Online Dating Insider

Welcome!
Online Dating Insider delivers cutting-edge insight and commentary on all aspects of the online dating industry. Topics include industry news, site reviews, emerging trends, analysis of dating site features, discussion about safety safety, finance and other issues important to the online dating market. Don’t miss our Tools & Services directory, useful to anyone running dating [...]

[Read more →]

Recently I had a great lunch with Brad Canavan at Iovation. I had to meet with a guy who’s email signature is “The Wizard of Odds.” Reading the Iovation newsletter, I see its now public knowledge that Iovation has completed a $15 Million Investment round. Capital came from SAP Ventures, the corporate venture capital arm [...]

[Read more →]

I heard from Stephany Alexander, who runs Womansavers, “World’s Largest Database Rating Men” (30,000+ men’s names, descriptions & photos entered by women, top 5% most popular women’s websites). Thankfully I don’t show up in the database.

WomanSavers has been the leader in online men’s database ratings since 2003, making us the first and most established of [...]

[Read more →]

Boston is getting a lot of snow today, tonight the snow shoes come out!
I’m sorry to say that Consumating is joining the TechCrunch Deadpool on March 15. I talked with founder Ben Brown many times when they were starting up and during the transition after CNET bought them in 2006. I loved the concept, turns [...]

[Read more →]

Given the important role fraud detection plays in the idating market, I expected the iovation webinar to be packed. Perhaps school vacation week got the best of people’s schedules. A transcript of the event will be posted and I’ll try to link to it here.
My notes from the presentation:
Fraud and abuse in idating spammers and [...]

[Read more →]

Hope everyone had a great Valentine’s Day. Today I feel like accountants must feel on April 16th.
In my quest to learn more about the role of fraud detection in online dating, I had lunch with Maxmind. Talking with the fraud guys is a real eye-opener. There are a number of companies working around the clock [...]

[Read more →]

Recently I had the pleasure of speaking with Jay Johns from Iovation. Simply put, Iovation brings a level of security to online transactions unlike anything else I’ve ever seen.
Iovation’s patented technology builds historical information about every computer used to connect to an online service, including device to account relationships and types of problems associated with [...]

[Read more →]

The FBI is expected to announce this week the awarding of a $1 billion, 10-year contract to develop the largest and most comprehensive government biometrics database in history — with information on the palm prints, eye scans, tattoos, and other identifying physical data of citizens and those who pass through. Via BoingBoing.
I wonder if they [...]

[Read more →]

Perusing the list of presenters and sponsors of the Social Networking and Dating conference in Miami. I came across Vidoop, which is building out a single signon solution based on Open ID. Vidoop provides corporate-grade security to websites, but with an interesting twist.
Vidoop Secure is a software-only, multi-factor user login technology based on categorized images. [...]

[Read more →]

At first glance, the dozens of measures Myspace has agreed to take to make it’s users safer, those outlined in this New York Times article seem easily hackable and not quite the watershed moment we were expecting, especially since MySpace has been talking to background check and p*rn-removers for quite some time.
Parents blocking kids won’t [...]

[Read more →]