MASHABLE - Aug 23 - Pure is a no-strings-attached iOS service resembling Craigslist's casual encounter channel; a hook-up tool that lets users browse who's around and what they want. Although it may be too racy to make it into the App Store, its founders say the app bans nudity and adheres to the iOS terms of service.
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Pure App Aims To Spice Up Users' Sex Life
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Babyklar.nu: Dating Site For Danes Ready For Baby
THE GUARDIAN - Aug 22 - Emmanuel Limal, the 43-year-old actor from France, was tired of meeting women who weren't ready to start a family. He set up Babyklar.nu, Baby-ready dating site. It functions like a normal dating site but every potential dater is asked to be honest about their wish to start a family soon. The response to the site has been overwhelming, he said. "We had 50 sign-ups an hour when we launched in June and I'm fully expecting the first Babyklar.nu baby by next summer." More men have signed up than women (53% to 47%).
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MySingleFriend.com Launches Singles Events
DAILY MAIL - Aug 22 - MySingleFriend.com, UK dating site where singles are recommended to potential love interests by friends, has launched a series of dating events (Date MySingleFriend) where singletons can bring a trusted wingman or woman along for an evening of dating and match making. Wingmen/women are responsible for filling out scorecards and taking note of good matches, leaving singletons more time to enjoy their dates.
by Bianca London
See full article at Daily Mail
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Coffee Meets Bagel Launches iOS App
TECH CRUNCH - Aug 22 - Launched in New York City in 2012, the startup is also today releasing its iOS app, which includes the same features as the free web service. Coffee Meets Bagel works like this: After signing up through Facebook, users can specify personal details as well as what they look for in a date. At noon each day, they receive one match, or “bagel” as the company calls them. They then have a time limit to either “Pass” or “Like.” If two people mutually like each other, they are put in touch through a private company texting line. Coffee Meets Bagel has raised $600K from Lightbank and has accumulated ~80K users. The startup has made ~1.5M matches, with 70% of members checking the service daily.
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Jiayuan Q2 2013 Financial Results
PR NEWSWIRE - Aug 21 - Q2 net revenues were RMB119.3M ($19.4M), a YOY increase of 20.0%. Net income was 13.1M ($2.1M), a decrease of 36.4% YOY. "Our mobile product and personalized matchmaking offers continued to grow in popularity," said Mr. Linguang Wu, CEO of Jiayuan. Mr. Wu added, "In the second half of this year, we expect to introduce new mobile products addressing the specific needs and spending patterns of our rapidly growing mobile user base." The number of average monthly paying users was 1,326,370, compared to 1,222,880 for the corresponding period of 2012.
The full article was originally published at PR Newswire, but is no longer available.
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Pure: No-strings Sex App Launches
DAILY MAIL - Aug 22 - Pure app offers sex on-demand by simply asking users their gender and the gender of their preference, whether they can host and then shows them potential partners who answer 'Okay' or 'No Way'. Pure's intentionally soul-less and potentially dangerous approach to hook-ups has no profiles, no chat sessions before-hand and deletes unfulfilled requests after an hour. While Pure is focusing its efforts initially on the gay market, it hopes to eventually open up the bi, straight and polyamorous markets very soon afterwards. They will charge $9.99 for a day pass - allowing users unlimited requests for 24 hours.
by James Nye
See full article at Daily Mail
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OKCupid's Security Flaw
BUSINESS INSIDER - Aug 20 - OkCupid uses an instant login feature. Whenever the site sends an email, links inside that email contain a unique identifier (called a token) that, upon clicking, will log users into their OKCupid account without a password. The trouble presents itself when people begin forwarding these emails or otherwise distributing these custom links.
by Dylan Love
See full article at Business Insider
Mark Brooks: Ease of access vs security. Given the privacy concerns of many iDating users, the decision to improve conversion factors over protecting privacy is interesting. You can be sure that this was tested, and the conclusion drawn that making the email based logins was worthwhile the odd user screw-up. What's your thoughts? Which way would you sway with your dating site?
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Inside IvyConnect's Exclusive Dating Scene
THE AWL - Aug 20 - Asking for a business card typically signals an intention to keep the relationship strictly professional—but that's not the case at meetings arranged by IvyConnect, the members-only social and professional club founded by Harvard Business School fellows, Beri Meric and Philipp Triebel. In just a year and a half, IvyConnect has grown from fairly elitist dating startup—then called IvyDate—to elitist lifestyle service with ~3K members and another 1K on the waiting list. IvyConnect hand-picks members. Applicants are approved by IvyConnect’s five-person membership committee and then pay $45 each month or $500 each year. IvyConnect says they haven't spent a dollar on paid advertising. Meric and Triebel hope to turn it into something larger than just an excuse to get drunk and mingle. One in-development feature is IvyCareers, a way for members to help one another advance professionally.
by John McDermott
See full article at The Awl
Mark Brooks: People will pay more to get more. In the IvyConnect case, they'll pay to save time sifting through profiles. Dating sites help users sift more quickly and effectively. This service is small, but will do well over the longer haul, but staying focused.
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WeGoLook Adds Dispatching Agents To Verify Online Dates
PR WEB - Aug 21 - Nationwide third party verification company, WeGoLook, has added Online Date Verifications to its services. The company will dispatch a local agent to meet with an online date to take current photos and verify said identity. The WeGoLook report is available to the customer generally within 72 hours and pricing starts at $59.
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OKCupid's OKTrends To Start Up Again
DIGIDAY - Aug 20 - In the spring of 2011, OkTrends was one of the hottest blogs on the web. From August 2010 to April 2011, OkTrends posts averaged 32,5K Facebook likes and 4K tweets. And then, all of a sudden, they stopped. The blog went dormant “for a couple of reasons,” said Rudder, who still works full-time at OkCupid. “I was the person who wrote all the posts and there was just other stuff I had to do here. I’m writing a book, which is kind of like a superset of all the stuff I did on OkTrends,” he explained. Rudder’s forthcoming book, “Dataclysm,” is due to its publisher, Crown Publishing, in December for a fall 2014 release. Rudder plans to rekindle OkTrends this March.
by Joe Lazauskas
See full article at DigiDay
Mark Brooks: Woohoo! At last! Other sites have toyed with pushing interesting data, but then they don't have a Harvard genius dedicated to spending a week on each post. Truly fascinating data, beautifully interpreted is hard to come by.
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Announcing iDate Brazil
OPW - Aug 21 - South America is a hot market. If you'd like to learn more about this growth market, and meet some of the key players, attend iDate Brazil on Thu-Fri 21-22 Nov. The weekend after the conference there's Formula 1 racing.
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AtThePool CEO Interview, Alex Capecelatro
OPW INTERVIEW - Aug 20 - I used to run an adventure and social club in Silicon Valley. It was a singles club that wouldn’t admit to being a singles club. AtThePool.com reminds me of my little club. Yes, its great for singles, but that’s not really what its about. Here’s my interview with the CEO/Founder, Alex Capecelatro. - Mark Brooks
What is your founding story?
AtThePool has been live for just under a year. Our goal is to help people connect offline, so not too different from a typical dating site, except we're not focused on dating.
I had been moving around quite a bit in the States. I found incredibly difficult to connect with people around me. I began working on At the Pool when I was living in a town called Beacon, upstate New York and it was probably the most depressing time in my life. I was building a chemical manufacturing company out of an automotive garage, and it was extremely isolating. I tried Meetup, but it didn't really work up there. I tried Facebook but Facebook doesn't really help you meet new people. I tried dating sites and learned that a lot of people using dating site not for dating but to get out and meet new people.
So the initial thought for AtThePool was to create a really easy and fun way to meet new people in your area based on your interests.
I've got a whole ton of questions for you, but one question just is burning in the back of my mind, what were the chemicals in the garage?
Long story. I have a background as a chemist. I spent a number of years doing that. With a couple of friends out of MIT, we developed a new class of materials based on Aerogel, which is the world's lightest material.
I sold lasers, and we had to measure Aerogel, and it was very difficult to measure. Amazing stuff!
Our company was called Aerogel Technologies, and we were pretty much the only manufacturing plant in the world that's making Aerogel.
Are you a fan of traditional idating sites, or are they broken? What do you think?
Idating is getting more and more popular. It's here to stay, and it's just getting bigger.
Would you say you're more of a social discovery? You're discovering new people to hang out with.
The website is 100% social discovery but we have a new app that is coming out in about a month. The app is very different. The app is looking more at your existing relationships connecting to people nearby, and it's not so much about meeting new people. Meeting new people is interesting and exciting if you're in a new town, but on a day-to-day basis your existing relationships are overwhelming. You know a lot of people that you are not following up with, you know people who are probably right around the corner that you just haven't caught up with in quite a while. Social discovery is interesting, but I don't feel like it's an entire product. It's really a feature within a greater product, and that's how we are evolving our company.
What do you think of Meetup?
I have a lot of mixed feelings about Meetup. I love the mission. It's really good in the business community but it really doesn't resonate with the young community. Part of it is the design and the user experience. It's more than 10 years old. I feel like they need to reinvent themselves, or they are not going to stay relevant to the new crowd.
So how are you making money?
At this point we are focused on execution and growth. We are not focused on revenues right now. We do have a couple different models that are in the works and that we are experimenting with. The first one is launching sort of white-label pools, communities of people that have a reason to meet. There are pools we can white label and drop into conferences and other events we are getting a lot of attention and a lot of attraction to.
The other one is local deals. For example, we know who in Santa Monica is into yoga, into cycling or surfing, because that's how our interest graph is built. What we are doing is building a recommendation engine, and if we scale the right way that's a huge business.
How many members do you have now?
We are not disclosing the number, but we have members in over 95 countries. The growth has just blown us away, it's been pretty phenomenal.
Are you looking for funding?
We raised funds about 7 or 8 months ago, and we are well funded for the next year. We're not looking for money right now, we're just focused on executing/launching this mobile product, and just having a good time.
What is AtThePool and GetThePool going to look like in one year roughly?
I'm extremely excited about the mobile launch. Our goal ultimately is not one year out, but maybe five/ten years out. We believe the entire world needs to be connected. I want to be able to travel anywhere in the world, connect with the people around me, and be able to get offline.
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Facebook Graph Search To Remove Online Dating Stigma
HUFFINGTON POST - Aug 19 - Facebook's rollout of "Graph Search" has created uproar in the online dating space. Online dating CEO's, investors and entrepreneurs have become concerned that graph search would do what dating sites traditionally could not -- meaningfully connect singles through friends and common interests -- and therefore drive traffic away from dating sites. One of the search fields includes "relationship status," which enables you to specially search for "singles," thus making graph search a de facto dating feature. Facebook has actually done a huge favor for the entire online dating industry. Given that only 1 in 5 singles visit a dating site each month, the biggest opportunity for growth for dating sites is to remove the stigma associated with using online dating sites, and thus expose the other 80% of singles to online dating.
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Hinge Dating App Making Smart Match Recommendations
THE VERGE - Aug 16 - Hinge is a lot like Tinder, a popular hookup app that only reveals potential matches once both people show interest, except it only surfaces matches that are friends of friends. Hinge doesn’t ask the usual array of questions but instead relies on pre-existing signals to make assumptions about you. Solely by examining your friends and interests, the service can predict your political leaning, your age, your sexual orientation, and your race.
by Ellis Hamburger
See full article at The Verge
Mark Brooks: Good move! Past behaviors are the best indicator of future behaviors.
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Savers Are Sexy
REUTERS - Aug 16 - "You would think that spending would be more attractive," says Jenny Olson, a PhD candidate at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business and co-author of the working paper, "A Penny Saved is a Partner Earned: The Romantic Appeal of Savers". "Those things can also be perceived as wasteful and lacking in self-control," says Olson. "And self-control is a very desirable quality in a potential mate." New York Times money columnist Ron Lieber once asked eHarmony to dig through its 30M matches made in July 2010, and found that users who labeled themselves as savers rather than spenders were contacted 25% more by potential mates.
by Chris Taylor
See full article at Reuters
Mark Brooks: 'savers rather than spenders were contacted 25% more by potential mates.' I love these kinds of stats. The internet dating industry can shine a light on all manner of human traits and foibles. They're fascinating! OKCupid proved this with the OKtrends blog. Why don't we do this more often?
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