Online Dating Insider » Identity

Augmented Identity App Great For Stalking, Death of Business Cards Imminent

David Evans — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 16:19:38 +0000

Swedish mobile software firm The Astonishing Tribe has created a mobile application called Recognizr, a facial recognition service based on a mashup of face recognition technology, computer vision, cloud computing, and augmented reality.

Point your phone at someone’s face and Recognizr’s face recognition software creates a 3-D model of the person’s face and uploads it to a server where it’s matched with an identity in the database. The application then displays the subject’s name and links to their social persona such as photo sharing sites and social networks. More at PopSci.

Doesn’t work on iPhone, and I need to dig into the privacy concerns, of which I am sure of two things: 1) this will freak people out to no end, and 2) The Tribe has most likely identified most if not all of the issues people have with this sort of application. Time to break out the Richard Nixon masks!

I use the Yelp Monocle all the time. It turns on my iPhone camera and as I spin around floating windows appear on the screen overlaid on the live video. I’ve found It’s a great way to find beer, pizza and tourist destinations.

I’ve also been using Bump, which is a cool iPhone app where you bump fists with someone and your business card, photos or other items are immediately transferred to the other person’s phone. DUBMeNow is nowhere near as cool as Bump, but it’s profitable and raised $2.8 million recently.

Augmented reality is just getting started, things are going to get Minority Report/CSI very quickly, especially with the iPad.

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YouAndMe Gets Honest

David Evans — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 19:21:55 +0000

Free dating site Youandme has integrated Honesty Online and iovation as part of their safety and security measures.

Steven Sikes, one of youandme’s founders says:

“We easily could have over 50,000 online dating members, but we’ve banned thousands of spammers and scammers. Working with Iovation and Honesty Online should mitigate this problem and help YOUAND.ME to have a really high quality membership base. We’re focused on quality over quantity and the most social and secure online dating site.”

I’m glad to see dating sites beginning to understand the value of identity verification and anti-fraud services.

Press release.

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Honesty Online Offers FastLife Speed Dating Identity Verification

David Evans — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 17:28:30 +0000

Online Dating Insider sponsor HonestyOnline is now providing identify verification to speed dating services.

FastLife.com, the worldâ€™s largest speed dating service, has partnered with Honestly Online Inc. to launch Prestige Speed Dating, designed exclusively for established singles concerned about the personal history of the people they date. Set to launch Thursday, September 25th in New York City, the innovative new format, which includes a state-of-the-art identity verification check, has already exceeded expectations in registration and enrollment.

The launch, to be held at Touch in Manhattanâ€™s trendy Clinton/Hellâ€™s Kitchen district, will cater to 20 qualified, singles â€” the countryâ€™s very first Prestige daters. To qualify as â€œPrestigeâ€, candidates must consent to â€” and pass â€” Honesty Onlineâ€™s detailed verification check. Once a candidateâ€™s background has been qualified they may attend the upmarket Prestige Speed Dating events.

I take minor umbrage at FastLife’s claim to be the world’s largest speed dating service. Nonetheless, it’s great to see face-to-face speed dating service implementing verification checks. Can WooMe and SpeedDate be far behind?

Here’s how it works:

Using its proprietary system, Honesty Online only requires singles to provide their name, address and date of birth to verify the validity of their identity, after which singles are asked to answer a series of questions to confirm that the identity is truly theirs. The entire process â€” which is considered one of the webâ€™s most accurate authentication programs â€” takes users only a matter of minutes to complete. For the launch event, Honesty Online will also preview a future offering â€” a credit check of all participants in Prestigeâ€™s launch event. In addition, FastLife will require each applicant to fax a copy of their business card reflecting their place of employment and their position within the company as well as submit to a telephone interview with a FastLife representative. Honesty Online will be providing a thorough employment and reference check in the next quarter.

So much for my fake business cards. Good to see Honesty Online continue to add to their core services.

Fastlife offers Prestige-level members their own personal consultants. A great example of that high-touch feeling missing from the online dating experience.

Press release.

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Dating Links For Sunday June 29, 2008

David Evans — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 17:12:19 +0000

Match.com will start advertising to affluent singles.

The new Honesty Online blog.

I grow weary of signing up for new dating sites. Does anyone actually think to ask if their questions are any good? Why don’t dating sites link to popular photo-sharing sites? I have to open up iPhoto, find a photo crop/export it to desktop, then upload it. This is 2008 people and I don’t have a lot of time.

Any dating site that lets someone join without a photo is doing them a disservice. I don’t care if you’re a CEO or look like a troll, you need a photo. Life isn’t You’ve Got Mail, dating sites need to wake up and start building in privacy tools like eHarmony to gradually reveal yourself. Punish people without photos by limiting search results or something, anything to avoid the dreaded blank grey picture box. If I was buying a dating site, I wouldn’t accept profiles without photos.

Why aren’t you letting me mention my social network pages? If your site is too idea-poor to come up with interesting and useful profile fields, leverage what others have done. Walled garden dating sites s**k big time and I’m tired of them. I do the majority of my dating on Facebook now. Facebook let’s you find niche’s like no dating site can. Results may be spotty but it’s what’s happening right now and people actually write you back. Good looking funny people that are cool enough to be on Facebook. I like it, not for everyone, but it works for me.

This week I came across Fantomaster, which I know nothing about, but they introduced me to the term cloaking, which is my favorite word of the week. I bet Markus is doing this, and so is SinglesNet. This is way ahead of what most people think about when it comes to SEO and gets me all excited. The 5,000 landing pages thing is popular too, part of me hopes Google doesn’t like that. Search engine games are disingenuous for the most part, but thats part of the fun. You see what you can get away with until Google spanks you and you start losing $10,000 a day because your SEO/SEM guys pushed things just a bit too far.

TechCrunch on Modeling the Real Market Value Of Social Networks. Wonder how we could do this for dating sites? Traffic isn’t the only metric, what about time spent on site, customer satisfaction and successful matching? Some people say it should be number of emails sent, which I’ll add to the list.

Number of successful relationships will never be known. I’m waiting for someone to do a study of the number of eHarmony divorces. Probably pretty low but still how interesting would it be to know the performance of the site over time?

I heard that True.com uses Ivy Tower Media. Does anyone know anything about the company?

Does anyone have experience with Evercurrent? Leave a comment or contact me directly.

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To Catch a Myspace Predator

David Evans — Tue, 15 May 2007 14:17:36 +0000

Law enforcement officials are charging that the online social network MySpace has discovered thousands of known sex offenders using its service, but has failed to act on the information. So much for the Sentinel Sentry sex offender database.

Hemanshu Nigam, the chief security officer of MySpace, supports legislation requiring convicted sex offenders to register their e-mail addresses and instant messenger accounts with authorities. Sexual predators are pretty stupid when it comes to online chat, just watch an episode of To Catch a Predator, but does Nigam really think registering email and IM handles is going to curb the flow of the disturbed into Myspace?

Legislators should prepare for a rude awakening when they find out of ineffective email and IM registration and tracking will turn out to be. Just look at how easy it is to change email addresses, member names and credit cards at online dating and social sites.

For every sicko who ends up in a living room facing MSNBC’s Chris Hansen there are 10 others far more advanced in feeding their sexual addictions. Proxy servers in Russian republics, encrypted P2P networks California-based sex slaves and the ability to buy credit card numbers on the net for $6 are the real concerns.

Myspace will never fully eradicate predators from Myspace, everthing they do is a best-effort. While I applaud most social and dating safety initiatives, I certainly hope Myspace’sÂ hunger for revenue does not get in the way of their responsibility to do whatever it takes to keep members as safe as possible.

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PlentyOfFish Followup

David Evans — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 21:04:29 +0000

My comments on Markus commenting on PlentyOfFish Changing Direction.

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TrustPlus Portable Online Reputation

David Evans — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 20:39:31 +0000

My friend GPC, who used to do PR for eHarmony, went to the Web Innovators Group last night in Cambridge. I am deep into a project and couldn’t tear myself from the monitor and Greg was nice enough to post his review of the companies that presented.

One company which stuck out was TrustPlus, which is creating portable identities. This ties nicely into my earlier post about Identity Verification Services. It’s like Rapleaf, Trufina and Opinity all rolled into one.

TrustPlus is a service that allows you to receive and create reputation anywhere you go online. TrustPlus allows you to collect your existing reputation, collect new reputation as you interact and transact anywhere you surf, and provides you with meaningful analysis of the reputation of people with whom you are interacting and transacting online. TrustPlus is currently operational for craigslistÂ® posts. Additional sources of trust will be added soon and frequently.

I’m not a fan of having another email address, but this is looks like they are off to a good start.

How much money is a background-checked and ID’d member with a solid reputation worth to a dating site? How much more likely is that person to have a better experience on said dating site? Does anyone have any research they can share into this? Most background check companies immediately go to the financial value proposition, although there are several inherently intangible positives to offering identity verification services to dating and social networking users.

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Overview of Identity Verification Services

David Evans — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 16:38:27 +0000

Read/WriteWeb has an overview of identity verification services. Having worked with Trufina and Opinity, I am intimately familiar with how they operate and current issues that need to be addressed if these companies hope to succeed.

At first, background checks were a solution looking for a problem. The thinking was along the lines of â€œWe do checks for major corporate HR departments, why not branch out into other (seemingly) logical markets?â€?

Bzzzt. Wrong answer. None of these companies knew the first think about dating or social networking, and it showed, sometimes painfully, during their pitches to dating site business development teams.

That was two years ago.

Now Sentinel is providing searching capabilities to MySpace’s sex offender alert system. MySpace may use image-analysis software and other means whereby sex offenders using MySpace can be recognized, even if they don’t use their real names in registering. I talked to Riya about using their facial recognition on dating sites for matching purposes, as I understand it talks are underway with most large dating sites although I’m not clear on the status.

Sometimes you need to stare at a problem for a while before the solution becomes apparent. The problem is that others are reacting quicker to changes in the marketplace and launching competitive services for most less cost and overall resources.

I recently heard from Harrison Tang at Spokeo. Spokeo is a content and profile aggregator built by Stanford roommates. No VC, no big development team. Just a few smart people in close proximity learning from the mistakes of others who previously trod down a similar path.

This madness with 20+ profiles is ridiculous and borders on insulting. I can only hope that dating sites will allow for a Master Profile which can be shared among several sites and manageable via a centralized site.

Lots of entrants into the marketplace, everyone is having a hard time monetizing traffic. Either you make money on identity or background checks or advertising. So far, we’re not seeing a lot of either, but it’s early days for identity companies. There are plenty of them in the deadpool. As usual, it’s going to take timing and a unique value proposition to succeed.

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ProfileLinker Offers Portable Profiles

David Evans — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 18:19:43 +0000

TechCrunch has a review of ProfileLinker, a Boston-based (for now) company working on aggregating your social networking experience.

You tell ProfileLinker your site credentials and it pulls your bio, friends and other information from those sites and centralizes it. You then use ProfileLinker to manage your activity on those networks: aggregate and manage multiple social profiles; discover new social networks and communities of interest within social networks; and receive notification of messages and friend requests from multiple networks.

This is very similar to what Opinity (past client) and various other companies have been trying to do. It’s really so simple, but most companies are too focused on revenue, traffic building or their own in-house myopia when it comes to bridging social and dating networks. Suck in the data, add some value and republish across the net. Strong value proposition that until now nobody has been able to execute on well enough to get traction.

ProfileLinker pulled in my Myspace profile pretty well, there are some bugs in what is imported when you use custom skins for example. The password fields only allow easy-to-hack characters which is a simple oversight I hope they fix quickly.

Users can also sign up for Photobucket during the setup process. You can also import Yahoo contacts or any comma-delimited list from your address book.

ProfileLinker also offers a pc-only toolbar, like we need one more of those. Why not make it a simple bookmarklet?

I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on ProfileLinker. When there is enough value to most casual social networks, we’ll see some big deals happen with partners. Until now it’s good to be small while they get their business model sorted out.

Remember, there have been several sites that have tried to aggregate profiles. It’s straightforward to accomplish, but why should anyone do it? Would you trust a roomful of hackers with credit cards to manage your online life?

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Trufina’s Free Verified Personal Information Community

David Evans — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 21:26:31 +0000

Busy day, few things you should know about. One-time client Trufina has announced a new free service. No link to press release on their own website, hrrumpf.

College Park, Md.–Trufina Inc., a leader in the Online Identity
Verification space, announces today a unique initiative to bring
verified personal information to the Internet community–at no charge.

With Trufina, a subscriber has an â€œInternet ID cardâ€? that has been
verified to be accurate. Trufina users can also have several versions
of their ID cards, much like a user might have several different credit
cards in her wallet. When a user wants to assert something about their
identity, they can choose the appropriate card. And because that
information has been verified by a trusted source, personal information
can be trusted to be accurate. Trufina users have complete control over
their IDs and can choose where that information is used–and who can
view it.

Verified users can also â€œassertâ€? information on their own behalf. Once
Trufina’d, subscribers can assert their age, address, phone number and
other information for use across the Internet. For example, a user who
would like to purchase wine over the Internet could assert their age
with no trouble whatsoever.

Trufina IDs are applicable across many areas of the Internet. For
example, eBay users can reduce fraud by requesting buyers and sellers
to sign up for free Trufina ID cards and then sharing that ID with
them, reducing fraud and increasing trust.

Websites can also implement Trufina’s personal information validation
services to easily offer the verification of personal information for
their users. For example, social networks can offer the Trufina ID free
of charge to their subscriber base, reducing the occurrence of
inaccurate information. Users of that social network will know, upon
seeing the Trufina shield in conjunction with a subscriber’s profile,
that the viewed information asserted has been proven accurate. In
addition, Websites can now be assured that when a Trufina user
registers and uses their site that each Trufina member is unique, as
they can only register for the Trufina service one time.

Users can also join by going directly to www.trufina.com and
registering for a free account. Once completing a short questionnaire,
verifying the user’s identity, a user receives her own Trufina ID that
she can use anywhere on the Internet. Members can reuse their Trufina
ID whenever ID verification is needed.

Christian Madsen, Trufina’s CEO, said, â€œTrufina’s service is
user-centric, putting all the control in the user’s hands. Trufina
users control their own information by controlling what information is
visible to others. This was critical for our user base and in line with
our company’s philosophy and policy to give our users complete control
and privacy.â€?

About Trufina (www.trufina.com)
Trufina is the first company that offers users the ability to verify
personal information, control it, and share it across the Internet. At
Trufina we strive to lead in the development and deployment of the most
advanced verified identity system on the Internet. Trufina’s unique
approach brings more confidence and integrity to any online experience
by removing the guesswork of determining if the other person across the
Internet is being truthful.

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