Ticonderoga Ventures hooks up with Online Personals Watch

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Mark Brooks at Online Personals Watch has announced a working relationship with iDate. My question is, what does each partner get out of the deal?

iDate benefits from more exposure, although everyone in the industry knows about iDate, just like they know about OPW and this blog. iDate gets a newsletter and the OPW email list.

OPW benefits from additional traffic in that Mark may get some consulting gigs out of the publicity and alignment with a popular brand associated with the dating industry, at least to insiders.

Marc Lesnic makes huge piles of cash bringing together gamblers, dating executives and pharmaceutical executives. As he branches out into Mobile Dating Conferences(huh?), he risks over-extending himself. But then again, we have nowhere else to go. I can’t imagine that many US dating site executives are going to Prague, mostly it’s going to be the value-added service providers like Userplane and perhaps LookBetterOnline. The local dating market there is smaller and operates much differently than in North America. Much harder to break in without big partnerships. Dating sites that didn’t attend Nice last summer will find that out soon enough.

With no dating conferences coming up in the US for another 7 months, a vacuum exists, ripe for another conference organizer to step in and do a smaller, more intimate gathering of executives. Who is going to step up to the plate? I get together with many of the Boston-based dating companies and it’s nice to be able to sit F2F and talk shop. Perhaps a smaller, more intimate event is in order.

I have not heard much about SITRAS since they postponed the last conference. Are people getting their money back? iDate is the most popular(read only) conference at the moment. Either the social networking sites will start showing up or the dating sites will start going to the social networking conferences. I want to go to Vegas for a change.