In what I find as a bit of a surprising move according to TNW, Plenty of Fish has launched a site called Luv My Box (luvmybox.com).
The premise behind Luvmybox is that you pay a monthly subscription fee ($34.95) and they will ship you (or whoever you want) once a month a package called a LuvBox filled with adult oriented items that one would find in a sex shop. The packages are discreet and can include anything from sexy costumes, to games, to other tools of the trade. 😉
Badoo introduced last month a dating app for Windows phone users. The Badoo app requires Windows Phone 7.5 or higher and includes most of the features found on their other apps like location based dating, profile updates, matches and sending messages. To try out the new app just search the Windows Phone Marketplace for “Badoo”.
Badoo also has apps available on iOS, Android, and Blackberry phone platforms. If you do not wish to use an app you can also access Badoo through your smartphones browser. To find out more about this dating service and why it has 150 million plus users you can read our review of Badoo.com.
A lot of travel stories are about bad in-flight meals, sub-par hostel accommodations, and confusing cultural mix ups. But this travel story is about a couple who joined MissTravel.com, met for the first time in Cabo San Lucas, and fell in love.
Their story was featured on ABC20/20's "Vacation Confidential" segment, alongside an interview with the site's founder and CEO, Brandon Wade. ABC is the first to document one of "the newest and wackiest vacation trends" via a reality travel dating show that isn't too far off from its travel-and-romance hits "The Bachelor" and "The Bachelorette."
MissTravel.com claims to be the first online dating site to blend travel with romance, by bringing together generous singles looking for travel companions with attractive singles who cannot afford to travel alone. The idea is proving to be a popular one: more than 100,000 members have joined and over 50,000 trips have been planned in the 3 months the site has been live.
MissTravel.com has stirred up its share of controversy with critics who have compared it to a travel escort agency, but Brandon Wade is on the defensive. "Most people are uncomfortable with the idea of taking any kind of risk," he said during his interview with ABC, "so they choose to look at all the things that could go wrong with MissTravel.com, meanwhile ignoring all its potential for greatness."
Sibel and Steven, the couple featured in the segment, are bound to agree. Sibel is a 27-year-old from New York who signed up for MissTravel.com with minimal expectations. Shortly after joining, she received a message for Steven, a 31-year-old financial planner from San Diego who was looking for company on his upcoming trip to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico.
Sibel says she found the idea of joining a man she'd never met on a trip abroad daunting, but decided to give it a go after days of talks on Skype and over the phone. They met for the first time at Villa Marcella, a beachside mansion Steven rented out for a whopping $2500 a night. It was a weekend full of indulgences - dips in the Jacuzzi, fine dining, a private yacht, snorkeling, horseback riding, massages - and when it came to a close, Sibel and Steven kissed each other goodbye and returned to their homes.
A few weeks later, Steve traveled to New York to visit Sibel, and a few weeks after that, she traveled to San Diego to spend a weekend with him. The first success story of MissTravel.com is still being written: Sibel and Steve found what they were looking for on MissTravel.com, and the couple is still dating.
Our newly updated review for the dating site PerfectMatch.com is now available for viewing. Since our last major overhaul of the review about a year and a half ago PerfectMatch.com has done a number of changes to their service. This includes:
Adding more and changing a number of profile questions
Updating the Duet Compatibility Test
Streamlining membership length options
Adding Paypal as a payment option
Updating their search parameters. Video search is now available
To find out more about this service and the changes please read our updated PerfectMatch.com review now.
Online dating has been a thing for a long time now, so I guess it's about time someone invented online group dating. After all, the double (or more!) date is a well-respected dating institution, and it deserves a virtual version just as much as one-on-one dating does.
Grouper brings together matchmaking, blind dating, and networking for a unique new experience that pairs two friend groups based on their Facebook profiles and their answers to a short survey. That all sounds pretty standard, but here's where it gets a little different: Grouper users never exchange emails or chat using an instant messenger. In fact, they don't interact virtually at all.
Here's how it works: 3 friends pay the $20-per-person registry fee, answer all required questions and emails, then meet at the assigned date, time, and bar. The meet and greet then occurs over a round of complimentary beverages (but drinkers take note: the "complimentary" thing only applies to well drinks and beers).
Michael Waxman, CEO and Founder of Grouper, came up with the idea for the "social experiment" and coded the website on a whim. A week later he launched his new venture from NYC, convinced that group dating "would be way better than a dating site."
But there were still plenty of questions for Waxman and the rest of the Grouper crew. Would people actually be willing to meet in person without ever contacting each other? No emails, phone calls, Skype calls, texts, chats, tweets, Facebook messages, carrier pigeons, or other communication of any kind...would any singles actually be brave enough to give it a shot?
The answer, it turns out, is yes. The site sparked interest right away, and thousands of Grouper meet-ups have been conducted since the first, in which Waxman set up two friends on a blind date. One couple, who met during the sixth Grouper, are still dating. Grouper even sent them a gift for their one-year anniversary.
Waxman believes the success of the Grouper model lies in its low-key atmosphere. “We’re not fond of labels, and we think that a lot of people nowadays want to meet more casually, more organically,” he says. “We find that by not throwing it in a bucket of ‘this is networking,’ ‘this is dating,’ ‘this is whatever,’ people just show up more open-minded and have a better time.”
China is the new frontier for online dating. It is the fastest growing market place with millions of new singles joining dating services every month. In under 2 years (by 2014) it is expected that China’s online dating market will double its 2011 value to 2.02 billion Yuan. This works out to more than $317 million US dollars.
In 2010 a survey by China’s government found that of China’s 1.3 billion citizens, about 14 percent of them, or 180 million are single. For comparison in 2008 it was reported that the USA with its 300 million plus population had 93 million single people. Percentage wise this works out to about 30 percent which is twice the amount of singles as reported in China. With the China survey no break down by gender was mentioned but educated and self-sufficient single women are on the rise. A new phrase has been coined which appears in the China’s official dictionary. The phrase is Sheng Nu which means Unwanted Girls in English and is defined as all single woman over the age of 27.
The current top 3 dating sites in China are (based on their membership claims):
Zhenai.com – 63 million users
Baihe.com – 40 million users
Jiayuan.com – 39 million users
For a list of dating sites that cater to Asian singles in North America and Europe you can check out our Ethnic dating category.
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