SAN FRANCISCO--At the TechCrunch50 conference (coverage), I'm a little surprised we haven't seen any dating sites yet. After all, the economy may be in shambles, but the Internet never ceases to come up with new ways to help people meet. Matchmaking is still in the air though--and this time there's money involved.
Local Bacon, Red Beacon, and Mota Motors, three newly announced start-ups have a very similar aim: doing something better than Craigslist, and making money off it. In Local Bacon's case, it's helping job seekers and employees find each other by simplifying data. For Red Beacon, it's helping people more easily find service providers, then get them to execute a job. And for Mota Motors, it's about linking up car buyers and sellers while offering some hand-holding to make the process a little easier.
Out of the three, Local Bacon is the most risky. It's asking employers to work with a uniform format for job listings, so that all submitted jobs look the same and are easier to parse and search in Local Bacon's job finder. This is great for people trying to find based on certain qualifications, although it requires employers to reformat their listings, which can be a pain if they're sending it out to several job listing sites at once, or have certain qualifications that may not fit into Local Bacon's template.
It's also requiring job applicants to pay 99 cents per job to apply.
Local Bacon hopes that fee will help focus who applies for jobs, as well as keep the company afloat. It also helps provide tools for both applicants and employers to monitor and manage applications. For instance job seekers can get notified when their application has been looked at by the employer. That's something you don't usually find out until you get called in for an interview.
Local Bacon simplifies job listings by having all its employers work with a standardized job description format.
(Credit: CNET)The company said it's got tools on its road map that will help employers sort through applications by skill set, educational background, and more. For now that's something they have to keep track of on their own.
Red Beacon connects you with service providers--even if you need them right away.
(Credit: CNET)For people looking for someone to a one-time job and those who want to do it, there's Red Beacon. It helps people request a local service, then compare prices from local providers. It has a scheduling tool that lets you put out an order for whatever you need; its system then goes out and finds people to do it for you. On the other end, service providers can put out a quote for how much they would do the job for, then you as the service seeker can you get to pick the one you want.
To help users choose providers, companies get ratings and reviews from previous consumers, along with any photos they've taken to back up that work. Red Beacon also pulls in the aggregate rating from Yelp's API.
Companies that want to be included have to manually add their information, something that will later be verified by Red Beacon to weed out any false ones--although that's not yet available. The service will also be limited to the Bay Area until the company sees how well it does.
The third matchmaking service, Mota Motors, aims to make car buying and selling easier. It asks straightforward questions about your car's condition, then scans an index on the Web to give you a recommended sale price. It's hooked up to a number of service providers to help sellers get their car certified or fixed up before a sale. It can also write a description for you, including any selling points, meaning that you don't need an English degree to write elegant prose about your 1987 Honda.
For buyers, Mota Motors offers tools that offer advice and suggestions on questions to ask, or things to check before making a purchase. This includes a partnership with Pep Boys that has Pep Boys repair technicians doing a standardized inspection that gets posted to the car's info page to help you make sure it's not a lemon and warn you on any work that needs to be done.
So which of these three would I use? Considering I've got a car that needs selling, Mota Motors doesn't sound like such a bad idea. And as a soon-to-be buyer of a used car, I really dig the idea of having a system of verifying a used car to let me know what work it needs done. Of course the caveat with Mota Motors, as well as the others is that they're currently limited by location. For Local Bacon, it's the greater New York area, while Red Beacon and Mota Motors are limited to Northern and Southern California respectively.
The first dating service to use lab-based genetic profiling launched online last week. Scientific Match promises to pair up people who will be physically attracted to each other because their DNA is different.
Well-matched couples will like each others' natural scents, have more fun in bed, and bear healthier children than those who are genetically similar, the company claims.
The service, available only in the Boston area, charges $1,995 for a year-long subscription.
"I strongly believe this will dominate the future of dating services," said founder Eric Holzle, a mechanical engineer.
Members swab their cheeks and send in saliva samples. A lab spends two weeks analyzing the immune system genes, and then the company matches individuals with genetic profiles that are unalike.
"We look at six specific genetic reference points on DNA, and none of those six can match to make a match," Holzle explained.
He was inspired by a well-known "sweaty T-shirt" study of a dozen years ago, in which biologists found that women liked the smell of dirty shirts worn by men who were immunologically dissimilar to themselves.
As with other online dating sites, Scientific Match's users can fill out written profiles and upload photographs. Genetic details are not displayed, except to indicate a match. The service runs criminal background checks to exclude anyone who has committed crimes involving violence or identity theft.
Scientific Match is open to straight and gay people. However, women taking the birth control pill are turned away because some studies show they are more attracted to men with similar immune system genes.
The success or failure of the service can't be measured, however, with only a handful of customers so far. Although Holzle doesn't guarantee finding one's true love, he insists that people paired by Scientific Match will at least smell appealing to each other.
The romantic role played by scent is well-documented in poetry and science. Perfumers even add synthetic versions of pheromones, suspected aphrodisiacs found naturally in the body, to fragrances that include Paris Hilton's eponymous perfume.
But the ability to bottle attraction or to predict it through genetic profiling remains unproven by science.
Scientific Match sounds more like pseudoscience to Dean Hamer, the molecular biologist and author credited with discovering "gay genes."
"That sounds like a complete and utter rip-off that preys on people's lack of knowledge of causation and correlation," he said, adding that people could wrongly write off a potentially great mate due to genetic discrimination. "Why don't they just smell their underarms?"
Nevertheless, entrepreneurs are sure to try to capitalize on advances in genomics and biotechnology to reshape the landscape of high-tech matchmaking. The field is wide open. For instance, nobody has tried to set up couples based upon genes that have been linked to promiscuity or libido strength.
And Googling a date's full genetic code could be on the distant horizon. The cost of sequencing someone's DNA has dropped to the low six figures.
The latest online services to incorporate genetic testing include startup 23andMe, Ancestry.com, and the Genographic Project, which sell swab-and-send testing kits for uncovering the deep roots of a family tree.
Put romance and Webcams in the same sentence and we're often talking about sites that are neither safe for work, nor a proper replacement for face-to-face human interaction. SpeedDate (formerly known as "SpeedEdate") would like you to think otherwise, with their online speed-dating solution that gives you three minutes a pop with a grouping of daters via Webcam. The site has already setup more than 15,000 virtual dates after making its debut in late October.
Similar to WooMe (which is still in private alpha) dates are short, (hopefully) sweet, and one-on-one. SpeedDate will match you up based on some basic personality and geographical preferences. And starting next week, members will get to check out information about the person they're talking to, in order to get some quick conversation topics. There are also big fat "yes" and "no" buttons to note whether or not you enjoyed your time, and would like to setup a real date. Afterwards you can go back and get in touch with said daters to arrange a real-world meetup if both of you clicked the green yes button. Clicking the no button will end the date and move you on to the next.
Like real speed-dating events, sessions on SpeedDate.com are scheduled for a chunk of time on a weekly basis to maximize your potential dating pool. At all other times, simply keeping the browser window open will continue to match you up with new people as they come online.
While speed dating cuts through some of the red tape of glossing over people's profiles, the other end of that is getting matched up with more undesirables than you might be expecting, which is where SpeedDate's matching algorithm becomes important. It's worth noting that this is clearly a far better system than what's been done with the Dating on Demand service that you watch on your cable box, and potentially easier than sniffing out a local speed dating session on your own. It's also a little different from the competition by offering voice, video, and text as a means of conversation, meaning if you're without a Webcam you're not entirely out of the game--although your chances are probably better with one.
For a broader look at the service, the creators of SpeedDate have put together a video, which despite its news story look and feel, is purely promotional. My favorite part is when it turns into black and white to signify the "old" way of Internet dating, which looks a lot like MySpace. Burn.
- prev
- 1
- next
