Image: Adweek

Dating app Bumble repurposed a coffee shop to act as a gathering space for attendees of the famous SXSW festival in Austin, Texas. The company wanted to create a more intimate and inviting space to allow its customers to better connect, as well as to show off the capabilities of its platform.

Bumble’s headquarters are also located in Austin, and while there is traditional booth space available for companies looking to market themselves to SXSW attendees, Bumble chose a more engaging way to reach out to potential customers, according to AdWeek. They rebranded a local coffee shop in their signature yellow, providing comfy couches and tables along with a tagged wall saying: “Make the First Move.”

The Meet Group has acquired Growlr, a free dating platform for the gay bear community. Growlr joins MeetMe, Lovoo, Skout and Tagged in The Meet Group’s portfolio of mobile social entertainment apps, a move that marks the parent company’s first foray into the LGBTQ market.

The Meet Group acquired Growlr for $11.8 million using a combination of $4.8 million in cash and $7 million from its existing line of credit. The company pledged an additional $2 million to be paid in annual $1 million installments over the next years if certain revenue metrics are achieved. Geoff Cook, Chief Executive Officer of The Meet Group who co-founded the company as MyYearbook.com in 2005, called the deal “a meaningful step into the large same-sex dating market.”

On Wednesday March 13, Facebook and its popular group of apps including Instagram and WhatsApp were unavailable to many users across the globe. While the company struggled to address what was happening, people were turning to other social media outlets like Twitter to express their frustration with the hashtag #FacebookDown.

Ironically, Facebook also had to turn to rival Twitter for help in communicating the issues as the problem persisted.

Instead of being able to post status updates and selfies, users were getting error messages. Advertisers who spent large amounts of money on promotions via Facebook apps were especially concerned by the length of the outage.

Countries affected by the outage included users in the United States, Europe, and Central and South America. Outages in the U.K. were especially widespread. Reports of outages in Asia began several hours later.

The Unicode Consortium, otherwise known as the gatekeeper of emojis, has introduced interracial couple emojis to their growing lexicon of inclusive choices. The new emojis will debut later in 2019, in large part thanks to dating app Tinder.

According to Mashable, when the new emojis debut, you can choose from a mix of different skin color and gender combinations, including interracial same-sex couples, depending on your preference. The combinations provide a total of 71 new couple variations. Until now, the only couple or group emojis available has been the default yellow emojis.

Tinder advocated for interracial couple emojis back in early 2018 with its #representlove campaign. The company had already made efforts to be more inclusive by offering a range of gender and sexuality preferences people could include in their dating profiles, so the emoji campaign was another way to advocate for and appeal to its userbase. Tinder introduced a petition to Unicode after gathering 50,000 signatures, making a case to add the new emojis.

Not content with being one of the most well-known names in the dating space - as well as a facilitator for friendships and a growing power in the world of business networking - Bumble has set its sights on conquering the entertainment industry.

The company recently announced the return of the Female Film Force, a UK-based initiative launched last year to fund short films from aspiring women filmmakers in the UK and Ireland. The inaugural 2018 competition yielded 1,100 pitches and awarded five filmmakers (writer, directors or producers) £20,000 each to make a film embodying Bumble’s values of female empowerment, equality and kindness.

With the launch of Match.com in 1995, the search for a partner was irrevocably changed. Technology, business and society have radically transformed the ways we meet, communicate, date, fall in love, get married and break up. The dating industry has experienced tremendous growth as an increasing number of consumers use the internet to seek love and the social stigma for doing so disappears. There are now around 2,000 dating services in North America and an estimated 8,000 around the world.

According to the market research firm IBISWorld, the dating sector grew by 11.9 percent over a five-year period to reach revenue of $3 billion in 2018. In the same timeframe, the number of businesses has grown by 1.0 percent and the number of employees has grown by 5.6 percent. Mobile dating applications now account for nearly a quarter of industry revenue, and their growth has rapidly outpaced that of other dating services.

Match Group - parent to Match.com, Tinder, OkCupid and others - remains a dominant force in the industry. The company brought in $1.7 billion in revenue in 2018. Tinder contributed nearly half of that ($805 million) thanks to the incredible success of its premium subscriptions. As of January 2018, Statista listed Tinder as the most popular dating service for US singles in the coveted 18-29 age range. Plenty of Fish (also owned by Match Group), Match.com, and OkCupid followed.