Technology

The “coolest” new dating trend? If Samsung has a say, your smart fridge will soon be your go-to matchmaker. The electronics giant has recently announced its most surprising venture yet, a dating platform they’ve punnily dubbed Refrigerdating.

Refrigerdating promises to help singles find love based on the contents of their fridge. “In a world of social media, polished pictures and perfect surfaces, it can be hard to find out who truly is The One,” says Samsung. “But there is one space in our homes to which the polish hasn’t reached.“ That space is the inside of your refrigerator, which, if Samsung is to be believed, can say a surprising amount about who you are and what you’re into.

"We hope people can meet under more honest or transparent circumstances with the help of the contents of the fridge, because that can tell you a lot about the personality," said Elin Axelsson, PR manager at Samsung Electronics Nordic.

Black Mirror, the twisted British sci-fi anthology series turned Netflix smash hit, is one of the last things you’d want to inspire a real-life business. The show is notoriously dark, dystopian and disturbing to watch, with an outlook on human behavior and technological advancement that’s designed to leave viewers devastated. Despite its bleakness, Black Mirror is consistently praised by critics and has become a cult favorite for fans - and now, against all odds, it has inspired an enterprising Reddit user to launch a dating app based on a popular episode from season four.

Twenty-four year old programmer and entrepreneur Julian Alexander introduced his fellow redditors to Juliet, an AI matchmaker, in a post to the popular AMA subreddit.

The first date can be a tense moment no matter who you’re seeing, but when you’re meeting a stranger you’ve only communicated with through a dating platform, the stakes are even higher.

So you examine their photos for evidence of editing. You comb through their profile looking for signs they might not be who they say they are. And when that’s not enough, you take your detective powers elsewhere. Some call it stalking, others call it pre-date research - either way, a lot of us are doing it.

Risk mitigation specialists JPD surveyed 2,000 Americans to find out exactly how, and how often, singles investigate prospective mates. According to JPD’s findings, 77 percent of active daters research matches on a regular basis. Of those who do, most spend 15 to 30 minutes conducting their investigations. Some admit to spending 45 minutes or more on research before a date. Only 11 percent said they never research dates at all.

The DNA Romance dating platform disrupts the way people connect online by using Genetics and Psychology to matchmake people based on all three elements of human attraction:

1. Personality
2. Chemistry
3. Appearance

DNA Romance enhances the transparency of online dating by providing evidence based matchmaking going beyond appearance and questionnaires.

Dating app Hinge has launched a new feature called “Most Compatible” which uses machine learning to generate better matches for its users.

Most Compatible employs the Nobel prize-winning Gale-Shapley algorithm to find the most likely matches, also known as SMP or “Stable Marriage Problem.” It works like this: groups of people are pooled together, and based on their individual likes and passes (including which parts of profiles they liked or didn’t like), the pool is narrowed down so that each person is matched with one other person from the pool who seems most compatible, until everyone in the pool is matched. According to website The Verge, the AI technology “breaks people down based on who has liked them,” then tries to find patterns in the likes. If one person likes another person, then they might like another based on what the user liked about the first person.

Hinge will then recommend this “most compatible” match (you and your match will both receive the same recommendation of each other on the same day), and you will have 24 hours to message each other before the match expires. This match will appear at the top of your Discover page each day.

Match Group, the parent company of popular dating app Tinder, has launched a new app called Crown which offers a game-like format for online dating.

It works like this: every day at noon, users are presented with sixteen total profiles, shown two at a time, and must choose only one “winner” from each group of two. Users go through a process of elimination, until you end up with the final four matches, at which point you choose one final winner to be “crowned.” That winner is then alerted he/she has won, but that doesn’t mean you start chatting right away - it’s up to the winner to choose whether or not he/she wants to message you.

The game element is an interesting choice by Match Group. By turning it into a process where there is a possibility to “win,” the idea is that more users would feel invested in the process, and therefore be more likely to reach out. On the other hand, some argue, users might feel more acute rejection if their “winners” choose not to interact.