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PRESS RELEASE - Feb 25 - Social discovery service, MeetMe, is now available in Chinese (Traditional), Russian, and Japanese and is expected to launch soon on Android and iOS devices. Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian and German language versions became available in the third and fourth quarters of 2012.
Update: In April 2013, MeetMe launched in Dutch, Turkish, Korean and Chinese.
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DAILY HERALD - Feb 24 - Sam Yagan, a 1995
graduate of the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy in Aurora, will
be speaking about the importance of a technical education and what it's
like to be an entrepreneur.
Q: What will you discuss during your speech?
A: I'll be mostly focusing on the decision to become an entrepreneur and how to go about thinking about that decision.
Q: What makes a good entrepreneur these days?
A: Comfort with ambiguity and uncertainty.
Q: Is there a typical career path in entrepreneurship?
A:
The defining characteristic of a career is success in one job leads you
to the next, there's this ladder. I've started four successful
startups, so when I go to start the next company, I'll have some
advantages; I'll be able to hire and raise money more easily.
Q: What did you learn about entrepreneurship during your time at IMSA?
A: You have to be willing to fail.
Q: How does your startup accelerator, TechStars Chicago, assist budding entrepreneurs?
A: In the '90s when I got my start, what you really needed to succeed
was cash. But now what really differentiates successful startups is
whether you have access to the brainpower and the mentorship of people
who have been there and done that. TechStars Chicago basically brings
together this army of mentors.
Q: What should high school students with big ideas do to set themselves up for careers in online entrepreneurship?
A:
The biggest thing is to get a technical education. And if you want to
be an entrepreneur and you want to build things, just start building.
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BBC.CO.UK - Feb 24 - Customers of Cupid plc have voiced concerns that they may have been lured into paying subscriptions by potential dates who did not exist. Men who signed up to a number of sites owned by Cupid plc said that flirty messages they received as free members rapidly tailed off when they became paid-up subscribers. Cupid plc said it did created staff profiles, but only for "the express purpose of monitoring the site for quality assurance and moderation purposes". It categorically denied the company sent communications in order to tempt free members to pay subscriptions.
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PR WEB - Feb 23 - AnastasiaDate, an international dating service that matches American men with women from across the globe, announced the winner of their contest - “AnastasiaDate’s Princess 2013.” Men wrote love letters to their long distance girlfriends. Preston, a former fighter pilot, wrote his winning love letter to Kristina and was flown in to present her with the keys to the Mercedes during an award show in Odessa.
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NBC CHICAGO - Feb 22 - Sean Suhl is the general manager of Let's Date, the iOS-only app that picks out people for the users to date and then gives them two choices: 'no thanks' or 'let's date.' The app launched in San Francisco not long ago and is due to roll out in Chicago.
Q: What have you learned?
A: Women don't necessarily want to see the person who's the best match for them. People want to browse and look through people before they get to someone who's great for them.
Q: What else is different for you guys?
A: We want it to feel as much just like you walked into a bar. If there's someone you're attracted to, you'd say yes. And if there's not, then you'd say no. We allow you to cross things out on a card you don't like. If a woman says she doesn't like you, you can't message her.
Q: What are you most curious to see in terms of audience use?
A: Women in New York want to go out for drinks. Women in San Francisco want to go out for coffee. It's just interesting and we didn't realize that cultural difference between those two cities.
Q: Has the launch of Crazy Blind Date affected your strategy?
A: No. I think women want to know a certain amount about someone before they go meet them in public. You can't even log in without Facebook on our app. And if you don't have 50 friends and you haven't been on Facebook for at least a year you can't even log into our app.
by David Wolinsky
See full article at NBC Chicago
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01AMOUR - Feb 24 - Meetic, the leading dating sites in France, is organizing local offline events called "Meetic Soirées". Meetic sends invitation to selected members who are allowed to invite up to three single friends. Usually 80-120 people meet in a local cocktail bar. Since the launch ~16,000 singles attended 50 Soirées that were held in 39 cities.
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MARKETWIRE - Feb 21 - iovation, the provider of device reputation protection against online fraud and abuse, found that Africa had the highest rate of online fraud when compared to all other continents in 2012.
The majority of fraudulent transactions originating from Africa targeted online dating and retail websites.
The full article was originally published at Marketwire, but is no longer available.
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OPW INTERVIEW – February 20, 2013 – AnastasiaDate is a premium international dating portal with four separate sites that serve members from throughout the world. I interviewed Lawrence Cervantes, Anastasia’s Chief Communications Officer, to understand more about Anastasia and what they’re about.
Who are the founders of Anastasia, and what's their story?
Anastasia was founded in 1993 by a Russian woman who immigrated to the U.S. and married an American. They named the company after Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia who was reportedly quite a young lady and a role model for young Russian women. The company actually began as a specialized tour operator once the Wall collapsed. The owners originally took groups of American men to Moscow and St. Petersburg on organized excursions to meet single Russian women. The company soon became a success and expanded operations to include more and more cities throughout Russia and Ukraine. Then in 2003 Anastasia went online and has achieved amazing growth year on year. Since then we’ve gone worldwide with 4 main sites: AnastasiaDate.com, AmoLatina.com, AsianBeauties.com, and AfricaBeauties.com.
What business is AnastasiaDate in?
Anastasia is in the business of international dating. We mix the concepts of international romance and modern love, and I’m happy to say that we have the lion’s share of the market. More and more it’s not just about domestic dating. As the net and travel break down barriers to business and society, more people are aware of the possibilities and ease of finding romance throughout the world. We enable that.
How many members does AnastasiaDate have now?
Our family of sites connects over 4,000,000 members in over 110 countries, and we have regularly organized social activities throughout the year on 3 continents.
Where is AnastasiaDate based?
We have principle offices in New York and Moscow, with regional offices in Odessa, Ukraine, in Chongqing and Foshan, China, in Cebu the Philippines, and in Medellin, Colombia.
Do you have a mobile app?
Any day now…we’ll have more on a mobile application for Apple and Android within a few weeks and we’re very excited about that.
How is AnastasiaDate different from other Internet dating services?
I like to say that we’re the next generation of dating. While the vast majority of dating sites have forever focused on domestic connections primarily with sometimes a smattering of foreign members, we concern ourselves with international relationships almost exclusively. As expanding facets of travel and tech enables the average person to discover and learn more about the world outside their own country, they discover new cultures, people, and realize the possibility for romance on another level. We help them connect. This concept is growing in scope and awareness, and is the reason we exist. It’s night and day a different direction and focus than most dating sites.
How do you make money?
Like everyone we’re always looking for ways to create new revenue streams through technology, new services, improving what we have, better customer service which we’re very proud of by the way. I think like anyone will tell you, bringing home bacon is a cumulative effect, so we need to keep our finger on a lot of pulses. Whereas Chat hasn’t gone as far as we think it can in the U.S., internationally it’s done very well by us.
Who are the users typically?
Our demo is the 30 to 60 age group who are interested in romance and finding a mate from a number of countries. The U.S. contains the usual suspects, followed by UK, Germany, France and Italy. We’re big in Latin America especially Colombia, and China.
What is AnastasiaDate focused on for 2013-2014?
Mobile is a big directional push as it’s growing on all internet user fronts. We’ve recently added considerable muscle to our senior management team, so there should be strong acceleration in growth. We’re looking afresh at acquisitions and ventures, and we’re growing more charity participation. I’m publishing a book, so stay tuned.
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OPW - Feb 19 - The highlight of the iDate Las Vegas was the Online dating disruption panel moderated by Dan Slater, author of "Love in the Time of Algorithms". In the first part of the panel Dan Slater gave a quick overview of the history of online dating. Then Steve Carter (VP of Matching at eHarmony), Brian Bowman (CEO of LikeIt), Lawrence Cervantes (Managing Editor of AnastasiaDate International) and Dan Winchester (IntroAnalytics) discussed what is online dating disruption and where it is happening. Dan Slater pointed out few stages of disruption that happened in the past such as eHarmony's heavy TV advertising, the rise of free dating sites, behavioral matching and offline dating. Of course now it's Facebook with its Graph Search that might shake things up.
Steve Carter: What disrupted online dating more than eHarmony was the changing societal attitude about being online. eHarmony got people to realize that online dating wasn’t just for hookups. Freemium or free services have been very disruptive. What Facebook is trying to do and what everyone is afraid of, it is to leverage that enormous amount of data that is out there on people. Any use of big data offers the potential for mass disruption.
Dan Winchester: I would argue that there hasn’t been any meaningful disruption in the last 13 years. The closest I’d say anyone has come to disruption is the free space.
Brian Bowman: eHarmony took the high end of the business away. POF and took out the bottom end of the industry. The biggest reason dating hasn’t innovated is the business model, and this 1990 model of charging to communicate obfuscates all kinds of innovation. The major innovation in dating is going to be infusing social networking.
Larry Cervantes: I think instead of being disruptive, a lot of what we call innovation is simply adoption and implementation, which AnastasiaDate does as a business model. One example is the video chat market, which may not be as prolific on some domestic sites but is a major mover in our.
The other issue is the pay model. We don’t have a membership component but we feel it’s fair that you cut the largest slice you like and pay as you go. I don’t think that international dating is a disruptor per se because our clientele are kind of different animal.
Dan Slater: Would you say having moved mail order brides online has moved the yardstick at all in terms of enhancing a number of folks who are interested in it because now it’s so easy to access. Do you think online dating has shifted the stigma a bit?
Larry Cervantes: The shift has been in the international move, the ease of travel and the Internet itself… the wall is coming down.
Dan Slater: In the past year or so we’ve been hearing a lot about social dating. But it still only appeals to a very small segment.
Dan Winchester: Social is all about eroding privacy. Dating is all about respecting privacy.
Brian Bowman: Privacy doesn’t matter. I believe the role of a dating site is to let me have a great first date. The industry does a horrible job of matching. People are having bad dates because we just don’t have enough information on people to match them.
Dan Slater: What impact Facebook Graph search may have on the online dating?
Dan Winchester: Graph search, in my view, is Facebook trying to add intent into their already well established advertising business. They want to serve job ads, dating ads, classified ads but they don’t want to become a dating site.
Dan Slater: What if it’s not about dating. Facebook has always been used for dating, but now it just has this enhanced dating capability.
Dan Winchester: Facebook is saying we’re no longer going to be a social network; we’re going to be dating site. They could do that but they can’t do both.
Brian Bowman: If they want to do this they are absolutely positioned to do it better than anybody because they know a tremendous amount about you and they know who you are. The question is, is that a priority for them?
Steve Carter: Facebook doesn’t really know that much about us. Does anyone know why Google hasn’t entered this space?
Dan Winchester: I didn’t get the sense that Facebook users are on Facebook saying I really wish Facebook was a dating site. This isn’t going to disrupt dating because dating is actually a pretty simple problem to solve. It’s about discovery and messaging and that’s already being done very well and the only way to disrupt it is to do it cheaper.
Larry Cervantes: Google is ideally positioned to create a separate dating function. I think there’s a lot of media out there, a lot of magazines that have their own proprietary dating sites.
Dan Winchester: There are plenty of people who use dating sites specifically because they don’t want to meet friends of friends. They want to meet people who they have no friends in common and if all goes wrong it is completely insulated from their life.
See all posts on eHarmony
See all posts on POF.com
See all posts at AnastasiaDate
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MORNINGWHISTLE - Feb 19 - Jiayuan.com has bought competitor juedui100.com. Juedui100.com, established in 2005 has in the past reported ~8M registered users. However, it has suffered from business difficulties so that by the end of 2010, no more than 20 employees were still employed. Experts seem to not be very optimistic about the acquisition. The acquisition will not effectively increase the number of validated users for jiayuan.com. Jiayuan.com should focus on the growing market such as the development of mobile clients instead of acquiring an aging rival. At present, the Chinese online dating market is divided by three giants – jiayuan.com, baihe.com and zhenai.com.
The full article was originally published at Morning Whistle, but is no longer available.
This post also appears on InternetDatingInvestments.
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SEEKING
ALPHA - Feb 19 - When social networks myYearbook and Quepasa merged in
2011, they gave themselves an appropriate brand name MeetMe.
MeetMe has grown since the merger, but is still a small company with a
market cap of $112.46M. Given its recent growth and outlook, it may be
an attractive buyout target for Facebook or Google. Why? MeetMe provides
a platform for meeting new people through social games and apps on
Apple and Android smartphones and tablets. The company derives revenues
through ads and virtual currency, with ~60% of traffic coming from
mobile devices. In the last five years, revenue has grown 5300%. In two
years - 2009 through 2011 - the company's revenues grew from $536K to
$11.85M. Facebook is primarily about finding friends and interacting
with them, and so is Google+. MeetMe, on the other hand, is more about
new relationships and social discovery. It makes an attractive
acquisition for either of the two players, as they could be interested
in expanding their reach to social discovery. With a valuation in the
range of only $110M, MeetMe is an easy buyout for the likes of Google
and Facebook. Another company that would possibly be interested in
MeetMe could be Microsoft if it plans to enter the social media space in
a big way.
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UPI - Feb 18 - A recent survey of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers said 59% of the nation's top divorce attorneys have seen an increase in the number of cases using evidence taken from dating sites during the past three years. 64% said Match.com was the top site cited, followed by 9% who said eHarmony and 27% who listed other choices.
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