INDO-ASIAN NEWS SERVICE - Oct 10 - Human traffickers are exploiting social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram or Snapchat, as well as dating apps such as Tinder, Blendr, and Yellow to hunt for potential underage victims, reveals a new study by the Human Trafficking and Social Justice Institute of the University of Toledo in Ohio, US. The study was requested by the Ohio Attorney General's Human Trafficking Commission. The study outlined how traffickers connect to vulnerable youth online, groom the children to form quicker relationships, avoid detection, and move the connections from online to in-person.
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Facebook And Tinder Being Used By Human Traffickers To Hunt Underage Victims: Study
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Dating Apps: Tech Doesn't Matter, Says Sex Columnist
NYMAG - Oct 6 - Users choose dating apps the same way they choose bars - based on the people. The make-or-break factor in whether users stick around, is the crowd. With new apps getting launched every few months, the dating app people will like best is the one that happens to have a user base that fits the demographic of people they want.
Here's a breakdown of some of the dating apps Maureen O'Connor, a sex columnist, have experimented with:
- Tinder: Single people who hang out at bars.
- OKCupid: Single people who hang out at coffee shops.
- Match: Squares.
- JDate: Jewish squares.
- eHarmony: Christian squares.
- Ashley Madison: Horny married guys.
- Blendr: Horny single guys.
- Happn: People with nice jeans who live near your subway stop.
- Coffee Meets Bagel: Risk-averse nice guys.
- The League: Hedge funds and Hamptons.
Dating apps, like all social situations, are malleable. They're whatever people want them to be.
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Location Based Apps: Women Are Overwhelmed And Creeped Out
NEW YORKER - Feb 27 - Blendr is a location-based dating apps for straight people. It was created by the same folks who made Grindr, the hookup app that has 4.5M users. The founders weren’t willing to disclose the number of Blendr users. When it comes to apps, men tend to be more willing to use location-based dating features. Women are different. Women may initiate contact less frequently, but they are comfortable reaching out first if they see a profile that appeals to them. Maybe the real failure is that no one has built an app that women want to use. On Check Him Out, women are “shoppers” and men are “products.” Only women can initiate contact, though men can “favorite” profiles. The site claims that 59% of the users are women. Women want authenticity, privacy, a more controlled environment, and a quick path to a safe, easy offline meeting. Coffee Meets Bagel, founded by three sisters, sends you a match and then sets a deadline by which you have to either “like” or “pass.” Three Day Rule caters to women who are searching for Mr. Right as opposed to Mr. Right Now. It functions as an intermediary. It shows just a few carefully selected matches at a time—bypassing the deluge problem, and saving busy professionals from scrolling through pages and pages of profiles. The site is still in beta mode and not open to the general public, and will eventually be for paying users only.
by Ann Friedman
The full article was originally published at New Yorker, but is no longer available.
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How Technology Has Changed Romance
CNN - Feb 12 - Technology isn't killing courtship. But for many young couples, it's redefining what romance looks like. We've come a long way since those AOL chat rooms. Using your phone's GPS feature, mobile social apps such as Blendr, Grindr, Are You Interested? and Plenty of Fish help you zero in on potential dates, or hook-ups, right around the corner. OkCupid recently launched Crazy Blind Date, which sets users up on short notice with someone they know almost nothing about. Some young single people today would rather have information than mystery. When Jason (29 years old) was skeptical of a potential date he'd met online, he turned to Facebook. There can be drawbacks to this Facebook sleuthing, said Dr. Corinne Weisgerber, an associate professor of communication at St. Edward's University in Austin. Brushing up on someone's background pre-date means you could skip over some of those foundational moments of discovery in person, she said. Although meeting in person will always be essential, the concept of romance has evolved to the point where weeks of IM or e-mailing can plant seeds of a relationship.
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Big News! Blendr Merged With Badoo
APPRENEUR-DIARIES.COM - Oct 12 - Blendr (the straight version of Grindr) has just launched on Android. After checking out both Blendr’s and Badoo's description, one can see that they are almost the same. Actually, the screenshots of the app are the same and the app themselves are exactly the same. If you download both apps and sign in both, it actually tells you in one that you have already been signed in the other. Furthermore, the apps look exactly the same and the people around you are the same, too.
The full article was originally published at Appreneur-Diaries.com, but is no longer available.
Mark Brooks: See comments for Joel's confirmation and comment.
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How Smartphones Are The New Wingman
CNN - Sep 23 - Online dating used to be largely a deskbound activity. But in recent years, mobile apps like Blendr have employed constant Internet access and location-based services to turn the smartphone into a wingman of sorts. Today's mobile location apps connect singles based on the proximity. Grindr has been a global success, with 1.1M daily active users in 192 countries. OkCupid also made its own location-aware app last year called OkCupid Local. Match.com and eHarmony have also gone mobile, but their apps are still more like window shopping. Location data isn't required to make the smartphone useful for meeting people. Smartphone owners can use Bump, a mobile app that lets you exchange contact information easily by bumping two phones together. Bump was an early hit in the iPhone app store and has been downloaded ~100M times.
by Heather Kelly
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Interview With Scott Lewallen, co-Founder Of Grindr And Blendr
OPW INTERVIEW - July 31 - You know Joel, no doubt. We interviewed Joel Simkhai about Grindr in December 2010. Here’s Scott Lewallen, the co-founder of Grindr and Blendr. - Mark Brooks
You started Grindr with $5,000. How did you do it?
I had met Joel when I lived in New York. I had moved back to Los Angeles and he showed up one day in L.A. and said: “You know what? I'm going to try out Los Angeles and I've got this idea. I want to be able to meet the gay guys around me. What do you think? Do you want to help me?” I was like, oh sure, that's a great idea and I had no idea what we were getting ourselves into. There were a lot of tireless nights where we didn't sleep, there was a lot of scribbling on napkins and pieces of paper. Some brainstorming in Photoshop and other sort of drawing programs.
So your background is branding?
Yeah, my background is branding, art, and technology.
At what stage did you realize that this was not going to be a small thing?
When Joel first came to me with the idea, I knew we were onto something. But I think the first time that it dawned on me that we hit something really big was a month after we launched. There was a big gay party in Palm Springs called the White Party. I was there to introduce Grindr and people were using it already.
How did you make it easy for people to talk and spread the word.
Keeping the experience very basic helped us because it solved a problem: figure out who is gay and then break the ice so you can talk to them.
Tell us more about LBS. You’ve done it right. How have you done it right?
It solved one single problem – finding out who's gay around you and letting the app do that for you.
There's other apps that have actually used a map, like SinglesAroundMe. What do you think of that?
I've seen it used in a number of places. Some people have done it brilliantly and some people have not. When it comes to Grindr it doesn't really matter where they are on the map. You only know they're 500 feet away.
So how have you used what you've learned from Grindr in Blendr, and what have been the challenges?
In Blendr, obviously the magic of our simple interface and the location based services were very important to us. Because it's clear that the gay men and straight men are interested in this type of thing, but would the women really ready for this? What we found is that it's picked up really well and that people are very engaged on Blendr as well.
Do you think you would move Blendr more towards the Badoo direction? Friendsmaking, if you'd like, finding new friends.
We did poll our Blendr users quite recently and the number that came back to us is that over 90% of both male and female are using it to talk with new people. Talking to new people essentially means dating or flirting. After watching our user habits and seeing what their doing, we've begun to push it in more of a dating and flirting direction instead of just social discovery.
Do you think anybody has really gotten the social graph right. Friends date friends of friends. There's one school of thought that says that's not cool, it should be a separate group. You don't want to mix that world. But in the real world, the reality is that people meet through their friends of friends. What's your philosophy on this and how does Blendr blend that in?
I think it's applicable to both Blendr and Grindr and just the social sphere in general. I do see it as two distinct buckets and I'm not sure that anyone has done it right in combining the two. Badoo would appear to be for flirting and dating. Whereas Facebook, it's more about social proof.
Could you define social proof?
Social proof for me is when I'm investigating somebody and something in their profile, whether it's an obvious mutual connection or mutual friend, or it's just some event that I know about. It qualifies them in my mind that I might be able to talk to them and they're not completely crazy.
What do you think is the future? Do you think these two buckets should be separate? Do you think the money's in a particular bucket in the future, in terms of monetization?
I'm not sure. It bugs me that I have to open five or six different apps to achieve what I want to do online. It would be nice to do that from a single location. But at the same time, if there was that single solution, would I want all those different aspects of my personal life to smear together?
How does Grindr use social media to generate word of mouth?
People talk about Grindr, regardless of our efforts to market it outside the app. We've got a pretty big following on Twitter and also on Facebook. We've had countless press mentions both in New York Times or TechCrunch – mainstream publications like that, and also pop culture. One of our big moments was when Stephen Fry mentioned us in his program and basically introduced Grindr to the masses.
How difficult was it to come up with the name?
Oh my gosh. The word Grindr came out of weeks and weeks of just looking at words and looking at concepts. I had a list of maybe 50 words and we just kept circling them and doing different iterations of each word. And we ended up on the word Grindr. It's a unique word. It's short, it rolls off your tongue, and it's memorable.
What would be your advice for someone who's just starting out and thinking I want to grow something for my particular dating community online and for mobile phone. How would you recommend they start? How would you recommend they spend money to seed?
I think a lot of success is built within taking risks and being passionate and focused about what you’re doing.
What one thing would you have done different in the first three months if you had to do it all over again?
Preparing ourselves for the amount of growth that we've had. We have 3.5 million users around the world. And very early on it became apparent that we weren't set up to handle the rapid scaling or the adoption rate with the gay guys that found out about Grindr. People are spending about 1.5 hours a day engaging on the app, and that leads to a lot of traffic.
Let's talk about the tech side of things as well. Do you think HTML5 is ever going to be strong enough to be able to do what you're doing with your native apps?
As a geek, I think HTML5 is super exciting. I wish there were more mainstream tools that facilitated development in HTML5. But we've created an ecosystem and a culture where people ask what apps are on your phone, not what websites do you go to. There's still some performance gaps that have to be met with HTML5. HTML5 seems to require a lot of processing cycles on your mobile device. As you get into older devices, the performance might not be up to par. We live in a world that is driven by app stores and the apps available in them.
You're on Android and iPhone. Do you have a Blackberry app?
We do have a Blackberry app and we support iPad as well.
How do you treat an iPad differently?
Apple defined two very different categories of their mobile devices. Whereas Android has one big ecosystem of things that run their operating system. So with regards to Grindr, we've done some optimization on the iPad. There's more room to display information on the profile. And certainly, at the end of the day, you see a much bigger, clearer picture of the person that you're talking to on your profile.
Do you see much difference between the usage of people on the Andoird versus iPhone?
Because we were first to market with iPhone, that's certainly where our largest population is. Android is catching up quickly. The barrier to entry to Android is a lot lower than iPhone, simply because a lot of the devices are cheaper or given away.
Are you seeing iPhone monetizing a lot better than Android?
I think Apple has done a wonderful job in terms of monetization. On iOS it's very easy for you to purchase your subscription credits.
So it's more streamlined basically?
A single button versus two pages of entering information is a much better user experience.
Who else would you say is doing a good job in the mobile dating space?
Anybody who's in Google Play, iTunes App Store or Blackberry App World top rankings is doing a tremendous job. If you look at the mobile dating space, I love Badoo.
The growth of mobile dating has been amazing over the last several months. It seems that most top tier dating sites are seeing 40-50% of their traffic on mobile now. Are you going to keep on doing the same thing and improving and growing? Or is there any revelation with the growth of the competitive space around you?
The competitive space is constantly growing and changing. Both in the gay market and also the mainstream market. I think that whatever happens tomorrow, happens tomorrow. Any company adapts and responds and evaluates. With regards to Grindr, our single most important thing is to make our users happy. So with regards to the future of Grindr, to me the most important thing is to sort of take the loyalty and the monetization our users give us and turn that around and develop new features and constantly improve the experience so that we can give it back to our users. Because at the end of the day, if we're trying to help gay guys meet each other, that better be one hell of an experience.
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Grindr Hits 4M Users, 1M Daily Uniques
TECH CRUNCH - June 17 - Grindr has surpassed 4M users (with 500K new users in the last quarter alone), and 1M active daily uniques. Blendr, the gender-open counterpart to Grindr, has also picked up steam.
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How Grindr Went Mainstream
INC - Mar 29 - Joel Simkhai founded the company behind an incredibly popular app called Grindr. Blendr began as an idea as early as 2010, just right around when Grindr really started to gain popularity. Blendr officially launched in September 2011, about two years after Grindr went live. Both companies are self-financed and through premium services and advertising revenue, though Simkhai is reluctant to offer revenue numbers. He says the company has spent no money on marketing, and downloads are completely driven by word of mouth. He does not plan on taking outside funding.
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Changing The Game
THEAGE.COM.AU - Feb 12 - A 2010 Nielsen random survey of 2K Australians found a quarter had tried online dating, of which 16% had formed long-term relationships as a result. One technology that has dramatically altered the playing field is Grindr, the mobile app that employs GPS tracking to allow gay men to check out other users in the area (a version for straight users, Blendr, recently entered the market). Grindr is so popular that Melbourne comic Nath Valvo created a show around it for this year's Midsumma festival and sold out every performance. The comedian says he knows men who wouldn't have been able to come out if they hadn't had access to the relative safety of chat rooms and other internet tools, and it's a case that extends beyond the gay community. Online dating can provide a sense of empowerment in that it can offer people a high level of control in how they manage their interactions and self-presentation.
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Social Networking Apps Bring The Close Closer
SYDNEY MORNING HERALD - Nov 25 - Blendr enables users to check their smartphones and then text other users a few metres away. If they hit it off, they can meet up for a date within minutes. Blendr is the heterosexual version of Grindr, which has more than 2M gay users in 192 countries. Joel Simkhai, who founded Grindr and Blendr, says the main difference between the two apps is that the straight version is less focused on casual sex. Other geosocial networking apps, such as OkCupid Locals and HowAboutWe are popular.
by Rachel Wells
See full article at Sydney Morning Herald
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Instant Date With An App
NY TIMES - Nov 3 - The idea of meeting someone through a mobile app may seem like a risky proposition. But the operators of these services say they are aware of the potential pitfalls and allow users to control how much information they divulge. Some of the apps are stand-alone, while others are new features of established dating sites; including Blendr, OkCupid Locals and HowAboutWe. OkCupid Locals is part of OkCupid, a larger dating site, which says a tenth of its 2.5M active members use the location features in the mobile app. HowAboutWe began a little over a year ago as a site where people post suggestions for dates they would like to have.The trailblazer among these services is Grindr, which is geared toward gay men and has signed up 2.6M members. In late summer its creators released Blendr, aimed at a broader audience.
by Jenna Wortham
See full article at NY Times
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Grindr Is The Gay Foursquare
by Una Mullally
See full article at Irish Times
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This post also appears on SocialNetworkingWach.
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Blendr Social App Raises Fears
BOSTON HERALD - Oct 3 - Blendr, a new location-based app, is raising concerns that it could be used to prey on teens. Blendr, which doesn’t bill itself as a dating app like Grindr, lets users know how close they are to others by relying on a smartphone’s GPS or Facebook’s location software. But child advocates aren’t viewing the new app as just a way to make friends and review places. When asked for its position, the company pointed to a 2010 statement: “As an added protection, we encourage parents to add Apple’s parental controls to their children’s iPod Touches, iPhones and iPads to help ensure that their children cannot access 17-and-over sites and apps. Grindr strongly condemns the inappropriate and criminal use of our service and actively cooperates with local authorities on any alleged illegal activity on our service.”
by Cameron Sperance
The full article was originally published at Boston Herald, but is no longer available.
Mark Brooks: LBS enabled idating is a double-edged sword. But ultimately, it will take off.
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Online Dating Inhibits Users From Gaining Social Skills
THE DAILY ATHENAEUM - Sep 11 - More people are starting to tell their children that they met on Blendr or another dating site. Blendr is a location-based mobile network allowing users to connect to other users nearby. It allows them to choose who can see their profile and gives their approximate location. While the app is handy, it takes away from the thrill of meeting new people. Meeting new people also helps to develop social skills for the shy and unnaturally bold. When someone is shy, it does not help to sit behind a computer and interact with people they may never see. The only way to get past shyness is to interact with people and get comfortable with it.
by Danielle Faipler
The full article was originally published at The Daily Athenaeum, but is no longer available.
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