I was reading an interview with Phonematrix’s CEO. Phonematrix is the latest of a long line of companies trying to sell anonymous calling to the dating industry. I’ve also heard from several background check companies “excited at the positive response” they received at iDate.
It’s interesting to see how many previous vendors who attended iDate last year were nowhere to be found.
Anonymous calling and background check companies are pure FUD marketing plays. FUD stands for Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.
Services such as anonymous calling and background checks are valuable services clearly needed by the industry. I will argue this point far past what is considered reasonable bounds.
I want to talk about three reasons why anonymous calling and background checks have not been received well by the dating industry.
1) Problems pitching the value of their services
2) Greed – lack of partnerships
3) Legal issues
What is the core value proposition to the dating site? What is the proposition to customers? The answers to these two questions should be quite different.
These calls and background checks are most likely going to be costs absorbed by the dating sites or rolled into the subscription cost.
By missing the mark on the value proposition, they lost any chance of being taken seriously.
Dating sites remain resistant to services that are not offered in a well-developed and easy to understand bundle. Selecting from myriad vendors to deliver several features and functionality is difficult under the best of circumstances.
A la cart services tend to be a lot more expensive in terms of resources and money and integration than package deals.
See Verified Person, DateNumber and other companies with perfectly good products that never took hold in the industry. DateNumber was cool, I really liked the service and the fact that I got my messages as MP3′s in my inbox. They got smart and went after the auction market, where the revenue opportunity dwarfs dating.
Yahoo and Match had to bring in experts to do due diligence on background checks. That was like showing people a space ship who have never seen an automobile.
Why doesn’t Phonematrix do a deal with a background check and photo ID company? Building a partnership like that is simple.
The only free competitor to background checks is reputation management. The problem with anonymous calling is that it’s not the only game in town.
Calls can be made for free in any instant messaging client, including Yahoo, AOL, MSN and iChat messengers. During the past few weeks I’ve been spending at least 3 hours a day using Skype instead of my cell phone at my home office. Consider me a convert. Call cost is free if both parties have Skype. Yahoo charges a few cents a minutes to make calls from their messenger client.
Why would I pay several dollars to make a call when I can do it for free? Dating sites don’t share this information with members because then they lose them. In fact, many dating site will not let you mention your IM or email address. This is totally backwards. You’re getting my $20, why do you care how I choose to communicate with other members?
Vivox uses the phrase graduated communication. I agree with Markus, a viop call from IM is the highest likliehood of success. There needs to be an intermin step, like what Vivox is doing. View profile, send wink/email, text chat, then voice.
Other companies get this as well. I spent an hour in the new Userplane multi-party audio/videochat client yesterday. Impressive. Why not install that with a few lines of PHP or Javascript. Bingo, free anonymous calls for your site’s members.
Many ways exist to bring additional levels of safety, security and comfort, and yes, even revenue, to dating site. It requires a new approach to serving customers, both from vendors and dating sites themselves.
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In theory, I agree with Markus on the idea of VoIP integrated into the IM with the ability to open or close communication to select individuals to be a killer datilng app and a great idea. But, mass depolyment is a far bigger issue especially when the various IM platforms are purposefully not compatible. Why hasn’t the videocam taken off? It seems great – but why is there such small deployment? I think ubiquitous deployment to make it work on scale will come down to what the Dell’s preload and ship on their computers.
As a practical matter, VoIP is in the early adopter stage. Once there is a critical mass of people with IM clients and the knowledge to use them competently, and once standards are adopted by the industry so that I don’t need different clients to communicate with different buddies, it may well be *the* anonymous voice solution, but in my opinion that is a long way off.
As to those sites that allegedly will not allow their clients to send an email address, URL, or other such info to another member via their proprietary mail systems, I cannot speak for all such sites, but I can speak for eHarmony, and I am here to tell you that yes, you *can* send such info, if you know how. I’ve done it on several occasions, and they never blinked an eye.
What I object to are outfits like match.com claiming that messaging via their anonymous remailer is secure when it does not screen message bodies for the actual email address of the sender, this being the default format for messages sent using Microsoft Outlook. I have told several women about this, and all have been both shocked and angry at match.com for giving them a false sense of security.
Hello guys, hello David
We are about to launch that application, quite different but also in the “calling area”. It is called KipCall, http://www.kipcall.com
How do you feel about it?
Let me know what you think of it
I think Facebook, Skype and a few other companies are very close to baking your feature right into our social networks. Anonymous contact on Facebook doesn’t really make much sense. If someone is your friend, sharing number is not a big concern.
For private chat with people you don’t know, there are many companies which offer anonymous calling services.
How are you different?
David,
Of course there might be projects I am not aware of. But here is the thing:
I do not have the phone numbers and everybody in my Facebook, and there are not all my actual friends. We do not really aim to change Facebook, but more to change people call. Facebook is the first app.
People exchange now their facebook very quickly, and tend not to exchange phone numbers.
We want to get rids of phone numbers and switch them by a solution that allows people to keep control over time on who can call them, when they are reachable… Phone numbers do not allow that.
And the system is not anonymous, you know who calls you, you just don’t have his phone number. But you can callback, at any time. And of course, this is mobile.
Available to continue to discuss (better in inbox I guess yvalensi@gmail.com)
Yoann
My only comment at this time is that this is a highly contested space with 50+ companies trying to do the exact same thing. Some of them are quite good. Look at http://www.launchorbit.com/ for example. I have at least 5 apps on my phone which do this. I hardly use any of them after a few days.
Hi,
I know Orbit, even if I have not used it a lot. I will spend much time on it. Honnestly, it is quite different, we are really dealing with voice calls, and the question of phone numbers;
David, would you like to download the Beta?
David,
I have been using Orbitz and checked websites you are reffering to.
I understand your point of view, and it might mean I did not explain kipCall well enough
1) Anonymous: Our applications does not provide anonymous calling: You see the identity of the caller. And you can call him back. We want to get rids of phone number as we think it is useless and permanent, while the usage of Facebook allows you to keep control over who is calling you.
2) it is mobile and not connected: Unlike other applicationss, our system is always on, no 3G or WIFI required. You just your need your iphone
The big difference with our system is that you will be able to call someone without asking him his phone numbers, and that people will now have the capacity to manage calls the same way they are managing other parts of their social lifes.
People do not need to keep control over who is calling them. This is not a problem. Why would I want to call someone without knowing their phone number? I would ask them for their number if I wanted to call them. I don’t see a clear use case here. If anyone can call me, that is going to create the problem of keeping control over who is calling me. You create a problem and then you deliver a solution. Thats kind of interesting but again there are so many “social phonebooks” out there. I’m still not seeing how yours is any different. Sure send me a link to the beta. Best way to learn about something is to use it.
Sounds great.
I will explain you more our service
Can you send me your iPhone UDID (use an app called UDID+) so I cans end you the beta? (yvalensi@gmail.com)