Heading to the Harpoon Octoberfest party on the waterfront tonight along with a few thousand other dejected Red Sox fans. This has been a trying month, not only in baseball, but getting blog posts out. Don’t you worry, lots of good stuff coming down the pipe.
HowAboutWe Powers Someecards: One of my favorite weekly emails is from someecards. Once look at today’s email and it becomes apparent that HowAboutWe is now powering their dating feature.
OkCupid has launched a secret skunkworks Ok Labs in San Francisco. Ex-Zoosk’er Nicholas Abramovic is there. Nick used to run acquisition at Zoosk and later consulted for SpeedDate.
Nick’s previous gig was founder of DateUp, a stealth online dating service acquired by Match.com. His LinkedIn profile says he is currently leading the San Francisco office working on top secret projects for the coolest company in online dating.
Am I the only one who’s excited to see what they come up with in the labs?
Future of the Dolphin dating platform and niche social networks: More at Boonex.
Reposting this from last month because I’m surprised that HowAboutWe hasn’t done this yet: ChirpMe Launches A Dating Site For Activities–And Groupons: Most new dating sites have at least considered date ideas similar to HowAboutWe. ChirpMe decided to do both. ChirpMe is a start-up that is participating in and funded by the 500Startups accelerator program.
I’m talking to a dating site later today funded by another popular accelerator fund. These kids really get it and its great to see investors warming up to the idea of cramming them with knowledge, domain experts, caffeine and cash.
As to whether singles give a damn about group buys and date recommendations in a large-scale meaningful way, the jury is still out. More at Forbes.
Finding an Instant Date Nearby, With an App: NY Times talking about Blendr, which used location to show you other suitable singles nearby. These apps dumb down the matching process a bit too much for my liking, but they sure can be addictive if you are in a major metro area.
Moonit surpasses a major milestone: 1,000,000 registered users. Dating site startups, they probably didn’t buy profiles to start up their database, and in most cases, neither should you.
CuddleComfort.com went live recently. Time to get all snuggly with strangers. The site says that “Maine proved to be the state least in need of a cuddle, at 94% below America’s average. With over 15,000 people searching for a cuddle buddy each month on Google and almost 5,000 on Twitter, we are catering to a very clear demand.” More info.
FreezeCrowd finally launched. EDU email addresses only. College dating remains a hot market, tons of startups that tend to get a lot of launch press, then fade from memory. Then again I’m in my 40’s.
Meexo is like Pandora for dating: Pulls in Foursquare and Facebook data. For dating purposes, you can hide your profile from friends. Virtual currency is used to pay for sending messages.
Make way for another “rate a date” site. DirtyBubble is a place people to rate, share, and review their previous relationships and hook-ups. Look at it like Yelp for people. People get to review their exes on different categories and leave their feed back about their experience.
Looks like Cheek’d has some competition. MeSayingHi let’s people make connections in the “real” world before actually scoping them out online.
New Online Dating Book: Robin Mesger says My friend and I wrote a book about true on-line dating stories. It’s called I Don’t Want to Die Alone!
