Online Dating

Christian Café is having 2 sales this month on membership subscriptions. The first one starts May 16th and runs to for a week, and the second one runs during Memorial Day weekend. Both give percentage discounts on subscriptions and are available on the membership upgrade page during the time they are offered.

From Monday May 16th, to Tuesday May 24th, 2016 you will receive 15% off when you purchase a 3 month subscription. This mid-May sale means a 3 month membership will only cost you about $40.

For the Memorial Day Weekend sale which runs from May 27th to May 31st, 2016 you can save up to 25% off any membership. Depending on the membership this means you could see a savings of over $25.

One of the great things about Christian Café is they offer a 10 day free trial to all new visitors. All you need to do is signup for a free membership and fill in your profile, and upload a photo. No credit card is required. With the free trial you have full access to the service including sending and receiving emails and participation in the Christian forum. This allows you to find out more about the members close to you and if online dating is something you want to continue with.

Another perk of an upgraded Christian Café memberships is, it allows you to contact all members, including free ones. Most other dating services require both members to have paid before each can commutate. This is not true with Christian Café, as once the paid member initiate the conversation both members will be able to send and receive emails to each other.

For more information about this Christian dating service, please read our Christian Cafe review.

There seems to be a new dating app launching every week. In such a crowded market, you’d think investors and developers would shy away from creating something new, but it seems everyone is trying to take a piece of the dating market away from Tinder.

However, I came across a new app trying in a more interesting way to differentiate itself from the popular app – not by being more “female-focused” or offering profile verification as other competing apps are doing, but by focusing on what the actual goal is – the real-life date.

Dating app Dine offers users a chance to match not only through common interests, but through restaurant preferences. According to the company, the goal is to get you from an online match to an actual date – dinner or drinks – as quickly as possible. (Avoiding the Tinder problem of messaging endlessly with no results.) The app is integrated with Yelp to offer local eating choices.

Dine is owned by Mrk & Co., founded by veterans of Japanese gaming giant DeNA, which Nintendo partnered with to bring its games to Smartphones last year. But Dine isn’t incorporating the game-like elements of Tinder or its parent companies' popular games in its dating app. Its premise is similar to dating website How About We, where people can search for matches based on ideas they come up with for a first date. But Dine is all about the eating experience.

The concept of Dine is simple: After filling out your profile, you pick three restaurants or bars where you’d want to meet for a date. Dine offers you 2-5 potential matches per day, along with which three places they chose, so you can request to go on a date at a particular location.

When you send someone a date request and they match (accept), you can message each other. However – Dine provides users with suggested messages ready to go, with the language focused on scheduling a date and time for your meet-up. Of course you can erase their suggestions and add your own message, but the app is focused on getting you to set the date and meet in person.

According to an article in Business Insider, about half of accepted requests lead to actual dates within a two-week period, at least for the beta phase of the Dine app launch.

Dine has now launched all over the U.S. and Canada. Also noteworthy: Apple was impressed enough with the concept to feature it on its list of "best new apps".

In 2016, there’s no question about YouTube’s place in the world. The streaming site is the go-to destination for music videos, comedy sketches, makeup tutorials, adorable pets, and any other video whim the internet has. But before it was so firmly entrenched in popular culture, YouTube had an entirely different aim: dating.

According to co-founder Steve Chen, who recently spoke at the 2016 South By Southwest conference, YouTube was initially conceived as a way for singles to upload videos of themselves talking about the future partner they hope to meet.

“We always thought there was something with video there, but what would be the actual practical application?” Chen said, according to CNET. “We thought dating would be the obvious choice.” Chen and his co-founders, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim, launched a site with a simple slogan: Tune In, Hook Up. Five days later, not a single video had been uploaded.

In desperation, the team took matters into their own hands. “Realizing videos of anything would be better than no videos, I populated our new dating site with videos of 747s taking off and landing," Karim told Motherboard. They took out ads on Craigslist in Las Vegas and Los Angeles and offered to pay women $20 to upload videos of themselves to the site. Again, they came up short.

The co-founders made the decision to ditch the dating aspect entirely. Early adopters began using YouTube to share videos of all kinds - pets, vacations, performances, anything. YouTube took on a new meaning, got a physical makeover, and this time, it worked.

Although YouTube’s matchmaking element was a bust, it’s an interesting origin story that has inspired a small amount of superstition in its founders. Chen noted that they registered the domain name YouTube on February 14 - "Just three guys on Valentine's Day that had nothing to do," he said.

Today YouTube is hardly “nothing.” It was acquired by Google for a $1.65 billion in 2006. It has launched the careers of many stars, from Justin Bieber to Swedish gamer PewDiePie. The company is nothing short of an empire.

Chen now has a new project in the works. He was at SxSW with Vijay Karunamurthy, an early engineering manager at YouTube, in support of their new startup, Nom. The service describes itself as “a community for food lovers to create, share and watch their favorite stories in real-time.” The food-focused site, which lets chefs and foodies broadcast live video of their edible adventures, launched in March.

eHarmony.com has a special going on for the next few days. Starting May 12th until May 16th (2016) you can get 6 additional months for free when you purchase a 6 month subscription. This is valid only in the United States.

Instead of free communication weekends this past few months, eHarmony has been offering free subscription extensions when you purchase a subscription (about once a month). No coupon is required and you will see the deal listed when you visit the eHarmony membership upgrade page

To join eHarmony just signup for a free membership which allows you to create your profile and take the personality questionnaire. The whole process takes about 40 minutes to complete with most questions for the questionnaire being multiple choice. Just select the best answer which describes you and once complete eHarmony will take your answers and use their matching algorithm to produce a set of matches everyday for you to checkout. If one or more sparks your interest you can then go ahead and start communicating with them.

For more information about this online dating service, please go ahead and read our eHarmony review.

Tinder, Bumble, and Coffee Meets Bagel may inspire most of the buzz in the mobile dating industry, but it’s Badoo that’s now celebrating a major milestone. The London-based company has just become the first ever dating app to reach 100 million downloads in the Google Play store.

“We’re really excited about today’s milestone,” said Alexandra Chong, President of Badoo, in a statement. “With 10 years of existence, Badoo has the industry’s deepest insights and experience, and knows how to use this wealth of information to create a fantastic user experience and sustain incredible growth and momentum.”

Other companies in the 100 million club on Android include Whatsapp, Snapchat, Spotify, and Twitter - but a surprising number of big names (from the aforementioned Tinder to Amazon, Uber, and Pinterest) haven’t yet cracked the nine-digit mark.

Along with that big news comes the launch of a timely new feature. Badoo is putting privacy and security at the forefront of the product by introducing a new photo verification system designed to combat catfishing. To get a picture verified, users must submit a selfie with a pose requested by Badoo. The gestures are not common, like a thumbs-up, but rather unique and specific.

Once the image has been submitted, Badoo’s team of over 5,000 moderators across the globe review it to ensure it follows the directions and matches the other photos on the profile. The entire process can reportedly be completed in less than one minute.

For an additional layer of safety, users can opt to be matched only with verified users. Chong says the selfie scheme was devised to make the verification process fun instead of tedious. After testing other possibilities, selfies were the clear winner. Moving forward, existing users will be encouraged to verify their account and 100% of new Badoo users worldwide will be required to go through the process.

Badoo hopes the new feature release will aid its push into the United States. The company has plans to open its first office in the US and will begin a marketing/PR campaign to announce its arrival. Chong says the company has also set its sights on solving other problems that plague the online and mobile dating worlds.

“We hear a lot of complaints about people chatting forever online and never meeting face-to-face,” she told Forbes. “So we developed a great, innovative feature to address that. It will be launching in the coming months, so stay tuned!”. For more on this dating app please read our Badoo review

If you’re looking for love, eHarmony is one of the most trusted names in the biz. But what if you’re in the market for new employment? With the launch of Elevated Careers, eHarmony hopes to become a go-to destination for job seekers as well as singles.

After three years in development, Elevated Careers finally launched on April 1. eHarmony hopes its many years of matching experience will be equally as successful matching job hunters with positions as it has been matching singles.

“When you have a job you are compatible with on the levels that are most important to you, then the likelihood of you being happy in it skyrockets,” reads the website. “And who doesn’t want to be fulfilled in their work? We find those jobs for you by using technology that has proven to make successful long-term careers.”

Elevated Careers is based on a three-level compatibility system:

• Skills: Using data from millions of resumes and career transitions, Elevated predicts how compatible you are with a job based on your skills and background, and how likely you are to be hired for that position.
• Culture: Culture compatibility between companies and employees greatly increases overall job satisfaction, so Elevated emphasizes how your core values fit with a company’s.
• Personality: Elevated helps you avoid personal conflict at work by showing how compatible your personality will be with any prospective hiring manager.

To get started, upload your resume and fill out the Profile Builder section. Elevated Careers then creates a Compatibility Scorecard based on the information you provide. The Scorecard shows your compatibility with your current company and is also used to match you with job listings. You can automatically see the job matches tailored uniquely to you. You can also search based on your provided demographics, or input your own keywords and search parameters.

Once you have found a job match, you can apply directly for the job, as well as view compatibility details and predicted job satisfaction with that specific company. You are also able to save a job listing you'd like to come back to later.

All functionality and features of the Elevated Careers site are currently free for job seekers. Anyone can register and create their profile, search for jobs, get matches, apply for jobs and, where available, be in direct contact with hiring managers. In the future, the company plans to add premium features for a fee.

Companies can also sign up for an Elevated account for free, but registering for a paid subscription provides access to a wider range of features, including the ability to see all available candidate details, post searchable job listings, and directly contact candidates.

What’s eHarmony’s end game? Well, just as the original site came about because Neil Clark Warren believed there was a better way of finding love than relying on luck, Elevated believes that if jobs and employees are matched based on compatibility, people will be more satisfied and fulfilled in their jobs, and companies will have higher rates of employee retention, motivation, engagement, and productivity. That’s a world any of us would be happy to live in.