It’s that time of year again. iDate, the only online dating industry conference in the US, hosts it’s annual Miami Beach event Wednesday 1/27 – Friday 1/29. If you want to connect while I’m in town, let me know and we can set up a time to meet.
Day three of the iDate agenda.
Friday January 29: Friday morning starts with virtual goods and e-commerce demos going up against what I think is a talk about monetizing singles.
Then it’s a session about how dating sites can get credit, going up against a “blue ocean” strategy talk, which could be interesting. 100 million singles in the US, only 1/3 use dating sites. There’s your untapped market share right there. Dating sites selling leads to matchmakers, another market expander. Dating sites becoming more social, integrating with Facebook, blue ocean, again.
In the demo rooms, more e-commerce companies and search engines.
After that, a panel about the convergence of paid and free dating, but Sam Yagan from OKCupid is the only person I see listed on the panel. No matter, Sam is a great guy in a “tell-all” kind of way. This is a must-see session.
Few others demos, Shaddi talking about the Indian market, a marketing company and a billing company.
After lunch (which is where they should have given out the awards), Increased Retention via Maximizing Female Responses sounds interesting. I’m curious what that means, too bad the agenda is still not finished for the show. Down the hall, Viximo is speaking about virtual goods against more repeat e-commerce demos.
Next series of sessions: Noel Biderman will share his thoughts about profiting on infidelity. Their ads are everywhere right now, big marketing push. Still waiting for the conservatives to jump all over this.
Dating Factory and Dating Lab are talking about the evolution of dating business models (my pick). Matchmakers are going to want to check out the Matchmaking Pro demo. I went through it with Jerome at the Matchmaking Institute a few weeks ago, nice system, rebuilt from the ground up, bridges online and offline dating nicely.
VisualDNA is speaking. This is the most important session of the entire show. I’ve done some work for them, in fact I’m looking at their visual profile creator right now. Eharmony and Match are using them in various capabilities. Don’t miss this.
Closing up the show we have an un-titled panel debate. All new people on the panel this year. Hopefully they can keep us interested for more than 5 minutes. The last two of these have been epic debacles.
Final thoughts: As the only online dating industry conference in the US, iDate is the only game in town. This is both a blessing and a curse. It makes conference planning for companies a lot easier, but according to most of the people who I talk to, the show continues to disappoint. A sampling from the emails I receive after every show offer up basically the same complaints, year after year. People expect better service for the price they are paying to attend.
The agenda needs a lot of work. I’ve been saying this for years and hear the same thing from attendees after the show. Stacking up the interesting speakers in competing time slots, way too many micro-demos everyone has seen 100 times and a general lack of well-defined conference tracks hurts attendance.
Plain and simple, iDate is about the people and the conversations and deals going on in the hallways, not to mention getting into the sun for a few days.
