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Bad Dating Behaviour

PRESS RELEASE -- May 29 -- 8m singles in the UK are looking for love, and they’ll go on 18m first dates this year – but at least 6m of those will end in disaster, and even fewer will lead to something special.  Of the 1,300 singles polled by PARSHIP.co.uk 40% admitted to turning up late for a first date – or not showing at all; 28% talked about their ex and past sexual experiences, 14% confessed to over-indulging in alcohol, and 6% said they’d been chaperoned by a friend, their mother -- or even a pet. 14% of women surveyed admitted to drinking so much on a first date that they felt out of control.

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Online Dating Aggregators

WASHINGTON POST -- May 29 -- The explosion of online dating sites has gotten overwhelming. But some new companies are trying to streamline the process of searching for singles by culling profiles from different sites into one central Web portal. Industry folks call it "online dating aggregation," but James Nord, founder of one such company, called Rubixx, compares its service to companies such as CheapFlights.com or Kayak where users log on, search for flights, are fed potential options from various providers and click through to the airline's site to purchase. Rubixx works similarly by feeding daters' profiles of potential matches who fit their basic requirement from a variety of dating sites. FULL ARTICLE @ WASHINGTON POST

This post also appears at the iDate Forums.

OKCupid Downtime

OPW -- May 29 -- OKCupid went down tonight. I thought you might get a kick out of their online message on the site:

"So...We thought it would be cool to get a cat for the office, but we needed a litter box, and there wasn't really room in the bathroom, so we put it next to these servers in the back, and everything would have been fine, but the A/C repair guy was allergic and the cat reacts badly to loud noises and there were all these wires hanging back there and a bunch of surprisingly flammable packing material...

Erik thought it would be JUST AWESOME to put a paperclip on the end of a rubber band and shoot it at Vinay's eye, and it would have just been Erik and Vinay's problem except Vinay had a cup of coffee and was standing over James, who was fixing our router at the time...

Anyway, we'll have things back up soon. Sorry for the inconvenience. - Worker"

See all posts on OkCupid

Patti Stanger Will Speak At The L.A. iDate

PRESS RELEASE -- May 28 -- Patti Stanger, star of the Bravo TV series "The Millionaire Matchmaker," author of the bestselling book “Become Your Own Matchmaker” and CEO of "www.MillionairesClub123.com,” will discuss how TV can be utilized to positively impact the online dating and matchmaking industry at the Internet Dating Conference in Los Angeles on June 25th. FULL ARTICLE @ PR NEWS CHANNEL

Bill Aims To Bar Sex Offenders From Social Web Sites

NEWSDAY -- May 27 -- A Nassau County legislator proposed a bill Wednesday aimed at barring convicted sex offenders on probation from having computer access to social Web sites where they could prey on youngsters. Sex offenders who used a computer in their crime could be required to register their computers with the county and allow the installation of monitoring software as a condition of probation. FULL ARTICLE @ NEWSDAY

Talkster Wins TMC's 2008 Communications Solutions Product Of The Year Award

MARKETWIRE -- May 27 -- Talkster, an alternative mobile communications company, won Technology Marketing Corporation's (TMC) 2008 Communications Solutions Product of the Year Award for its mobile application talki. talki gives consumers affordable alternatives to traditional long distance and international calling, plus SMS and MMS without any charges. Talkster has been awarded TMC's Communications Solutions Product of the Year Award for the last three years, having won for its innovation in voice over instant messaging (VoIM) technologies in 2006 and for its innovative Free World Dialing(TM) ad-supported calling service in 2007. FULL ARTICLE @ AJAX WORLD MAGAZINE

See all posts on Talkster

This post also appears on SocialNetworkingWatch.

Aussie Women As Keen As Men To Take Part In Group Sex

INDIAN EXPRESS -- May 27 -- As per the RedHotPie.com.au survey, which drew 8763 responses, almost as many women as men instigate the idea of group sex - 46% compared with 54%. The most common reasons given for group sex are excitement, variety and to spice up long-term relationships. FULL ARTICLE @ INDIAN EXPRESS

See all posts on RedHotPie

Audio Chat And Video Chat IM To Be Covered At iDate2009

NEWSWIRE TODAY -- May 27 -- Many dating sites experienced an upheaval after one of the largest audio and video chat IM providers shut its doors for business. The June 25-26, 2009 event in Los Angeles will cover alternatives for online dating executives. iDate2009 Los Angeles will have a session that will cover this issue in detail, with a list of the top Flash IM providers and an overview of what their technology has to offer. FULL ARTICLE @ NEWSWIRE TODAY

fish4 And White Label Dating Team Up To Launch fish4love

PRESS RELEASE -- May 27 -- fish4, the online portal to find jobs, homes, cars and holidays anywhere in the UK and White Label Dating (WLD), the provider of software and services that enable brands to create their own online dating sites, have launched fish4love. WLD will provide the back-end systems, software, customer support and access to its extensive database for fish4’s new dating site. FULL ARTICLE @ PR-INSIDE

See all posts on WhiteLabelDating
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CAMEyeO - Online Video Dating Component

PRWEB -- May 27 -- CAMEyeO.com has a new 'faCetalk Online' video dating application that allows online daters to schedule a private video date and meet their suitor online face-to-face. Dan Wellisch says of the 'faCetalk Online' widget, “Our product is for use by  members  of an online dating site, yet our website and support is targeted towards online dating site webmasters. 'faCetalk Online' is available as a customized widget (no advertising) or as the free ad-supported version. FULL ARTICLE @ PR WEB

Internet Dating Is Flourishing

COURIER POST ONLINE -- May 26 -- There are about 93m single people in the U.S, according to the U.S. Census Bureau but only three million use online dating services. And then there are countless others who turn to professional matchmaking companies. The Right One prides itself on an effective approach that results in a match nationally every 17 minutes and a wedding per day. It's Just Lunch International, doesn't release statistics but the company's president, Irene LaCota, points to its continued expansion in and outside the country as solid proof that its program for the last 18 years indeed works. Both companies agree that the majority of their clients are in their 30s, 40s and 50s, and come from all walks of life. The Right One declined to disclose pricing of its packages, and It's Just Lunch International said its lowest-tier package starts at $1,000. There are many singles that avoid online dating services because they don't want to sacrifice their privacy. FULL ARTICLE COURIER @ POST ONLINE

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Research Help Wanted

OPW -- May 25 -- Hypothesis - 'Those who meet their partners via online personal sites are more closely matched than those who meet their partners offline. This closer match may result in longer, more satisfactory, relationships."  No one has empirically tested this theory,apparently. James Wolf is an academic researcher, an Assistant Professor at Illinois State University school of IT, who is looking to partner with an online personal site to test this hypothesis. His goal is to survey men and women from several countries who have found their partners online. 

I'm keeping a list of dating companies interested in working with academia, so please contact me if you're open to working with academics on such studies. And/or contact James directly at jrwolf@ilstu.edu.

DNA Dating

SUNDAY TIMES -- May 24 --  Dr Tamara Brown, a Croatian geneticist, has been investigating what creates that initial “spark” between two people, and she believes that the answer lies in smell. Her company, GenePartner, charges clients $99 for a genetic match. “We don’t claim to provide the ideal partner based purely on DNA,” Brown says. She adds that people also need to match on a social level — to have similar life goals, ideals and education levels. GenePartner is not the first company to use DNA testing. ScientificMatch started in December last year, about the same time as GenePartner, offering DNA matching for a lifetime membership fee of $1,995. As the testing is unregulated, there are fears of serious risk to privacy, that customers’ DNA results might be sold to insurance companies, for instance. In the U.S., the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (Gina), signed by President Bush last May, makes it illegal for employers and health insurers to use their employees’ or customers’ genetic information to discriminate against them. The states of California and New York have taken action against DTC companies, ruling that since genetic tests are medical tests, they can only be ordered by a medical doctor. FULL ARTICLE @ TIMES ONLINE

See all posts on GenePartner
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Andrew Boon, Director And Co-founder Of BoonEx

OPW INTERVIEW -- May 23 -- BoonEx built the Dolphin platform, the internet dating software that anybody can use to build their own dating site or social network. Here are the people behind BoonEx. BoonEx is launching a new and improved version soon, Dolphin 7. Here is our interview with Andrew Boon, the Director and co-founder of BoonEx. - Mark Brooks

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What is the founding story of BoonEx?
I founded the company in 1999 with my wife, Julia, and we’re still running it together. It was just me and Julia when we started a small dating site back then, which was an affiliate site of Soul Mates Technology.

One day we stopped being part of their affiliate program. We decided we could build a dating site on our own. The dating site didn’t work really well and we went onto building software for websites. We started hiring people and the software started to sell and the company took off. It went on to be more of a community software company than a dating software company when social networks started to pop up and our customers started to request more and more features related to social networking.

Just 2 years ago we incorporated in Australia and we have started moving the offices and operations to Sydney. The company is still private and we’re not seeking any venture capital or investments.

How many sites are live on the Dolphin dating platform right now?
Since the software is free and it’s open source software, it’s really difficult to track the number of sites running on this software. We are pulling about 500 downloads every single day and we have just about 50,000 webmasters registered in our community. So normally each of those webmasters would at least install one or more websites based on this software, some of them have dozens of them. So from that figure we can tell that there would be probably somewhere around 50,000 websites running on this software.

Again, with the Dolphin 7 we expect to at least double the download rate of the software because there is much more included, it is much more easy to operate and install and it is a lot more attractive than the current version.

What are the top 3 new features in the new software?
Dolphin has been developed based on the request of the webmasters. This time we’ve taken a very different approach and redesigned the whole package for the end users, not just for the webmasters. We researched the functionality of Facebook, MySpace, PlentyofFish and other websites that are popular right now.

So Dolphin 7 comes with improved navigation, new logic, it’s going to work faster, it’s going to have caching, the proper support of the clusters… It can work for a bigger size and there are quite a few new features that are coming from the latest trends, from things like Twitter. So we have very similar status updates and it will come with the iPhone application, with an Android application and with the desktop application. We have a new mail system, new whiteboards, a video player and a new music player with the visualization features.

When somebody sets up a new site, can they click off what features they want?
Yes, the package is designed in a way that the webmaster can turn off at least half the features.

What would you say are the top features?
I believe it’s the media sharing – the photo, video and music sharing feature. The blogs definitely, and events and groups.

But isn’t this more of a social networking than Internet dating?
These are, yes. And Dolphin, like I said, is moving more and more into social networking. The dating features like search, match and the profiles are staying there no matter what. You can’t really take them off. They are the core part of the system and we are already used to not talking about them as extra features. If you want to build a dating site on Dolphin, all you need is to remove the social networking features and it would work just like a simple dating site.

Are there a couple of sites you could point us towards as demo sites, sites perhaps that you launched personally?
The best example of the software working in action would be our own site BoonEx.us. It is a social network for people who are interested in our software.

Another one, a fairly typical example of our customer, is MilitaryRomance.us, which is a site for single soldiers looking for love online. You can see other examples here: http://www.boonex.com/about/case_studies/

New Site Sponsor, Viximo

OPW -- May 22 -- Viximo is a new Online Personals Watch site sponsor.  They offer a virtual goods platform suitable for Internet Dating sites. Cyworld and QQ alone make hundreds of millions of dollars from virtual goods. Asia loves virtual goods, and Americans are turning on to them. Facebook and Hotornot are two success stories to reference in the U.S. market. I'm told, two of the most important factors for making virtual goods work on a site are: 1. really great virtual goods, and 2. the right pricing and handling of money and virtual money. Viximo can help. We're excited about virtual goods, and virtual currency and proud to have Viximo as a sponsor. As always, we vet our sponsors. No fluff is allowed on OPW. We recommend taking a look at Viximo.

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Renault And Match.com Among First To Use Pre-roll Ads On YouTube

MARKETING MAGAZINE -- May 21 -- Warner Brothers, Match.com, Activision, Renault and Nissan will be the first advertisers to show pre-roll ads on YouTube. The pre-roll ads will run up to 30 seconds. The test partners will be able to sell pre-rolls through the YouTube sales force and the pre-rolls will be sold on a CPM basis. FULL ARTICLE @ MARKETING MAGAZINE

See all posts on Match.com

This post also appears on SocialNetworkingWatch.

Scammer Email Writing Competition

OPW -- May 21 -- We're launching a scammer email writing competition. Please go to this thread and read the comment, and add your own scammer-esque email. The best email wins $100 to your favorite charity. Judging by Irena the day before iDate Los Angeles. We'll announce the winner at iDate L.A. 

Interview With Marc Simoncini, CEO Of Meetic

OPW -- May 21 -- Earlier this week I spoke with Marc Simoncini, the Founder and CEO of Meetic. Meetic is focusing on expanding Meetic Affinity all over Europe. Its in all countries except for the Nordics at this stage. This is a higher end dating product for serious daters (which is akin to eHarmony in the USA). They will be rolling out a product for a younger audience called Peexme. Its a mobile application and web application that will be launched in June. Watch this space for more info. Peexme will be more of a flirting than a dating service. Meetic is their dating service and their matchmaking product is Meetic Affinity. As far as their acquision of Match Europe goes, they will continue to run all the brands but will only promote the top brands. Meetic will run Match in the Nordics, and Meetic all over the rest of Europe. They will actively market and promote one brand per market. So that means they will stop promoting Match and DatingDirect in the UK. Additionally, they will merge the Match Europe and Meetic databases.

The deal with IAC is an eight year agreement.  There are three main elements to the agreement.
1. Match has no right to manage the daily business in Europe. It will be managed by Meetic
2. There's a reciprocal right of first refusal for acquisition
3. And there will be two members on the board of Meetic, from IAC

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Craigslist Sues South Carolina Attorney General

TECH CRUCNH -- May 20 -- Craigslist is suing South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster, seeking declaratory relief as well as a restraining order with respect to criminal charges he has threatened against the company and its executives. The company is raising the gloves because it refuses to shut down its operations in South Carolina, claiming it’s in full compliance with all applicable laws and has already done enough by removing its ‘erotic services’ category. FULL ARTICLE @ TECH CRUNCH