of focus groups for women to determine just how to tailor the product to their needs.
How's the wing-man feature working out for you?
It's great. One of the challenges that dating sites have is that traditionally people don’t want to invite their friends. One of our objectives was to make dating more social. We wanted to map our product to support the ways people interact in the real world. If I'm in a group of guys looking to meet a group of girls, just meeting one isn't going to do it. I want to be introduced to another group of girls. That's the product benefit.
How are you monetizing at this stage?
We've always had a paywall since the inception of the service. If you want to send an email to another user and you're not both in the same place at the same time through the introductions that we make, then you have to become a premium member. On our iPhone and Android apps, that's a $20 a month.
Are you finding that people are sticking around for the typical three months, or how's the behavior a little different than internet dating?
I think we're doing better than that. The way our product works is that we're making introductions to you and you don't have to do a whole lot other than view the introductions and make a decision on whether or not you want to act on them, or ignore them.
How does the matchmaking work? What are you matching on? Are you going into personality profiling in the future, do you think?
We keep our profiles short and sweet, so our goal is to introduce people to quality matches and learn people’s preferences as they give us feedback. Right now, because it's on mobile and people originate their profiles on mobile, we don't want to give people elaborate personality tests.
Have you seen much difference in the behavior between people across different platforms? So iPhone to iPhone users, Android to Andoird users. Do people behave differently?
There's certainly differences in the types of users on Android and iPhone. iPhones are expensive, so it tends to be a more for affluent users. The app ecosystem on iPhone is mostly a paid ecosystem whereas on Android, there is a lot of freeware.
How are you accepting payments?
We use carrier billing and credit card.
Do people enter their credit cards, or do they prefer to go through the carrier?
We get a lot lower friction conversion on carrier billing without question. We do see quite a lot of credit card revenue as well. Part of it is, we have some algorithms to sort of determine which payment method suits the user, and if they fail on one we present the other.
Of course you'd rather take the credit card, you wouldn't be paying quite so much. A few years it use to be 50% that the carriers were taking for on-deck apps. What are they taking now?
They're moving in that direction for sure. It still very tentative.
What do you think is reasonable? Are you happy to pay 30% to Apple?
Happy is the wrong word. I think willing is a better word. Seeing revenue shares of 80% is big progress. The reason why I'm willing to pay 30% for iTunes connect is that they've built a community of users that pay and the transaction interface is relatively frictionless. If you look at Google Checkout, by contrast, that takes the same percentage. They haven't yet built in continuity billing, the billing failures are significantly higher than on iTunes. I see Google Checkout as being overpriced, but iTunes can get away with that kind of pricing because they've built the best mobile billing interface out there.
So Google isn't doing month-to-month yet?
No, there's not continuity billing in Google Checkout in the app store. They have it as a mobile web or web-based Google Checkout product, but in Google Play, it's transactional billing.
Do you think Blackberry is going to be on the radar in the future?
I don't have high hopes for it. It feels like it's riding off into the sunset. We don't have any foreseeable intentions of building out for that platform.
What's your vision for the future? Where is MeetMoi going to be in a year's time?
I think we'll be more or less the company we are now. We'd like to have a significantly larger audience concentrated in urban areas. I think in a year's time, we'd like to have a very strong New York audience base. San Francisco, Chicago, L.A., Austin – places like that.
Do you think you'll go into the real world advertising realm?
We've already done some event-based marketing. So there will be some offline marketing, but I'd say the bulk of it will be online.
EXAMINER – Aug 22 - Meetme.com describes itself as a “social gathering place” – a place for people wanting to make friends, date, and/or play video games.
Q: How Meetme.com works?
Geoff: Meetme.com is a re-imagination of offline activities – like meeting people at a bar or coffee house, but online.
Q: Is there a fee structure?
A: It’s free to join. You can purchase our Spotlight services for 50 credits or $1 to get access to more profile views and more friend requests.
Q: Who do you consider your competition?
A: Badoo and Tagged.com.
Q: What % of your members use the mobile app vs. the website?
A: ~60% of our daily active users are mobile users.
Q: Do you notice more people in urban areas using it, like L.A. and New York?
A: According to our survey 57% of our users met in person with someone they first met on app. 56% met for friendship and 44% for dating. The likelihood of someone to meet in real life is same – whether it’s an urban city like L.A. or some small town.
by Kelly Seal
The full article was originally published at Examiner, but is no longer available.
TECH CRUNCH – Aug 22 – Tagged, a social network for meeting new people, has raised $15M in growth capital financing from Lighthouse Capital Partners and Comerica Bank. The company previously raised $9M in funding. Tagged was on an acquisition tear in 2011, buying hi5, Digsby, TopicMarks and WeGame. Tagged's revenue grew by 35% to~ $43M in 2011.
by Leena Rao
See full article at Tech Crunch
This post also appears on SocialNetworkingWatch.
CLOSE-UP MEDIA – Aug 17 – MeetMe, a public market company for social discovery, has launched Spanish and Portuguese language options on web and Android, with iPhone expected in the coming weeks. The launch of these initial two languages marks a step toward internationalization of the platform. By the end of the year, MeetMe will be available in 6 languages.
See full article at TechZone360
This post also appears on SocialNetworkingWatch.
TECH CRUNCH – Aug 16 – After losing long-time Googler Benjamin Ling to social network Badoo, Google is seeing another exec head to the UK site. This time, Jeff Hardy, who was Head of Global Partnerships for Google+ Local, is leaving the company to join Badoo as VP of Partnerships and M&A.
by Leena Rao
See full article at Tech Crunch
This post also appears on SocialNetworkingWatch.
TECH CRUNCH – Aug 3 – Users are complaining that Twoo, a social networking service, is sending unwanted messages to their contacts. Co-founder and CEO Lorenz Bogaert counters that this is a misunderstanding and the company is working to fix it. The app auto-selects all of the user’s friends with no unselect all button, meaning the user must manually unselect every friend. While the “connect” button fairly obviously pings all of the user’s contacts, the “next” button will also send messages to all of the user’s friends. At the very best, the site is unnecessarily confusing. At the worst, it is purposefully complex in order to message unsuspecting users’ contacts to increase its membership.
by Billy Gallagher
See full article at Tech Crunch
Mark Brooks: Twoo have stiff competition with Badoo, also out of the UK. Badoo has been accused of being spammy in the past as well. These People Discovery services have both pushed the fringe of what's allowable and tolerable, and good practice. (Full Disclosure: Courtland Brooks has advised Twoo in the past)