A great time was had by all at the eAmore Dating Industry Summit in New York. 150 people got together in Brooklyn to listen to dating industry executives, startups, financiers and vendors.

Overall, I was pretty pleased with the event. The main gripe was that the schedule ran too long, and this will certainly be addressed at the next event. From my perspective this was easy to overlook while engaging with a roomful of bright young and passionate dating entrepreneurs for a few hours at a hip event space under the Brooklyn Bridge.

I felt like an elder statesman. Some presenters were 12 when I started covering the dating space. I ended up spending a lot of time on stage and tried to educate and provide perspective by sharing what I’ve learned working with dating sites over the years.

One issue that was continuously reinforced throughout the night is that entrepreneurs tend to avoid focusing on previous attempts in their market. This can be useful if they leverage their myopia in positive ways, or may lead to pain-inducing times if they don’t understand how the market has evolved. That’s where I can help.

Some of my rapid-fire “state of the dating industry” presentation ended up repeating key points Sam Yagan made in his keynote. Example: Social exhaust data is interesting in dating profiles but no one is leveraging it to its full capacity. Mobile is easy to get into, difficult to succeed. The Q&A with Sam was super, he is one of the nicest and smartest people in the industry. We could have listened to Sam talk for an hour straight, he’s that good.

Here’s part 1 of a recap for those of you who were unable to attend. Leave a comment if you have found other write-ups of the event and I’ll add at the bottom. Speaking of attending, people came from all over the US and several people who went to iDate LA came to eAmore on their way home which was great!

As an optimist cynic who thinks he’s heard it all, I learned an incredible amount from some very bright people hell-bent on changing online dating for the better.

The event turned me on to a number of new concepts based on previously-attempted ideas that failed to get significant traction in the marketplace. Examples: mobile matchmaking, white label providers, introduction services and dating site meta-search. Reality is that sometimes it takes a few iterations of an idea for it to take off. Society has to be ready, technology advances, having enough money, the right founders and team and plenty of luck are required to succeed in the dating industry.

Mobile was a hot topic. Most services had or are planning some sort of mobile apps. HowAboutWe talked about their new mobile app.

Andrew Weinreich, founder of mobile dating service MeetMoi was the moderator. Kudos to Andrew for his efforts to keep the event moving along and insightful Q&A sessions.

Parlor.fm is soup-to-nuts voice-based social networking. Almost too much to comprehend in a quick demo. Founder brought LoveDetect to market, a concept I love to this day.

LoKast, creators of disposable social networks impressed. Great for parties and events.

MeepMe has a new take on flirting at events. Lots of UPenn/Wharton people at the event.

A Small World-inspired Invite-only services like Refreshing Note and Clique NYC caught my attention. Great examples of leveraging local networks and the social graph.

I enjoyed finally meeting Lori from Cheek’d. She has great energy and while I was lukewarm from the start on “dating business cards”, her foray into Facebook is worth paying close attention to.

Moonit is based on better relationships through astrology, and does a good job masking the new-age feel of most astro-based services. They have a new API available to dating sites. I can’t believe I didn’t get a chance to say to Dana, who I’ve spoken with a number of times but never met.

Same goes for so many people. I was on stage too much and didn’t get to mingle enough until the very end of a long night. If I didn’t get a chance to say hi, please don’t take it personally. I’d love to talk with you if you are doing something interesting in the dating space.

Spent time with Kareem Ahmed, the founder of Inbox Cupid, a Groupon-style service where members are the deal of the day. I am totally bullish on the concept, huge potential. I would be surprised if the company didn’t attract investment interest in the near future. Kareem called me the Simon Cowell of the dating industry. I’ll take that as a compliment.

Special thanks to Adam Ludwin at RRE Ventures for talking about some of his criteria for investing in dating-related companies. RRE’s money in HowAboutWe is being put to good use. There has been a lot of discussion in the crowd about if suggested date ideas are a strong enough driver of growth.

One key indicator that HAW is on to something is that dating sites are copying the idea.

eFlirt Expert’s “How to pick a dating site” eFlirt Engine service won my vote for most likely to succeed. Built in a “startup weekend” environment, singles need a place where people can go to select the dating site that is right for them.

I love Lokast and a few other demos were great, but there are 60 million people not dating online in the US and we need to get people educated and comfortable with online dating. Then they can go hog-wild with mobile apps and Twitter and all the rest. Plenty of room for new and novel startups, that’s for sure.

Luv@FirstTweet leverages Twitter to build your profile on the go and then match you with other people. I’m slowly warming up to the idea that Twitter can play some sort of role in the matchmaking process.

MyYearbook and Hotlist both talked about social sites with a dating component. Hotlist is a social discovery engine that enables you to view where your Facebook friends and crowds have been in the past, are checked-in right now, and plan to go in the future. MyYearbook, which has that Myspace feel it it, gets over a billion pageviews/month.

I’ll follow up with some more thoughts on eAmore in a follow-up post. Did you attend? Leave a comment and let us know what you thought, it will help us improve the next one.

My hat is off to Maria for putting together a solid event, thanks for all your effort. I’m already looking forward to the next event. In the meantime I’ve got some smaller get-togethers and webinars planned, stay tuned.

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Welcome to the Friday Edition of Online Dating Insider.

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SocialOne says online dating has reached critical mass and is trending downwards with a 58% drop in growth from 77% to only 19%. Hmm.

A big dating site CEO says that “everyone is including Comscore tags on their sites  so  sites like OKcupid, eHarmony and Zoosk all went and tripled all their traffic stats and jumped dramatically in the rankings.”

Advertiser update: SkaDate Updates With New Features And Themes. Check out the demo and new SkaDate Templates .

CupidsPlay, which launched recently, has sent me 25 emails in the last 24 hours. Every time I wink at someone I get an email saying “do more, don’t just wink.” They better clean up their act and get rid of all the spammers, otherwise that site is going nowhere fast.

Dizzycat says New dating site treats members like prostitutes. WhatsYourPrice.com divides its members into two categories: generous and attractive. Generous members are supposed to make offers to the attractive members in order to negotiate the terms of a first date. Guess we are at the place and time where its ok for someone to pay a man or woman just to go on a date with them. A new spin on the worlds oldest profession. Yuk.

Lots of people wrote in about artist R. Luke DuBois who is at it again with Online dating maps reveal kinkiest and loneliest places. I wrote about DuBois recently in Artists Do More With Dating Data Than Dating Industry Does.

IAC Launches Hatch Labs to Build New Mobile Ventures – MarketWatch.

Sportaneous is like HowAboutWe for pickup sports games. speaking of HAW, they are sending out too many emails lately. Whats with the email uptick from dating sites? More emails may equal more visitors, but at some point, they risk losing me because it turns out that everyone on HAW is also on Match (much better profiles).

Dating Factory cooperates with SaveTheChildren fund to help children in Japan. Nice to see more dating sites providing donation links. DF now lets you control your sites’ registration and confirmation pages and has launched “Passion Play”, a sexual performance measurement tool that scores your prowess based on foreplay performance, duration and number of orgasms achieved.

Not exactly what I had in mind when I talk about reputation tools but at last there is a leader-board I know I can show up on.

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I just received an email from someone complaining about a dating software platform vendor. Right after that I read that the open-source Facebook platform Diaspora launched. Immediately after Diaspora was announce earlier this year they put up link to crowdsource some funding and got $200,000 right quick.

More at TechCrunch.

Zero members vs. 500 million at Facebook is not the story, its that Diaspora could be like a distributed private NING. I’m all for a private social networks, tired of hiding stuff of Facebook that I don’t want mom to see. Too complicated and when you screw up your settings and get emails like “why are you naked at this thing called Burning Man?”

White label market is mature, not much room for new players, well maybe a fresh start in the US with better profile sharing features. SkaDate and Boonex have been advertising on this blog for years. I always wondered why other dating “software in a box” players would stop the backbiting and yelling at each other in the comments, and simply buy an ad here (hint hint).

Putting your name, reputation and a phone number out there to burnish your brand, and not being secretive and sketchy, is the way to go.

Dating software is not quite as mature as I’d like to see it, and the white label providers are slow to move compared to blog platform software and other more establish services. Moving forward, but still, there is no sense of urgency, which leads to people feeling ho-hum about white label platforms for the most part.

Hosted, ASP-style super-configurable dating platforms with no members is the perfect middle ground. Then do a deal with the competition and cross-promote, which is a lot cheaper and you’re not giving up a big chunk of your revenue. Am I crazy to think this?

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I receive a lot of I’m noticing a uptick in emails from people inquiring about WhiteLabelDating.com and other private label dating services. WLD recently announced a new newsletter system, which provides the company with the ability to assess open rates, click throughs, bounces, upgrades and revenue from every email. The tool also allows very specific targeting by location and demographic information, as well as cross site targeting. WLD currently sends out up to 4.8 million emails per week to the database, with deliverability monitored so that more emails arrive in customers’ inboxes with every campaign.

Global Personals, the parent company of White Label Dating, also has a new website. There is also a new site that explains some of what goes on behind the scenes at globaldev.

I’m still waiting for a private label providers that doesn’t come with a pre-populated database. I can fill one up pretty easily and don’t want to deal with the profile ownership hassles and other legal fine print, which is 99% of the questions I get about private label providers. If they are doing such a great job explaining their services, why am I getting so many emails from confused people?

WLD competes with Dating Factory, EasyDate, The Dating Lab and a few other vendors. All of these companies should be running an ad in my sidebar to drive traffic to their landing pages.

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WhiteLabelDating.com, announced that 7-day conversion on its general network increased by 36% in the UK over the last quarter and by 33% across international platforms.

The company attributes this strong performance to the introduction of innovative tools such as Recommended Member, which highlights relevant matches to users; Icebreakers, which allows new members to send out an introductory message to hundreds of potential matches and Inbox Filters, which enables members to manage communication settings according to preferences to avoid being inundated with incoming messages.

The UK-based business provides software and services to enable brands and individuals to create their own online dating sites. In 2009 it introduced Recommended Member functionality to the platform following a partnership with IntroAnalytics, which uses behavioural preferences rather than those expressed in profiles, resulting in member introductions to other members where there is likely to be mutual interest. This function has directly improved member retention by 10% (9.9%) over the last month alone.

Member satisfaction has also increased by 47% over the quarter, largely due to members being able to filter their communication settings by age or location, allowing them to only receive replies that meet certain criteria and improving the chances of a suitable match. The introduction of these new tools has also led to a 139% increase in re-initial memberships as users choose to extend their subscriptions.WhiteLabelDating.com now runs over 4,000 dating sites around the world.

While I am not in any way a fan of “spray and pray” messaging on dating sites, these are impressive stats. It will be interesting to see how the recently-added IntroAnalytics feature affects usage and conversions.

Related posts:

1. Hirings at White Label Dating
2. Industry Moves: Dating Lab Director Goes to White Label Dating
3. White Label Dating Infrastructure Upgrade

Dating Factory December Update

This week Dating Factory have introduced an optimised pricing model for those dating affiliate partners who run Disabled Dating sites with us.

Cross promote not only to different niches (Adult, Dating, Gay) but also different niche markets within one niche. (Ed note: white label providers make most of their money in the adult markets.)

Performed AB testing on selected websites and came up with interesting results regarding how particular colours and design layouts affect your customers. New templates resulting from these tests have been implemented and are now available.

The big Christmas Countdown is still going on and has increased free to paid conversion rates on the sites throughout the system by 3.7% so far.

Matchmaking Pro Update

Last week I participated in the Matchmaking Pro webinar. their new suite of tools for matchmakers, including white-label dating, was impressive. Matchmakers should check out the system, which is focused on managing leads, clients and bridging the matchmaking world with online dating, something that has taken far too long to happen.

The next Matchmaking Pro CRM & White Label solutions Webinar is Thu, Dec 17, 2009 5:00 PM – 6:00 PM EST.

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Received this email from World Dating Partners:

As You might be aware of, there has been a change in ownership of the majority shares in Datech Ltd. Because of this, a new Management Team has been appointed.

My name is Julius Thomas and I am the coordinator for this Management Team and thus also the CEO of WDP. I have a legal and financial background and I have Masters academic degrees in both these fields having worked over 20 years with corporate efficiency programs, last three years however exclusively for Internet platforms.

The Management Team consists of experienced professionals in the fields of Financial Management and Business Law as well as Technical Development, working on behalf of the new major shareholder (who remains passive in his position).

In our organization during the last decades we have made many companies very successful by restructuring their core business focusing on revenue-driving activities, new applications and designs.

Robert Fathers remains in the company and will continue to guide the company in particularly the Marketing areas.

Any time I hear that a company has had a change in ownership and is now run by an executive specializing in corporate efficiency programs I tend to get seriously skeptical.

Consider:

It’s obvious that someone, somewhere, put a lot of money into WDP and was not happy with the results.

The deal with Relationship Exchange.

Last year Christine Johanson was tapped to be the new CEO of North American Operations. Is she still in this position?

The WDP blog has not been updated in a year.

Final straw: the wife of the previous CEO left to start her own white label dating company.

Let’s see if WDP puts together some big wins in coming months. If you use WDP, leave a comment and let us know what your experience has been.

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I had a super first trip to Toronto last weekend where I spoke at an FICP conference about social media and social tools. Thanks to Kris Covino at Date.com for showing me around town and taking me out for a great lunch. I got to meet up with a few other people but unfortunately wasn’t able to meet everyone I wanted to (sorry Sam!)

Love this Google/Match.com mashup, courtesy of Adam Richardson.

Skout is using Crowdflower to manage user created content. Crowdflower is a very cool company which, among other things, is built on top of Amazon Turk. Crowdsourcing done right.

A though for the day: The problem with hosted white label dating solutions is that you get what you get, can’t change course midstream, as often happens with custom development. The services which allow customers to change around the look and feel, features and offer the best marketing advice and back-end CRM tools is going to win. There are six or so white label providers out there and a few more on the way. The market is not even getting started yet, expecting many small and mid-tier sites to move to private label solutions, but only if marketing and CRM systems advice are strong, it’s the missing piece.

Tired of Farmville? Try FarmersOnly. I’ve lived in the suburbs or cities all my life and I wouldn’t have the faintest idea what goes on in a feed store, but singles who lead the flannel life might want to check out FarmersOnly.com.

Foursquare Lets Others Play With Its API. Dating sites, take advantage of this!

Patrick Perrine, great, guy, past clients, owner of the original gay eHarmony site, myPartner.com, has written a second book, Sex vs. Love: The Ultimate Showdown.

Unlike my first book, Bringing Perfect Back, Sex vs Love (SvL) is written for men, women, gay or straight! It is an easy read, with a fun and insightful look into sex, love and relationships as they exist today. SvL deconstructs and compartmentalizes sex, love and relationships in a way that helps the reader understand their individual desires and how one can go about fulfilling them through a multitude of satisfying ways.

I hope you enjoy the book, if nothing else, it will make a great stocking stuffer!

Order your copy here: http://www.amazon.com/Sex-vs-Love-Ultimate-Showdown/dp/1439259763/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1258394033&sr=8-1

Tweaking the blog this week, let me know if you see anything broken.

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Christian at skout.com emailed with some big news.

Get your own mobile dating service: Skout will white label its’ solution to enable anyone to run their own mobile dating service. The structure is simple;

1) You provide logo and colors,
2) Skout provides your branded solution (destination site, mobile web, iPhone App, and news letter),
3) Skout provides the user base,
4) You drive traffic to the site/App
5) You rev share with Skout on every subscription you can sell.

This solution is great for companies that have solid traffic but a hard time to monetize the user base. CPM/CPC rates are going down drastically, and Skout can provide an alternative source of income by the partner driving traffic and converting people to subscribers of the branded dating service. It’s almost like Ning for Mobile Dating. We will initially bring in a few big brands (TBA soon), and then let smaller actors on as well. We could create a Techcrunch Singles for you, for instance.

Traction: Skout is seeing 2000-3000 users per day signing up with no ad spend. There are currently 80,000 logins per day on average (15,000 uniques). Total number of mobile chat messages in Skout’s network is 300,000 per day, and growing rapidly. According to Pinch our iPhone users spend ~50 minutes per day on average flirting and finding love. This metric is consistent with their internal stats engine.

They have changed the concept of “friends” to “hotlist”. “Friends” adhered to the facebook paradigm, with friend requests being sent out. The new “hotlist” adheres to the twitter paradigm, where you simply follow singles you find interesting. Future revisions of Skout will include FB Connect and will also be deployed as a FB App. Subscriptions being launched in the next few weeks.

A new website is up at skout.com.

This is all great news for mobile dating. One issue I have become acutely aware of is that Skout needs to do a better job with filtering the fakers on the site. A too-stringent boot policy could hurt growth, too wide a net and the site risks getting overrun and turning into MySpace. Skout is going to have to watch who’s on the site and what they’re up to closely.

If you want to add mobile dating to your website, talk to Skout, tell them I sent you.

Related posts:

1. White Label Dating Offers 100% Revenue Share
2. Skout Launches iPhone Application
3. Skout: Official iDate Mobile Sponsor

It’s Marathon Monday here in Boston. As part of Patriots Day, Paul Revere just rode by on a horse, fighter jets screamed across the sky for the Red Sox Game and I’m monitoring several friends Boston Marathon progress via text message (go cousin Mike!).

This morning I talked to someone who has a ton of good dating-related domains, hopefully we’ll be able to post some of them here and get your reaction.

I also had introduction call with Mike Rogers, VP of sales at Friendfinder. Mike is an absolute sales and marketing titan with an amazing pedigree and he is in a strong position to make some great things happen at FriendFinder Networks.

Mike mentioned their white label solution, which drew a blank for a moment until I understood that he was talking about their SpringStreet Networks acquisition. Depending on how you define white label dating, SpringStreet was one of the first third-party providers of online dating services, the precursor to White Label Dating, if you will.

The white label dating sector is really heating up, new market entrants are coming and I’m in a much better place to understand how the current crop of companies operates and how to differentiate between them, which is more difficult than it seems.

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