Online Personals Watch: News on the Dating Industry and Business

Registry CrimSAFE Helps Online Dating Reduce Liability

RETAILS SOLUTIONS ONLINE -- Mar 30 -- National Background Data (NBD) announced Registry CrimSAFE, a new criminal background screening service. Registry CrimSAFE increases the effectiveness of criminal background screenings by removing subjectivity from the screening process and enforcing consistent screening decisions. For example, in some states a Driving Under the Influence violation is a misdemeanor while other states deem it a felony. Registry CrimSAFE enables organizations to predetermine how to handle different types of offenses. These predetermined policies are applied on every criminal screening, enforcing consistent decisions throughout an organization. FULL ARTICLE @ RETAILS SOLUTIONS ONLINE

Chemistry.com Reinforces Formula With $40m Effort

BRANDWEEK -- Mar 30 --  This year, the two-year-old Chemistry.com is continuing to promote itself as "a progressive, non-judgmental brand", said Mandy Ginsberg, gm/vp of Chemistry.com. On April 14, the brand is launching a $40-plus million campaign centering around four new TV spots. The ads feature different couples, including one homosexual couple reciting mock wedding vows. The campaign will run primarily on cable stations such as Bravo, Food Network and TNT. Chemistry.com spent $21m in measured media in 2007, per Nielsen Monitor-Plus. FULL ARTICLE @ BRANDWEEK

Online "Speed-dating" Phenomenon

REAL BUSINESS -- Mar 28 -- Woome.com, online speed-dating site, has been live for three months and already garnered 200 000 users. The service is free but soon will introduce a premium service, that users will have to pay for. Despite the lack of a revenue model, Woome has attracted some big-name support. Its first round of funding amounted to some £1.5m from the likes of Skype founder Niklas Zennström, and Mangrove Capital, and angel investor Klaus Hommels. FULL ARTICLE @ REAL BUSINESS

Dateline, Eddy Ankrett - CEO Interview

OPW INTERVIEW -- Mar 29 -- Eddy Ankrett is the Chairman and CEO of Dateline Holdings, PLC, which runs Dateline in the UK. He has big plans for the Dateline brand. (Full Disclosure: WhiteLabelDating.com is a client of Courtland Brooks). - Mark Brooks

What is the founding story of Dateline?
Dateline was established in 1966. It is the oldest established and most respected dating brand in the UK. It was started as an offline dating service when people didn’t have the Internet and was, in a way, computerized before the Internet. It has carried on from offline dating into what is now Dateline.co.uk.

What does Dateline offer compared to other services, and how has it evolved?
Dateline has three services. One is Dateline Classic, which is for people who don’t want to use the Internet – it’s purely a paper driven service. We put adverts into major newspapers and magazines in the UK, and people fill in a profile and send it back to Dateline. We then put them into the computer system; we do matching, and we send them three matches in the post.

We then have the Dateline.co.uk service, which is a typical Internet dating service that is very successful in its own right. 

Then we have a brand called Dateline Platinum, which is the combination of the Internet and a personal service.  Each applicant is visited in their own home and given background checks and interviewed.

What markets is Dateline focusing on?
Dateline is a UK based company. Part of the plan of partnering with WhiteLabelDating.com is to develop our service throughout Europe, and possibly throughout the world.

What is your relationship with WhiteLabelDating.com, and what made you decide to work with them?

About eight years ago I was Managing Director of Dateline, for about four years. I’ve been in the dating industry for 16 years, and kept an eye on Dateline because it’s a major brand. About six months ago I bought back Dateline with the backing of some fantastic fund managers. So it’s back in the hands of people who know dating. I’ve put a team of experienced dating professionals together. When we put the team together we asked ourselves “Who is the best company to support us from an online point of view?”

After some research, I came across Ross Williams of WhiteLabelDating.com, and found that his member conversion statistics, specifically for converting registered members into paying members, was the best I had ever seen.  He also had the ability to make Google AdWords pay-per-click work. So if we spend $200,000 on pay-per-click, he has the ability to get $300,000 back.

He’s young and very progressive, as is his company, and we’ve now formed a fantastic working relationship. Since Dateline has been relaunched on the WhiteLabelDating.com system WhiteLabelDating.com say they’ve never seen a site with such fantastic statistics for not only registrations on Dateline, but also conversions to paying members. To say the partnership is a success is putting it mildly.

Why are you still running an offline dating service? Is there really a future in offline dating?
Dateline, to my knowledge, is one of the only companies in the country, if not the world, that is making online dating work with offline dating. Offline dating has a great future, in my opinion, because of the security check and the face-to-face element. I remember a UK TV program about a dating scam where loads of people, I think in Africa, were joining online dating sites and pretending to be members. So the Internet is open, and I’m sure things are being done to stop those sorts of scammers. WhiteLabelDating.com has some fantastic products designed to stop scammers reaching online members. But I do believe that offline dating has a fantastic future. I’ve spent the last 16 years in the offline/online dating space, and I’m very passionate about it.

At the end of the day you have to find the interviewers. You have to train them. They have to be presentable. They have to have experience. Dating is such a major industry. I know Ross at WhiteLabelDating.com has some solutions to increase the feeling of security and to stop scammers. People must feel secure when they visit dating websites.

What's your personal goal for Dateline?
Dating is a fabulous industry that brings phenomenal rewards. I’ve always said, I’m 63 now, and when I die, all I want etched on my tombstone is ‘This guy helped millions of people form happy relationships.’ And at the end of the day, what better job in the world could you have than helping people meet other people to form healthy, happy and successful relationships?

Dating Thai Girls & Guys In Bangkok

ROAD JUNKY TRAVEL -- Mar 29 -- Men of all sexual orientations will find something to love in Thailand. It is filled with gorgeous women having traditional backgrounds and a new love for western fashion. Thai women love their men clean and sporting the look of wealth so polish up before you go. Homosexuality is an open part of most Thai culture. Transvestites and beautiful “lady-boys” are common in society. FULL ARTICLE @ ROAD JUNKY TRAVEL

Iovation Secures $15M

RED HERRING -- Mar 27 -- Fraud protection service firm Iovation capped a $15m funding round with a $5m investment from SAP Ventures and European Founders. The initial $10m investment was made by Intel Capital. iovation markets a hosted service which tracks and identifies the devices used by people to commit online fraud on commercial sites or to harass users of social networking and dating sites. The company also creates a database of suspect devices gleaned from each of its customers which is then shared among all of Iovation's customers. FULL ARTICLE @ RED HERRING

Mark Brooks: Wow! This is one of the biggest votes of confidence I've ever seen. I'm proud to have iovation as a client (of Courtland Brooks), and a sponsor of Online Personals Watch and Social Networking Watch. If you would like to wipe out scamming activity on your dating or social networking site, iovation is the way to go. You can email me at mark@courtlandbrooks.com to schedule a 45 minute introductory demo of iovation's dating and SNS products.

This post also appears on SocialNetworkingWatch.

Men Dating Online Could Break Law

REDHERRING -- Mar 27 -- A federal law, the International Marriage Broker Regulation Act (IMBRA), makes it a felony for a man in the United States to communicate with a foreign woman via dating site, without the man first submitting unilaterally to criminal background and sex-offender checks and certifying all previous convictions or arrests, marriages, or divorces, children, and states of residence since the age of 18. An online dating company not compliant with this legislation can be sued for $5k-25k and its executives could do up to 5 years in prison. The rationale behind creation of IMBRA was to protect foreign women. FULL ARTICLE @ RED HERRING

Mark Brooks: AsiaFriendFinder might have cause for concern, but all the foreign based dating sites aren't going to be too concerned about IMBRA. This is ill-conceived legislation.  What's next?

Coffeedate Launches Poster Campaign

MAD.CO.UK -- Mar 25 -- Coffeedate's posters are featured in and around coffee shops across the UK following a trial in the Bath and Bristol, which saw weekly registrations on the Coffeedate.com site increase by 30%. Coffeeddate.com offers its members the opportunity to meet in the informal setting of local coffee shops. The dating site ensures they feel safe and relaxed. According to coffeedate.com, the singles market is rapidly increasing in the UK, currently standing at 12m and predicted to increase to 16m in 2010. Earlier this month rival site Match.com appointed Initiative to its £8m media planning and buying account. FULL ARTICLE @ MAD.CO.UK

Match.com Mobile Goes Live On Alltel And US Cellular

TRILIBIS NEWS -- Mar 25 -- Trilibis, who powers Match.com mobile, has a fully functional WAP-based service that's been live on Sprint, AT&T, Virgin and Alltel for a few months now, offering Match.com Mobile as a downloadable opened new distribution channels. Trilibis recently launched a BREW version of the Match.com Mobile service on Alltel and US Cellular. In January, Trilibis launched Match.com Mobile on Vodafone UK. Match.com Mobile is now available in four additional countries (Australia, Mexico, India and Thailand).

State Panel OK's Internet Dating-service Bill

MIAMI HERALD -- Mar 25 -- The ''Internet predator awareness and online safety act'' has been approved at the state Senate's Commerce Committee despite the objections of companies such as Yahoo! and Match.com. The bill would require any Internet dating service to disclose online and by e-mail whether or not it conducts a criminal background check. The site would have to tell a user if it allows members to have criminal records, but it doesn't have to say what that record is. Match.com doesn't conduct background searches because they're so unreliable, something that Republican Senator and former Alachua County Sheriff Steve Oelrich confirmed. He said criminal background checks are iffy things and would give ''a false sense of comfort'' to users who could think that a ''Jack the Ripper'' was really a ''Jack Robertson'' until it's too late.

TrustPlus, Shawn Broderick - CEO Interview

OPW INTERVIEW -- Mar 24 -- What's your online reputation? Wouldn't it be nice if you could bring your good reputation together into one place to show it off. TrustPlus can help. - Mark Brooks

What is TrustPlus?
Trust Plus is a Webwide Reputation System. We allow people to aggregate their reputations from online communities and take them with them, wherever they go on the net, whether they’re buying, selling, dating, chatting, researching or blogging. We’ve built a platform that enables sites to use TrustPlus as their feedback system, but what’s really cool is that users can bring their reputation built elsewhere into the site. Just imagine – now you can take your eBay reputation and use it to sell more stuff on craigslist, Amazon, anywhere else you sell.

Walk me through how the process works.
Your reputation is based on three key components: behavior, context and network, and it includes explicit and implicit behavioral information. Your feedback on EBay is an example of explicit behavior. You bought something from me, and I explicitly rated you AAA+++. Implicit behavior would come from a site like Wikipedia. Let’s say you are Joe72314 on Wikipedia.  We base our rating on a number of factors such as how long your edits stick around.

But behavioral data is just one piece of the equation. Just because you’re the world’s best seller of refurbished cell phones, doesn’t mean I should trust your hotel reviews.. And just because I’ve had a good experience with you doesn’t mean that everybody else in the world is going to love you.  So we look at the weight you carry on the network. It may be the case that I’m not very well trusted on our shared network. Therefore, my opinion of you isn’t going to carry much weight. So what we’re really doing is building some interesting data based on people who know you and the people who know them. Finally, people can add to their reputations through background checks and other services.

So how would TrustPlus be used on a dating site or a social network?
The dating sites that we’re talking to want to be able to leverage a 3rd party rating process to allow people to rate each other. So a user will go out on a date and afterwards will be able to rate the person that they dated. What really matters in the dating world is truthfulness - did they look like their picture or was their marital status correct; that sort of jazz.

It strikes me that there’s major potential for abuse here. In the dating business, I can be a perfectly nice person and go out with another perfectly nice person and we can clash like cats and dogs and one of the parties could get very vindictive. How do you prevent that?

We’re not per se in the business of policing what people say about each other. You might have a valid opinion and there’s absolutely no way that I can tell whether your opinion is valid realistically speaking.

So what is important is that the system is architected so that if people don’t behave well, their opinions don’t matter much. If I say you are the biggest jerk that ever walked the face of the earth, my opinion only matters if somebody trusts me. If the network doesn’t trust me, my rating of you isn’t going to be very important. So applying the whole networking component to this exercise really helps to isolate people who behave badly to everyone.

What’s your revenue model? Does the consumer pay or does the site pay?
It’s actually a bit varied. Some of the dating sites that we’re working with are planning to offer ratings as a premium service so when you search for that 5’ 11” blond haired, blue eyed woman, the people with good reputations will bubble to the top of the results list and the people who don’t have good reputations might not even show up on the list. Some sites want everybody to have access to the reputation data and we would drive revenue by selling other value-added services.

Where do you see the online reputation industry going in the next 5 years?
The reputation business barely exists, so doing a 5-year projection might require a little more fortitude than I’m willing to do at this point in time.  But I’m happy to share my opinions. Today reputations are very vertically siloed. You may have a stellar rating on eBay, but be a jerk on a dating site. The two reputations never meet. I think that 18 months from now people will be amused with the fact that there used to be these big silos of reputational information that you had no access to and no control over. Three years from now I don’t think we’ll do anything online without some understanding of the people that we’re working with, dating, talking to or buying or selling with. So I think there will be a reputation layer of the Internet that develops just like there will be a social graph layer and there will be identity layers. All of those will be horizontal; all of those will be owned by the end user; and they will be pervasive.

America's Most Eligible Gay Bachelor

PRESS RELEASE -- Mar 23 -- On April 2, myPartner.com begins its nationwide search for America's most Eligible Gay Bachelor with a kick off celebration in SF.  All through April and May anyone can nominate candidates and vote for favorites at www.mypartner.com/AmericasGayBa-chelorContest.html. From the top 51, five will be selected and flown to San Francisco for final judging. The winner will be announced during San Francisco's Gay Pride celebration on June 29th and will receive a romantic get-a-way trip for two and a $10,000 Private Matchmaking Package with Relationship Expert Patrick Perrine. FULL ARTICLE @ BIG NEWS

Dating In The UK

ROAD JUNKY TRAVEL -- Mar 22 -- The post college dating scene in the UK has its limits. Outside of work Brits have a very difficult meeting one another. The exception would be the club scene of course, but the relationships made there are often very short and alcohol ignited.  Reluctant to make the first move, Brits may make foreigners feel less than attractive so you may need to break the ice. They also shy away from public displays of affection early in a relationship so keep your hands to yourself. FULL ARTICLE @ ROAD JUNKY TRAVEL

OmniDate - Find Love Through Virtual Dating

SHALOM TORONTO -- Mar 21 -- OmniDate, a Toronto based dating site, offers an unique method for finding the right one - the virtual blind date. Ravit Abelman, an Israeli business woman, founded OmniDate with her husband, Dr. Igor Kotlyar. "The goal was to develop a product which would enable singles to "meet" in a comfortable atmosphere, without having to get dressed up and driving to a date with anxiety about possible disappointment." Users can curl up with their laptops on the sofa and do their dating from home. The characters respond to the writing text, they laugh, are surprised or serious. Key strokes produce various gestures such as shaking hands or sending a kiss.

Mark Brooks: OmniDate.com is actually a demonstration site for the OmniDate dating system. The technology is available for licensing, and an API is available for easy integration. Let me know if you'd like a referral to Igor and Ravit. OmniDate is a client of Courtland Brooks.

SpeedDate.com Surpasses One Million Dates

PRESS RELEASE -- Mar 21 -- SpeedDate.com, the online speed dating site has hosted over one million "3-minute" online speed dates. SpeedDate.com also recently launched a Facebook application. The company is backed by Silicon Valley venture capital firm Menlo Ventures. FULL ARTICLE @ BUSINESS WIRE

LavalifePRIME Partners With 50Plus.com

PR LEAP -- Mar 20 -- LavalifePRIME, a dating site exclusively for singles 45+ will offer 50Plus.com members immediate access to LavalifePRIME's database and social networking resources at http://50plus.lavalifeprime.com. Boomers registered with 50Plus.com will be able to view LavalifePRIME members' profiles and use its instant chat and social networking features. FULL ARTICLE @ PR LEAP

Bone Fish Partners With SpectrumX

THE OPEN PRESS -- Mar 20 -- White label dating provider, Bone Fish, partners with SpectrumX to offer the option of incorporating a fully-branded personality profiler into the affiliate dating and social networking sites at no extra cost. FULL ARTICLE @ THE OPEN PRESS

Betting On Love

HISPANIC BUSINESS -- Mar 19 -- QuieroLatino.com is a new dating site for U.S. Hispanics. For free users can create a profile and check out other users' profiles. However, in order to meet another user, members will have to sign up for a monthly subscription fee of $24.95. "According to U.S. Census data, 80% of married Latinos are married to another Latino," says QuieroLatino founder, Ariel Oxman. "We want to do for Latinos what JDate has done for Jews" he added. FULL ARTICLE @ HISPANIC BUSINESS

Dateline Unveils Online Service

NMA -- Mar 17 -- The UK and Germany are Europe's largest online dating markets, worth 66m Eur las year, according to Jupiter. PlentyofFish, Gaydar, DatingDirect and Match dominate the UK's online dating market, according to Hitwise. Offline matchmaking service Dateline, which has been operating in the UK for more than 40 years, has launched an online dating site Dateline.co.uk. WhiteLabelDating.com has been appointed to provide the platform for the site. FULL ARTICLE @ NMA

Got News? We Need Your News!

OPW -- Mar 20 -- Online Personals Watch is for people who work in the business of internet dating, and for the press, and marketers, to research the industry. The site was started in June 2004 and we have quite an archive of searchable news at this stage. Check out our internet dating news listed by company. We list and summarize all major online personals industry news, so please send us your news hits.  You can send them to Petra at tips@onlinepersonalswatch.com, who reviews them and then forwards them all to Irena and I to summarize and post.  Got an anonymous news tip? You can email me at mark@onlinepersonalswatch.com, or call it in to me directly at 212-444-1636. - Mark Brooks