Online Dating Insider » speeddate

Speeddate.com Dating Formula PR

David Evans — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 00:03:18 +0000

The folks at Formula PR have a good sense of humor.

We are pleased to announce that SpeedDate.com, the world’s first online speed dating Web site, and Formula took their relationship to the next level and are officially together. For information on the world of online dating, survey results and expert commentary on love in the virtual age, please be sure to get in touch with us.

Nicely done. Actually got me to visit their site and introduce myself.

One Million Speed Dates and Counting

David Evans — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 13:02:22 +0000

SpeedDate.com has announced it has hosted over one million 3-minute online speed dates.

One woman in California, has gone on 40 dates in an evening. How can you keep track of 40 people?

While SpeedDate is one of the most visible players in the current crop of video-based introduction services, I refuse to call it the first world’s first online speed dating site. Paltalk and other videochatting systems have had similar features for at least a decade, although those services are desktop applications, not web-based.

Check out the SpeedDate Facebook application. Need to invite 12 people to start dating. Who am I going to invite? I’ve already bothered all my close friends with invites to Little Black Book and countless other FB dating applications.

Facebook has to do something about the endless “add your friends” badgering. A necessary evil but I can’t wait until we get past this and on to auto-installing applications based on a circle of trust/reputation system.

Alternate press release title: SpeedDate.com hosts three million minutes of speed dating. Think about the advertising opportunities. Millions of people captive for three minutes. What would you sell them or tell them? In-even ads, overlays, pre and post-roll, there are endless opportunities to monetize the service.

They need levels of service, where is the VIP room? Where are the reputation tools?

Speaking of videodating, I love the title of this New York Times article which talks about the recent boom in speed dating websites, Does This Webcam Make Me Look Fat?

SpeedDate: No Fake Profiles

David Evans — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 15:34:55 +0000

Dan Abelon (sorry for the misspelling earlier) wrote in to provide some additional information:

We absolutely do not set users up with fake people. People do not respond because they are either looking at another site in another tab, or have stepped away from the computer. We realize that this is an issue. Within the week, we are tweaking the technology to ensure that people don’t continually get set up on dates if they are not in front of their screens.

Point taken, the dates are not fake and the systems needs to be tweaked so that you aren’t sent on dates while you’re reading TMZ in another browser window.

The other issue you raised was the lack of profile information for many users. This will change too as we are starting to encourage more users to fill out a brief profile.

Even with the improvements we have yet to make, people seem to still be enjoying the service. We have in the range of 40-50 thousand dates taking place each day.

40,000 speed dates a day is impressive, to the point of wondering if that means conversations that last the entire time or just initiated dates. I’ll have to get related numbers from Woome for comparison.

A Night of Speed Dating

David Evans — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 20:08:18 +0000

I’ve been videoconferencing since 1994, in fact, the original Connectix Quick Cam right here, next to my original Apple Newton and a hard drive the size of an end table.

For me, text chat in an instant message window is fine for friends, but for business and meeting new people, I prefer the additional emotive bandwidth that videoconferencing provides.

Since speed dating sites are popping up all over the place, I decided to spend part of last night speed dating at Woome and SpeedDate. My unscientific seat of the pants review follows.

A huge barrier to entry for most people is the fact that not many people have webcams. New Mac laptops have cameras, and some PC’s do as well, but we’re a long way from webcams being ubiquitous.

Several speed dating sites offer the ability to chat without audio or video. That is not speed dating, thats an IM session, which I think is much easier on a dating site with a chat application. No need to create new profile and much larger pool of potential matches.

This begs the question, why don’t people use the chat feature on dating sites more?

Simple, because men tend to lapse into neanderthal-like behavior when proper checks and balances are not put in place to monitor their behavior. I’m willing to bet that dating sites that have well-behaved men get more people in the chat rooms.

Women who join video dating and speed dating sites and put up photos of themselves in their underwear (the majority on some of the sites), have no one but themselves to blame when men stalk them online and send disturbing emails and videos.

The two services I tried out are WooMe and SpeedDate. Previous speed dating articles include First Look: SpeedDate.com , SpeedDate interview notes.

Woome

The amount of semi-naked women’s profiles is enough to make me blush, and that is saying something. If the women are one iota as hot as their photos, this site has Myspace beat hands down for R-rated voyeurism.

There were nine people over 30 in the US on Woome when I stopped by to kick the tires. The majority seem to be 18-27.

The ability to schedule sessions puts WooMe far out in front of the competition in terms of features.

A few years ago I developed a plan for a similar feature for a company than never launched. I spoke with someone at an anonymous calling company this week who are rolling out a similar idea.

Speed dating events should be scheduled based on time (I want to talk from 8-9pm), topic (I want to talk about American muscle cars of the 60′s) and location (I want to talk to people in Brussels.)

WooMe is close to nailing it, what they need is a directory of topics to discuss.

Skype broke the 12 million users online mark last week. Think about a virtual bar in Skype that allows you to meet people based on time, topic and location. That’s what I worked on back in the day. Marketing to 12 million people is a lot easier than building up a database of users from scratch.

There is a lot to do at WooMe. Create profile, upload photos, see who’s online, schedule sessions and most of the usual dating-site features.

Scheduling a session is straightforward. Name it, add some keywords to make it easy to find, general demographic information and interestingly, orientation, as in “anyone meet anyone” or in my case “girl meets guy.”

Set a start time, format: voice and video or voice only. Notice the lack of text-only chat as opposed to SpeedDate.

Paticipants can be 2-on-2 or 3-on-3.

Duration: 60 seconds to two minutes.

After seeing this, I realize that WooMe is not going for the longer topical conversations. Unless you are a fast talker, it’s all about the initial chemistry and level of interest.

What do you do after that? WooMe should have a section of the site dedicated to longer-format discussions.

Inviting people is an interesting experience. Do I invite guys or just women?

The selection process is smooth. Now we sit back and wait. Nine minutes to go. Wait, now it says 1 minute to go, what happened? I am confused, it says it starts in 40 seconds in one place and 9 minutes in another. Something is wrong here. Oh well, let’s see what happens.

Screen refreshes, funky background music is playing, makes me smile, the anticipation!

“looks like there’s no one for you to WOO in this session… please try again with another session and be sure to invite some people!”

Denied. That was my first time, I’ll try again and see what happens. Turns out I need to wait for Woome to get their webcam setup working properly, then I can actually participate.

The sortable list of most popular, recently joined, favorites and online now give you several different ways to check out people.

The list of upcoming sessions is nice, mouse over the session name to learn more.

I like the nudge concept, kind of like a Facebook poke or a dating site wink to show someone you are interested in them. Sites need to start limiting the number of winks or woos that can be sent each day. I can imagine women are deluged with them every day.

The video setup process is nicely done, if your system is one of the ones they work with.

WooMe may do well in the college market. If they add an adult area for “webcam girls” they could take a lot of market share away from various adult webcam sites.

SpeedDate

Speed Date licensed an online speed dating patent, U.S. Patent Number 7,203,674 covering key aspects of online speed dating.

This makes me wonder if WooMe and the others could be shut down if they don’t license the intellectual property.

Dan at SpeedDate emailed to let me know that they performed a significant upgrade to the site last week. I’m glad, because the old version of the site left a lot to be desired.

A brand new version of SpeedDate has arrived! We’ve added lots of new features, including:

-Faster dates

-Send messages in between dates

-Delete matches from your chat list

-More profile info about your dates, and lots more…

Please send your feedback on our new design to info@speeddate.com to be entered into a drawing for a free webcam.

Much better. The awkward pop-up windows are gone. You can now Flirt, Wink or Skip people that come up in your searches.

The abrupt joining of speed dates is still there, but overall the interface is much easier to navigate. Profiles remain a weak spot, every single one I’ve browsed says “Meet me to find out.” WooMe clearly is the winner when it comes to profiles.

Every single enounter so far has been with a static photo, with no one on the other end, so I report them all as “not responding.” It feels like the system is setting up these dates with fake people, wheather or not that is true I don’t know yet.

This is a total turnoff. With WooMe, you only meet up with people in a scheduled session, although you can create sessions as a host and not participate, which probably not a great idea.

A while back I had a good conversation with Dan Ableson, one of the SpeedDate founders. He said all the right things during the interview and I was impressed with their pedigree. That was before I tried WooMe. I know nothing about the founders except that they have a super site and SpeedDate has a some catching up to do. The site refresh is a good start, now they just need some live humans on the site.

Conclusion

Both sites cater to the under 30 crowd, featuring few of us older folks.

WooMe is a better experience overall, the clear winner, even though I haven’t been able to use the entire site. It’s well thought out for the most part, looks good, although it loads slowly at times.

This was a brief evaluation of the two speed dating sites. I’ll have more to say when I can actually get into WooMe conversations and spend a few more nights in front of the webcam.

During the review period, I was emailed or winked by five women on Match and set up two dates. That was unexpected, I guess my new photos and profile headline are working.

When it comes to meeting someone online, speed dating services have a long way to go to even begin to compete with dating sites. They need many more people on the sites for them to be a true alternative to traditional dating sites.

Next up, a look at Camlink.

Speedate.com Interview Notes

David Evans — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 18:10:58 +0000

I spoke with Dan Abelon, founder of SpeedDate.com, as a follow-up to my earlier post on the latest entrant into the world of speed dating.
Dan came up with the concept of SpeedDate while taking entrepreneurship courses with Eric Schmidt (CEO of Google) at Stanford Business School earlier this year. Dan and the team are located in San Mateo, CA. Dan’s partner is Simon Tisminezky.

Speeddate.com received an undisclosed round from Menlo Ventures this summer.

Partnerships

Speeddate is not talking to major dating sites as part of strategy. Dan is considering a Facebook application a priority more than partnerships. Dan is focusing on leveraging user-centric feedback to make Speeddate.com into a destination site. Perfect products first and the people will come. Critical mass is important to success.

Dating vs. social: Focusing more on dating and social networking.

Stay focused. Challenging to build great product. Competitive advantage is listening to users, integrate feedback. All about the details.

Report Members Feature – making women feel safe and comfortable is most important. Assurances that the site is doing what they can to keep people safe and comfortable.

Marketing locally, initially for San Francisco area. Heavy on the PR. I was at a meeting in New York last week where my hosts said they had met Dan at the TechCrunch40 demo pit. All the deals are happening at these events now. iDate is a must-attend, but more and more deals and coming-out parties are happening at west-coast startup events for the most part. Thats where the money, talent and exposure is.

What are Ice Breakers? Co-founder is Simon did lots of offline speed dating.
Ice Breakers are potential questions to keep people talking.

If you could live anywhere, where would it be?
Tell me about your craziest vacation.
If you were to cook me a meal, what would it be?
What would you do with a million dollars?

Post-date communication- even if you both vote yes, you can keep the conversation anonymous on the site.

Multiple modes of communication: text chat, audio and video. In text mode, static profile photo displayed.

Get matched with people, they show up in your messenger list.

It’s early, but there appears to be a mix between audio only or voice, video and chat.
Dan continues to stress giving users flexibility to communicate as they choose.

Plans to have fee structure in future. Free for forseeable future until they build critical mass.

Event schedule: Every Thursday to start, people leave browser up and loaded with Speeddate.com in background.

Crazy Blind Date, WooMe and Tripio are all competition to Speeddate.com.

No related posts.

Startups Nipping at Dating Site Achilles Heel

David Evans — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 17:31:07 +0000

Upgraded the blog last night, new templates and some functionality added. Now you can see my bookmarks for dating-related stuff I come across during the day.

To date, no dating site has gotten close to offering a comprehensive suite of functionality that pushes dating to the next level.

Reputation management
Image search
General search
Profile help/coaching
Introduction facilitation
On-site activities like games and speed dating

It’s interesting to watch the current gaggle of startups trying to push their way into the dating space. These sites are smart to focus on functionality and service instead of creating a new community around their technology.

I’ve starting writing more about companies such as Eyealike, LoveDetect, WooMe and SpeedDate. [Disclaimer, some companies are clients.]

Today I’ll talk about Eyealike. Great concept, something I’ve been pushing for for a long time. Eyealike was started by Gary Heuss, who spent time as an executive at Kiss.com and PerfectMatch.

My idea was always to start out with a 6×6 matrix of faces based on your preferences and then reshuffling the thumbnails based on which people you click. Eyealike is kind of like that. It’s a novel way to refine the laborious search process, but only if the technology behind the system actually works.

I met with a company recently that is considering rolling out something similar. Let’s the business development battles begin. My algorithm is better than yours.

Will people use the feature? Will it be truly useful? Searching for women that look like Scarlett Johansson returned a lot of photos of women that look nothing like her, but the services is beta after all.

Will Eyealike add significantly to dating sites revenue? Probably not. Most likely the big deals will be for advertising-driven revenue from social networks.

Most companies trying to sell their stuff into the dating space have a backup plan in case things don’t work out. Going after pedophiles on Myspace makes sense for Eyealike as a business model. There is money to be made there.

I’m playing around with the celebrity matching feature. Great traffic driver for destination sites, although it’s a one trick pony. Better for social networks. Nobody is going to pay an extra $4.99 a month to see if they look like Brad Pitt. Match will never add this to there endless upsell page during the signup process.

The downside is that it’s hard enough to get a date, now I have to look like Brad Pitt?

I would like to know how the image search system interfaces with dating sites. Eyealike is currently scraping 250,000 images from dating sites, including Match and American Singles. The devil is in the details. Dating sites don’t have the openness that social networks do, unless you count Engage and eTwine, which makes it more difficult to share data with partners.

Although Yahoo, with it’s new Personal’s platform, is probably in a better place than any other site to take advantage of the new openness we’re seeing in the social networking space. They use the new API’s to connect with existing dating partners, something most people probably don’t know.

Seattle PI has a writeup of Eyealike. Go check out the service and let us know what you think in the comments.

First Look: Speeddate.com

David Evans — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 18:56:28 +0000

Tonight was a beautiful night in Boston so I went to a restaurant overlooking the city on the waterfront here in Charlestown and hung out with new neighborhood friends. I came home and didn’t remember that Speeddate.com was having it’s inaugural event until 45 minutes into it.

Speeddate.com launched at Techcrunch40 a few weeks ago. Lot’s of buzz in the blogosphere. Bay area company attempting a feature that several dating sites, including Match, have tried and discarded a few years ago.

I went to Speeddate, configured the Flash setup for the site and was immediately greeted by a woman from the San Francisco Bay area. Talk about abrupt.

There is something to be said about a service where the first time you use it you are introduced to a good looking woman. I could get used to this. However, reality quickly set in as I learned that she, and all of the other women I talked to, worked for, or were related to Speeddate.com in some form or another.

As I struggled to settle into a round of banter, I soon realized that the audio and video lag was terrible, she was getting my audio a good 10 seconds after I spoke. Verbal ping-pong ensued, which was slightly disconcerting.

With 25 seconds left in our “date”, I finally saw the countdown timer. Oh, the pressure! I spent the rest of the conversation tweaking the Flash setting in my browser, and then she was gone.

I rated my first date as a match, but after looking at the results, she didn’t share my enthusiasm. Onward we go.

Bam! Another Bay area cutie is looking me straight in the eye. This instant-on stuff is too jarring, give me a moment to regain my composure. Perhaps a fade-in fade-out is in order. First dates just got a lot easier.

Many moons ago I dated a woman who ran a HurryDate event in Boston. On our third date she invited me to an event she was running. They ran out of men, so I had to step in to balance out the gender. Imagine a third date where your date is watching you chat up 10 other women, and she has a clipboard and a whistle. Talk about performance anxiety.

I talked to a few other women before my screen got stuck on “System searching for your next date.” Not the most graceful of endings. I’m sitting here wondering if another woman is going to pop up on my screen while I write this.

Then I realized that my hair looks terrible.

Features

The Find Matches features lets you select an age range and geographic boundary, 10, 50, 100 miles from my zip code in Boston. The broadest search showed seven matches total. Granted, I was 45 minutes late, but seven people 3,000 miles away? I would have stacked the deck and had a bunch of people at the ready.

Clicking on My Messages brings up a new window. What is this, 2001? Where is the AJAX-driven display? Why not just reload the side of the screen with my messages?

Invite friends and Crushes. This feature brings up a window asking me to enter in the usual Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail and AOL service login. No way, I have 400 email addresses in my Gmail account, can you imagine me accidentally inviting the executives from Match, eHarmony and Yahoo to a speed date? Main problem is that I didn’t know what the next step would be, and I wasn’t going to take any chances.

You can enter in email addresses of friends, which, had I known this, I would have asked a few to participate.

Just outta Beta

Speeddate.com is definitely just outta beta. The developers have a lot of work to do before mainstream daters warm up to the concept. Because it’s Friday and the Sox are in the playoffs, I’m going to outline some issues I came across and where improvements are necessary. Maybe karma will come back around and set me up on a great videodate.

The basic profile that I was asked to fill out was like an afterthought. They need to beef up profiles and ask for more information, which is going to be valuable to advertisers. Surprising that there were no ads wrapped around the experience. You know my gender, age and location, surely you can serve up some interesting ads.

Where was the option to display a link to my other dating site profiles, my Flickr photos?

Make the countdown timer more prominent on the page.

There is no alert that the webcam is going to turn on. Better be ready!

Where is the rating and the ranking?

What if I wanted to talk to men, or woman to woman? No option for that.

They need to ping my mobile and let me know about the event.

Need to add “why are you ending date” option for “bad connection”.

Sell webcams on the site. Between that at dating site affiliate programs, the site can be making money in no time.

Integrating Speeddate with a dating site seems like a straightforward process. My baseline for these types of services is Userplane, paste in a few lines of Javascript and you’re off to the races. We’ll see if they remain a standalone destination or partner up with dating sites.

Are the events going to be scheduled, or can I show up and hope that I’m matched with someone?

Just how will people be matched once there are more than eight people on the site at once? That’s why they need deeper profiles for people to search against.

It would be cool if I could have a business speed date with the readers of this blog. I’ll have to ask them if this is possible. I videochat in Yahoo messenger, iChat and Skype often. Skype audio and video is far superior to what I experienced tonight, but that’s only a matter of codecs and tweaking Flash.

Imagine a desktop taskbar widget that alerts me to the fact that I have speed date requests waiting for my approval. I would love that. I can’t wait to see their Facebook application.

I’ve been videochatting since 1995 and have joined every service out there. Overall, I have to say I was impressed with the experience, with the caveat that it feels like the people at Speeddate.com have not paid much attention to the services that have come and gone before them. I urge them to join a few services and see what else is out there and continue to add features and functionality, there is lots to be learned from the competition.

Check out Speeddate.com and let us know what you think.

CrunchBase Information

SpeedDate

Information provided by CrunchBase

No related posts.