TECH CRUNCH – Ten days after Apollo Global completed its acquisition of Yahoo (formerly Verizon Media) from Verizon for $5B, it has appointed Jim Lanzone, the current CEO of Tinder (for 14 months) as the new CEO of Yahoo. Renate Nyborg, Tinder's head of EMEA, is taking the CEO role at Tinder. Nyborg is young but has a long track record in tech, at Headspace, Apple (subscriptions & developer relations), and building her own startups. Her connection to Tinder is personal. "I swiped right on my husband and it changed my life…. We are building the most fun, inclusive, safest place for singles to connect… We're…raising the bar for the industry."
Category: Reporters – Ingrid Lunden
Tinder’s Opt-in Video Chat Feature Is Rolling out Globally
TECH CRUNCH – Oct 27 – Face to Face, an opt-in-only feature that Tinder launched earlier this year that lets users video chat with each other without exchanging personal information and only when they're facing the cam, is now expanding globally. Both parties need to be opted into the feature, and they have to be matched before a video chat can be initiated.
POF Founder, Markus Frind, Investing in Canadian Startup – Symend
TECH CRUNCH – May 12 – Symend, a Calgary, Canada-based company that builds behavioural analytics into customer engagement products to identify customers having trouble with their bills, and then suggests alternatives to keep them from defaulting altogether, has picked up $52M in funding. The company has been around since 2016 and has to date "treated" ~10M customers, on behalf of its enterprise clients. This round is being led by Canadian VC Inovia Capital, with participation from Ignition Partners, Impression Ventures, BDC Capital's Women in Technology Fund, Mistral Venture Partners, and angel investor Markus Frind (the Canadian founder and former CEO of dating site PlentyofFish).
Andrey Andreev Sells Stake of Bumble’s Parent Company MagicLab to Blackstone
by Ingrid Lunden
See full article at Tech Crunch
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Badoo To Drop Swiping
TECH CRUNCH – June 6 – Badoo, a UK-based dating app with ~388M users globally – whose majority-owned app Bumble is currently being sued by Tinder in part for its use of swiping – says that it will be removing the swiping from its own app. Badoo is rolling out a new feature called Badoo Live which are live video broadcasts to let people show off their personalities. Users will be able to send messages during a live session, which works on a principle similar to Facebook Live. Once a match is made, users can start a live video chat with each other.
Facebook: “eHarmony’s Chief Scientist Doesn’t Work On Our Dating Product”
TECH CRUNCH – May 4 – Dr Steve Carter, a data scientist who helped design and build the psychometric and relationship models that became the basis of eHarmony is working at Facebook. But Facebook has confirmed to us that Carter is not working on the new dating service, and the company declined to say what he is doing. He joined Facebook in Aug '17. Carter's profile on LinkedIn describes him as a data science manager, "helping Facebook get even better at making meaningful and beneficial connections between people and communities."
by Ingrid Lunden
See full article at Tech Crunch
Snap Interactive Changes Name To PeerStream
TECH CRUNCH – Mar 9 – Back in 2016 after Snapchat rebranded the company name to Snap to reflect its status as a camera company and more than just Snapchat, Snap Interactive filed a trademark infringement lawsuit to bar the change. It turns out that the lawsuit got quietly dismissed in Dec 2016 when the two settled out of court under confidential terms. And now, Snap Interactive is rebranding, to PeerStream. The company declined to say whether its rebrand was part of the settlement. Despite the lawsuit, Snap Interactive has actually benefited a bit from the mistaken identity: the company's stock shot up 164% in February last year when people mistook it for Snap around the time of the latter company's IPO.
by Ingrid Lunden
The full article was originally published at Tech Crunch, but is no longer available.
Tallygram, OkCupid’s Foray Into Friend Finding On Facebook, Hits The Deadpool
Pair Buys UK’s Cupple And Rebrands As Couple
TECH CRUNCH – Feb 3 – Tenthbit, the mobile app studio behind the couples app Pair, has bought Cupple, a UK-based rival mobile app for two people only, and has rebranded itself as Couple. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Tenthbit raised a seed round of $4.2M in May 2012. Cupple will, for now, remain as a standalone app, but users will have the ability to migrate their data to Couple from Cupple if they choose. Cupple did not disclose current usage figures, downloads or geographical reach. Pair meanwhile notes 1.25M messages sent every day, 160m messages between couples to date and 800K downloads.
Social Gaming, Dating Account For The Biggest Growth In Carrier Billing
TECH CRUNCH – Sep 3 – According to new data from U.S./German carrier billing company mopay, mobile gaming is currently the biggest generator of carrier billing revenues, accounting for over half of all transactions and growing at a rate of ~30% YOY. Traditional mobile games currently bringing in $4.50 per month, and have grown by only 10%. Social gaming is seeing a much stronger rise: its average revenues per user are up by 40% to $5 per month. Social media apps accounted for 5% of all carrier billing transactions. Online Dating has grown by 25% and is currently bringing in $6.50 per month in revenues among individuals using these services. But some countries seem more taken by carrier billing than others: Italy has a lot of single users who return only 25% of the time. Brazil’s carrier billing users, meanwhile, return 70% of the time, with two-thirds of that group making more than five carrier-billing based purchases.
by Ingrid Lunden
See full article at Tech Crunch
This post also appears on SocialNetworkingWatch.