I ranted about updating my Match profile, mobile dating and open profiles on Facebook over at The Progress Bar.

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Mobile community applications developers Mobestar has announced a partnership with Datech Limited. Datech provides dating services to 7,000 web sites around the world via its World Dating Partners brand. The partnership enables Datech to offer fully integrated web and mobile dating solutions to its clients.

World Dating Partners’ clients will now be offered the opportunity to fully mobilise their dating services using Mobestar’s mDate solution. mDate provides synchronised and fully integrated access to online dating sites.

After three years of false starts, it appears that mobile dating may actually be catching on. I like getting my Match alerts on the phone, it’s a nice pick-me-up during the day, although I’m never going to respond via the phone, that’s simply too time-consuming and I want to view the person’s profile on my 24″ monitor and get a better sense of them before writing back.

I hope that mobile dating doesn’t devolve into people sending winks back and forth, that would be a step backwards.

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Jangl is on a real tear. Now that Match.com took the bait, every large dating and social network is inviting anonymous calling companies to pitch their services. Baaaa! (that’s my sheep sound.)

The latest to enter the game is Various Inc, which owns the FriendFinder network. Adult FriendFinder is the only property that anyone I’ve ever talked to can remember in the entire 20+ site FF network.

Investor reticence about the sex industry is changing

Speaking of Adult FriendFinder, it looks like they have spun up the PR machine to see if anyone wants to buy them. Some day the bank suits are going to realize that Vice funds are worth a ton of money, right now the majority are too scared to tarnish their image, although certain boutique firms are entering the fray.

Previous vox providers to the dating/social space were too early to the game, didn’t have robust enough feature and online dating was still considered too sketchy for most.

With Skype and videocams getting more popular, multimedia chat is becoming more mainstream. We’ve been saying that for a few years now, although Jangl’s 20 million user market potential certainly brings an air of authenticity to the situation.

Jangl and their competitors are in final review at a few top-10 dating sites that I know of. I’m sure there are many more deals in progress.

Via Mashable.

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Diesel Dating: Love the interface.

ForeSee Pairs Up with eHarmony to Measure Customer Satisfaction.

iRovr Launches Mini Social Network for the iPhone.

Peepsnation is a Mobile Hot or Not.

Sparkleroad.com is for sale. Sitepoint has the Sparkleroad listing. Owner says it has over 100k members with 6 localized domains and over 15,000 photos uploaded by the members.

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Vacation was fantastic. 18 relatives in a rustic camp on a beautiful lake in the mountains. Re-entry is proving difficult (or I’m just feeling lazy), we’ll stick with links for this week while I get back into the swing of things.

Meetic vs. Match. France versus Texas. Top two UK sites are free, fighting for leftovers. In Europe as a whole, Match.com is number one, followed by Meetic. Perplexing statement: In America Match.com has used a string of specialist dating sites to cater for divorced people, or fit people, for athletes, or Hindus. That’s the first I’ve heard of this.

Takeaway rumor: Match will offer mobile dating, again?

Eharmony partners with Jajah to offer VOIP-powered conversations. A bit of an ouch for Jangle, which powers Match. EHarmony says it will charge $5.95 per month for unlimited calls among its members.

E-cyrano’s Evan Mark Katz on CBS.

Mobile technology company Mobestar Holdings PLC said it has entered into a partnership with online-dating site operator Bone Fish to deliver a mobile phone interface to its customers’ dating web sites.

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IceBreaker which I wrote about back in November, has landed $7.2 million in new financing, money that the Bellevue startup will use to continue marketing its mobile dating service Crush or Flush.  Crush or Flush is similar to a mobile version of HotorNot.

IceBreaker plans to use funds to bolster a research and development center in Beijing, where the company now employs more than 20 people and is looking to add more.

With no revenue at the moment, the founders are kicking around various business models, which is what the mobile dating space has been doing for the past several years, as nobody really knows how mobile dating is going to work when it finally gets here in the US.

Seven million dollars is a lot of money, but in no way guarantees  IceBreaker will get crushed instead of flushed.

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