PR WEB - Oct 19 - BoonEx, a provider of social networking software, has released a virtual dating feature, developed by OmniDate. Virtual dating is fun and safe way for people to get to know each other in a virtual environment, such as a virtual cafe, before meeting in person. Users interact through photo-realistic 3D characters, which respond naturally to the typed text (e.g., typing LOL makes an avatar laugh). They can even blow a kiss or reach over and touch the hand of the other avatar. Companies using the Dolphin platform, BoonEx flagship product, can now activate virtual dating on their websites. FULL ARTICLE @ PR WEB
5 posts categorized "BoonEx"
Virtual Dating Expands Into Social Networking
| |
Mixergy Video Interview With Mark Brooks
MIXERGY - Sep 8 - Mark did this interview from Malta, where he’s making a name for himself in the online personals industry through his blog Online Personals Watch and consulting company Courtland Brooks.
Q: How are you managing your company from Malta?
A: 3 years ago I took a trip to Shanghai. There was an Internet dating conference in Shanghai, and I decided to stay there for 2 months. And business grew. I learned that my clients did not care where I was based as long as the work got done. I brought 15 people onto my team.
Q: What exactly do you do when you consult online personal sites?
A: We help Internet dating companies make more money. And also companies that want to talk to them. We do PR, business development, and strategic advisement.
Q: Can you tell people a little more about the blog?
A: In 2004, when I was working with FriendFinder, I noticed that I was getting great snippets of information from the press. And I consistently didn't have time to read all of the articles. So I thought it would be nice if somebody could summarize and extract the best intelligence out of what the press were writing about. So in June of 2004, I started OnlinePersonalsWatch.com. The idea is that we condense three hours of reading into three minutes of reading a day. In January of 2005, I had three jobs offers on the table, so I decided to take all three. And that is how Courtland Brooks started. At a point from there, I knew a lot of people that I thought could do a better job than me. So, I hired them.
Q: Is there still money in the dating world? It seems to me like most people either go to one of the top sites or they go to Facebook.
A: The reason dating sites have a future is because it's one thing to be single and another to be single and available. And it's even another thing to be single and available and looking. You don't find that on Facebook. Yes, you can find people that say they are single. But are they really single? Are they dating? Are they really available?
Q: But Markus at PlentyofFish has blogged that social networks are taking customers away from dating sites.
A: Yes. It is taking attention. But people want a more focused experience. There are two surprises that we have had in the dating industry. The first one is that social networking didn't kill the dating industry. And the second one is that Internet dating didn't kill the matchmaking industry.
Q: What about the idea that there are already enough established players out there that it is really hard to come in with a new site?
A: It is. Without a doubt.There are thousands of Internet dating services. I rather think it is like starting a restaurant. It's not that difficult, you would think, to start a restaurant. But there's a lot more moving pieces that go into building a successful restaurant than meets the eye. And the same with Internet dating.
Q: Let's say Casey Allen, who I see here in the audience, decides that he is going to start an online dating site. What's the first thing that you'd recommend that he do?
A: First question is, is he a marketer or a technologist? If Casey is a marketer then he should go down the white labeling route and use a service like White Label Dating, DatingFactory.com or EasyDate.
Q: What if Casey Allen happens to be a technologist and he can code something up? What would you advise him at that point?
A: There are two extra routes that he can take. Number one is to use an off the shelf software like BoonEx and another option is use a programming outfit that has already built dating sites in the past.
Q: How do you bring people into a site today?
A: All of the major dating sites spend a lot of money on PPC. So, Overture and AdWords are an absolute mainstay of the industry. PlentyofFish is a wonderful place to run ads. If you can pay an extra 50 cents to a network, then you can get 10 times more traffic. Commission Junction and ShareASale have a good reputation.
Q: What else brings people in?
A: SEO. Also I'm a big fan of affiliates. The problem with affiliates, by the way, is there are rogue affiliates that will send junk traffic. The only way to deal with them is you've got to understand their position. They want to make money. And affiliates tend to be short-term based. They don't care too much about the brand, because they will just switch out to a different brand. So, the only way to really manage rogue affiliates is by laying down guidelines.
Q: We talked about how to get people in the door. What about getting them to multiply? By multiply, we mean viral marketing, getting them to bring their friends..
A: Let's start with Zoosk. They are one of the great, recent, success stories. On a typical dating site, you sign up. You've got to put in all your information. With a Facebook based social dating site such as Zoosk, some of that information can be sucked over. And so that really improves the initial conversions and efficiency. Plus, you know, the kinds of people that are on Facebook are going to be a little bit more social. When people talk about a good or a bad experience they think of as Internet dating. They don't tend to think of it so much as, it's Zoosk. It's Match.com. It's FriendFinder or Fling or whatever. I think the industry as a whole needs to make sure that they have a good experience. That means not allowing scammers. Scammers are actually very good for short-term conversions, funnily enough.
Q: How is that?
A: Because they are very active about communicating with people and getting them to convert.
Q: Do you have a sense of what percentage of sales these scammers are responsible for?
A: I don't know. I think for some sites, it is quite significant. For sites of integrity, it is very small, because they kick them off.
Q: What else do people do to multiply?
A: I am a big fan of success stories. ChristianCafe.com is very good with success stories. So is Match.com and PlentyOfFish.com. Now, there is a bit more to be said for social media these days and mobile.
Q: Can you give me an example of one company that's doing social well and how they are doing it, and then one company in mobile and how they are doing mobile well?
A: PlentyofFish does well as a social dating site in and of itself. In terms of social media, well, actually, Zoosk is a good example. They have had some music videos that have been featured, and so has PlentyofFish. PlentyofFish has been in a video on Lady Gaga. So, that's quite a new thing for the industry. I think OKCupid has the best blog in the industry. Again, they have got material that is extremely compelling, extremely interesting. And so they are getting the press talking about it.
FULL ARTICLE @ MIXERGY
See all posts on FriendFinder See all posts on Match.com
See all posts on PlentyofFish See all posts on Zoosk
See all posts on WhiteLabelDating See all posts on Fling
See all posts on DatingFactory See all posts on ChristianCafe
See all posts on Cupid plc See all posts on OkCupid
See all posts on BoonEx
| |
iovation Named Internet Fraud Prevention Tool For BoonEx
BUSINESS WIRE - Apr 20 - iovation, provider of the world’s first device reputation service for preventing online fraud and abuse, partners with BoonEx, a white-label platform provider for community, social networking and dating sites. iovation ReputationManager will protect the BoonEx community against fraud and abuse, such as financial fraud, spam, predators, cyber bullies, phishing, identity theft, scams and solicitations.
The full article was originally published at BusinessWire, but is no longer available.
| |
BoonEx Partners With Messmo
PRESS RELEASE - Jan 26 - BoonEx, a supplier of downloadable open source software for social networks, dating sites and online communities partners with messmo, a mobile messaging company for dating and personals websites. The messmo Extension is planned to be available for Dolphin 7 in March 2010. Thanks to messmo sites can easily extend the reach of their existing member-to-member communications, such as email or IM, to now reach members when not at their PC by delivering rich messages. FULL ARTICLE @ PR WEB
| |
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
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/
| |