Q: We know that Single Christian Network is one of the oldest dating sites. Please tell us a bit more about your history.

A: I wish I could say I had the most altruistic motives for starting Single Christian Network (www.singlec.com). In reality it just happened.

I was an out of work computer programmer. My dad published a singles newspaper for Christians. He wanted to create a computer matching program for them and gave me a call. I needed the money. I agreed to write his program.
What happened is that it worked too well. He got overloaded with trying to publish his newspaper and run the matching program at the same time. Instead of paying me for the work, he asked me to take it over. I did. The rest is history. It was called Christian Computer Match back then.

What I did was put ads in singles newspapers all over the country. I posted full pages ads in some of them. The ad was an actual application. A new member would fill out the application and mail it in. I would key that information into the computer and once a month I would mail out matches to all the subscribers. Remember now — this is before the internet. I didn’t even have an email address back then. Everything was postal mail.
Once a month I would run the matching program, print thousands of matching reports and spend the weekend printing, folding, stuffing and licking envelopes. It wasn’t the funnest job in the world. My house was filled with envelopes, paper, stamps and lots of neighbor kids helping fold and stuff.

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OmniDate Inc. offers solution, which creates simulated dating environments where two people go on a virtual date: they select environment, their avatars and start to communicate.

As the company is also based in Toronto, we decided to meet and talk with Ravit Abelman, who is a cofounder of Omnidate.com. Below is a short summary of what we’ve learnt about OmniDate.

Q: How would you describe your project?

A: OmniDate has created a virtual dating application for dating sites. We help dating sites extend their model of member interaction to virtual dating with minimal investment. Allowing singles to meet in a virtual café is a fantastic way to dramatically improve user experience. Online daters, particularly women, love virtual dating because they can get to know each other in a fun and safe environment before meeting in person. Looking at it strictly from the business perspective, our application allows dating sites increase their conversion and retention rates.

Q: Why did you find OmniDate?

A: We saw a big gap in the online dating. Although there is no shortage of available singles, for some reason the success rate is minuscule.
It appears that people have a hard time getting to know the person behind the profile and meeting in real life. It is particularly difficult for women, who are concerned about safety issues. Under the current model, people search through millions of profiles and communicate with each other primarily through email, which is not an ideal way to getting to know someone. Not surprisingly, when people do meet in real life, the most common reaction is disappointment, especially among women. An average dater cancels her account after 3 month, not because she has found someone, but because she got exhausted and frustrated.
In contrast, virtual dating is a fun and safe way to get to know each other online before meeting in person. It helps establish commonalities in a safe, non intrusive way and reduces the awkwardness of the first date. There is actually research by Harvard and MIT that shows how virtual dating leads to better in-person dates.

Q: Tell us more about the technology and research behind OmniDate.

A: We simulate a dating environment online through 3D avatars, chat, games, and music. The application is 100% web-based and does not require end-users to install any additional software. It is built to easily integrate into any dating site and create a seamless experience for the end-user.
In terms of stats, an average virtual date lasts approximately half hour, and 15% of virtual dates continue for over 2 hours. We are also seeing a very high repeat use rate. This approach to dating has a great degree of appeal among online daters, particularly women – 60% of registrations on our test site are women. This is in sharp contrast to webcam dating, where according to a recent survey, most women who tried webcam dating said they’d never use it again.

Q: How do you see your technology helping dating sites?

A: OmniDate is a business tool. It helps dating sites improve their profit margins by increasing direct interaction between members. Virtual dating creates member activity, and results in higher conversion and retention rates.
Let me give you a sense for the magnitude of impact on profits. Even seemingly small improvements in conversion rates and retention translate into substantial gains for dating sites. For example, for an average dating site, an improvement in conversion rates by 3% OR an increase in retention by 3 weeks would roughly double profits for an average dating site.

Q: Please share your outlook on the future of online dating. Where is the industry heading to?

A: Last year, Scientific American published a big article on online dating, which concluded with a prediction of where online dating is heading. It said that the next step in online dating is virtual dating. I am in total agreement.
We are experiencing a major shift toward the use of avatars and virtual worlds. It used to be that only kids played with this stuff. Today people of all ages are enjoying virtual worlds, and even companies and universities are using these tools. Virtual worlds have over 300 Million registered users, and it is projected that 80% of all active Internet users will have a virtual identity by the end of 2011.
We think virtual experience fits perfectly into online dating. I believe that in a year or two, dating sites that do not offer virtual dating will be seen as outdated. By the way, since we released our beta earlier this year, a number of media, such as NBC, CBC and E! Entertainment, have also described our product as the future of online dating.

Are you working in the online dating business? Interested in interview? Submit your interview inquiries here.

The roots of Boonex are deep enough to call this company one of the pioneers of dating communities market. Here is an exclusive insight for the readers of Dating Ad Network blog on Boonex’s present and future products.

Q: What Boonex offers for dating communities?

A: BoonEx main product - Dolphin Smart Community Builder evolved from aeDating - a commercial dating website platform which was wildly popular for building dating and matchmaking sites. Dolphin has become a much more powerful solution but retained all dating-related functionality and improved it. Now you can grab a free copy of Dolphin and create a dating site of your own in no time. Moreover, you can always use social-networking tools to improve the site traffic, popularity and customer interaction.

Dating sites get more money, social networks get more “clicks” - with Dolphin you get both.

BoonEx products provide an all-inclusive opportunity to create a unique dating site with advanced audio/video communication tools, configurable profiles, couple-profiles support and matchmaking engine.

We strongly believe that Dolphin is the world’s best platform for online dating website deployment and you can easily give it a try by installing a free (ad-supported) version. The best part though is that we have a dynamic development team that makes Dolphin better and better every year keeping our customer highly competitive in the Web 2.0 market.

Q: What is the advantage of your solutions?

A: The major advantage is the real community behind our products. Over 30,000 webmasters around the world use BoonEx software and they help each other through BoonEx Unity - free professional support community for BoonEx software users. BoonEx Unity provides discussion and collaboration venues and is a marketplace for extensions, plugins, templates, and language packs. What you see as a default Dolphin installation is just a tip of the iceberg – this professional support community is the main force.

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UsabilityTesting.tv published an article which outlines the most common mistakes made by dating sites. See for yourself if you have any issues from the checklist below:

1. Registration is too long.
2. Photo upload is not part of the registration flow.
3. No easy way to find who’s online.
4. Not letting members know the status of their emails (or asking them to pay for it).
5. Making updating a profile tougher than necessary.
6. No search by partial username.
7. Not notifying users when someone “hot listed” or “favorited” them.
8. Sending the content of the email to their personal email.
9. Not sending real-time notifications.
10. Connecting IM and Online status.

Source: usabilitytesting.tv

Scam comes in various shapes and forms - from luring victims to voluntarily part with the money to outright credit card fraud. We all heard stories about scammers infiltrating security, defrauding customers and hurting business reputation. Here is one high tech solution for reducing online abuse.

Headquartered in Portland, Oregon, Iovation is geared to fight online fraud in many industries, including Dating. It performs more than three million daily fraud checks for its customers. Greg Pierson, founder and CEO of Iovation, explains the technology and shares his vision in this exclusive interview for readers of the Dating Ad Network blog:

Q: How your technology helps fighting scam and fraud in the dating business?

A: iovation pioneered the use of device reputation for managing online fraud and abuse for Internet dating sites and social communities. Our patented fraud management technology focuses on the reputations of physical Internet devices to help online dating sites gain a deeper understanding of the computers used by their members to create new identities and accounts. iovation’s real-time ReputationManager device reputation service identifies computers and accounts that have a history of fraudulent and abusive behavior, and exposes hidden associations between devices and accounts within a given network.

The service is built on iovation’s Device Reputation Authority database, which is the world’s only shared device reputation network that manages the reputations of over 80 million unique computers and mobile devices worldwide. Our online dating customers share this information to recognize or re-recognize devices connecting to their network and allows them to immediately act on a device if it has been associated with any type of fraud or abuse that is important to them such as email spam, predatory behavior, financial fraud and chat abuse. In helping online communities expose fraudulent devices trying to gain access into their online dating environments, we bring additional value that goes beyond an insurance solution and encompasses a real return on investment that is not only about stopping fraud and abuse, but also about reducing operational costs and increasing revenue through more precise online risk management.

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