Online Dating

One of the United Kingdom’s fastest growing dating services is Cupid plc. Two of their more popular dating sites includes Cupid.com and Flirt.

In February of this year they surpassed 100 million unique visitors. Last year during the same period they had only 15 million. The United States accounts for about a quarter of their traffic with the rest coming from Europe. Cupid reports average monthly global sales of around $9 million USD.

Cupid.com also just recently launched a HD iPad app. They already have native apps for both the iPhone and Android devices.

For more on the story you can read the press release and to find out about the dating site you can check out our Cupid.com review.

Online dating: it's great, except when it isn't.

The latest cautionary tale involves Skout, a social networking app designed to link up adults with other users nearby. Skout got its start as a Foursquare-like location check-in service, but didn't hit its stride until it transformed into a location-based flirting app. The company now attracts millions of new users a month and received $22 million in financing from Andreessen Horowitz, a leading venture capital firm in Silicon Valley, earlier this year.

After discovering that minors had gained access to the app, Skout created a service designed specifically for 13- to 17-year olds. Safeguards were put in place, but they may not have been safe enough.

3 men have now been accused of raping children they met through the location-based app. In each case, the men reportedly posed as teenagers in the Skout forum for underage users. In one case, a 15-year-old girl from Ohio said she was raped by a 37-year-old man. In the second, a 24-year-old man is accused of raping a 12-year-old girl in California. In the final case, a 21-year-old man in Wisconsin has been accused of sexually assaulting a 13-year-old boy.

Skout's founder, Christian Wiklund, responded in an interview, saying, "I'm disgusted by what's happened here. One case is too many. When you have three, it looks like a pattern. This is my worst fear." He has decided to suspend the service for minors, who made up a significant portion of Skout's member base, while he works with security experts to put better safeguards in place.

"We're seeing more of these cases," said Lt. Craig Carter of the Escondido Police Department in California. "Parents need to be aware that their kids could be on these Web sites." Many social networking services forbid minors from using them, or separate minors from adult users, but it's nearly impossible to control who ultimately uses the service.

Wiklund has contact law enforcement officials involved in all 3 cases and offered to aid in their investigations. The company has also suspended the app for teenagers and banned all devices registered with the app that belong to minors. Skout is also working with a task force of experts to improve security, age verification, and other company practices.

"I thought we were doing a lot, but obviously we have to do better," says Scott Weiss, an investment partner with Andreessen Horowitz. "This is a five-alarm fire. The entire company is re-evaluating everything it's doing."

This Canada Day weekend eHarmony.ca is having a free communication event which will run from Friday June 29th, 2012 until Monday July 2nd, 2012 (Canadian site only).

Holiday weekends are always a busy time for dating sites. If you were thinking about trying out eHarmony, this 4 day event is a perfect opportunity for you. As always it is free to sign up and create a profile on eHarmony. You also are allowed for free to receive matches and check out their profiles. What free communication weekends allow you to do (as the name may suggest 😊) is communicate with those matches at no cost to you and with no credit card required. The only features not available are secure call, photos and skipping the guided communication process and going directly to email.

To find out more about how this dating site works and what features it offers when compared to other services, please read our review of eHarmony.

If you haven't heard of Skout yet, you probably will soon. The dating app has raised $22 million dollars and is poised to make a huge splash in 2012, but CEO Christian Wikilund doesn't plan to stop at dating. Skout is adding 40,000 to 50,000 new users on the app every single day and if Wikilund has his way, it will eventually become a global network on the scale of Facebook or Twitter.

In an interview with Business Insider, Wikilund described the history of Skout and his vision for the app's future. Skout got its start in 2007, before Facebook had a mobile product and location-based services were just starting to become popular. As a location-based mobile social network, Skout immediately stood out from its competitors. Skout was the first dating app for the iPhone at the time of its launch, and has since evolved into a more general service to meet new people and flirt.

"The mission for the company is to build a global network for meeting new people," Wikilund told Business Insider. "A year ago we had 30 million messages a month, last month we had 425 million messages. We were signing up a year ago 100,000 per month. Now we're signing up 40-50k users per day. Everything has been growing, basically due to a good product."

Skout's impressive growth has taken it through Hong Kong, New York, Japan, Berlin, LA, South Korea, and more. Wikilund attributes the success to Skout's ability to be whatever you want it to be. Looking to meet new friends? Skout can handle it. Looking to meet a lover? Skout can do it. Looking for long-term love? Skout can help with that, too. "Right now," said Wikilund, "50 percent of adults on a national level are single, but 80 percent of our users are single." Flirting is definitely on the Skout menu.

Using Skout is free for all basic functionality, but extra fun requires an extra fee. Users can pay to see who checked them out or to promote their profiles, but the vast majority of activities on the app come with a price tag of $0.

If all goes according to plan, 2012 will be a big year for Skout. The company plans to continue developing the product and spreading the word, and has plans to continue their growth on both the national and international stages. A major launch is also scheduled for this summer.

Earlier this month Lavalife announced new functionality for their instant messaging feature. Members can now turn off instant messaging for up to 10 minutes. This allows members to take a timeout from being hit with chat requests if they happen to be searching for profiles or composing a private email to another member. When you disable IM only the person you are currently communicating with or anyone in your hotlists may contact the member.

To find out more about this Canadian dating site you can read our Lavalife review.

Now here's something that I never expected to need an app for...though now that I see it, I can't help but be intrigued.

Sarah Gray was in a long distance relationship when she found herself wondering whether it was time to bid her boyfriend farewell. The relationship did end up crumbling, but Gray found something good in the aftermath: a new app idea. The app, called Should I Dump My Boyfriend?, helps users answer the same question that Gray faced by tracking your feelings over a two-week period.

Forget about talking your friends ears off with the trivial details of your relationships or turning to silly Cosmo quizzes to answer your burning relationship questions. This app, which creates a graph that quantifies what you should do and provides customized advice, is the way of the future.

Step one is to keep track of your feelings. Record your ups and downs in the app, which sends a daily reminder to make sure that you stay on top of the tracking process. You can rate your boyfriend as often as you like, since you never know when you might be surprised by something he does, and can leave notes describing your feelings during each rating session.

When the rating process is complete, the app provides objective advice based on the unique patterns it analyzes in your entries. The idea is to help you spot trends that you may have missed in day to day life, and create clarity about why you might be sabotaging a good relationship or sticking with a bad one.

And it's not just useful for one relationship. The app saves all your entries from past boyfriends, so you can review and reflect at any point in the future. Mad at your man and wondering why you haven't dumped him yet? Check the app for reminders about what makes him so wonderful. Feeling the post-breakup blues and second-guessing your choice to dump the chump? Read through your old notes and statistics to refresh your memory about why he was such a dud, then count your blessings.

"Being able to see your relationship clearly and objectively is the 1st step on the path to a happy, healthy love-life," says Gray, :whether it's with him, with someone else, or on your own for a while." We're often to irrational in the moment to assess our feelings correctly, making the app a valuable asset when it comes to choosing partners wisely. "Sometimes, we need an objective voice to help us appreciate a good thing or accept something painful," Grey adds. "And this app helps us tap into the best voice of all - the one inside ourselves."

Check out the app on iTunes.