General News

For 14 days eHarmony Australia is running a free guided communication event starting April 13th and ending on April 26th, 2011. This means starting tomorrow for a fortnight, singles in Australia can visit eHarmony.com.au, create a profile, receive matches, and then communicate with those matches through the guided communication process at no cost.

As winter approaches in Australia it is a good time for singles to check out their local online dating site since this is typically the busy period for dating and matchmaking services.

To find out more about this online dating site in Australia, you should check out our eHarmony review.

Last month in a press release FriendFinder Networks announced that they want to re-launch its proposed initial public offering of common stock.

The story of their IPO started back in December of 2008 when FriendFinder Networks first filed their IPO with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for $460 million (see Story). In January 2010 they revised their initial public offering to less than half at $220 million (see Story). By February things were not looking so good and citing market conditions FriendFinder Networks delayed their IPO indefinitely (see Story).

For more information on dating services which FriendFinder Networks operates, you can check out our FriendFinder.com review and our Passion.com review.

In February Lavalife offered a 30 day free trial.

It looks like now they are going to be offering their dating service for free to singles who live in the United States. I have a feeling that this may only be for a limited time. So, online daters who live in the US and who are looking for a top grade dating service that is 100% free may want to give Lavalife a try.

For more information on this dating site you can read our [staticpage: Lavalife.com review].

Spark Networks reported their fourth quarter financial results this month. Revenue for the last quarter was down 9 percent to $10.1 million with a net income of $600 thousand. Net income is up substantially this quarter though since in quarter 4 of 2009 they reported a loss of $9.6 million. For the 12 months of 2010 revenue decreased 10 percent to $40.9 million with net income at $3.7 million when compared to 2009. In 2009 Spark Networks reported a net loss of $6.4 million.

For q4 2010 the number of average paying subscribers for the entire company was 160,744. This is a decrease of 5 percent when compared to the same quarter last year. For the entire year of 2010 the number of average paying subscribers was down 2 percent from 2009 to 162,311. Breaking average paying subscribers down by segment for quarter 4 2010 you can see all experienced a decrease when compared to the same quarter in 2009:

• Other Affinity Networks - 65,172 (-4%)
• Jewish Networks - 89,723 (-1%)
• General Market Networks - 5,174 (-46%)

For the full 2010 Q4 release visit Spark Networks News Room.

Related Story: Spark Networks Third Quarter 2010 Financials

Cupid PLC head office is located in the city of Edinburgh in Scotland. They employ about 15 people at the head office and another 200 or so in the Ukraine.

Cupid made a few announcements earlier this month about their final results for the year 2010:

• Revenues increase by 202 percent to £25.7m. In 2009 revenue was £8.5m
• Pre-tax profits for Cupid rose to £4.16m from £983,000 in 2009
• 42 percent of Q4 revenues came from outside the UK
• Their goal is to have more than 50% of revenues coming from North America by the end of 2011
• When you combine all of Cupid's dating sites they have 13 million customer profiles registered worldwide

For more information on this story you can read the announcement on the London Stock Exchange. To find out more about Cupid PLC dating sites you can read our Cupid.com review.

First of all let me say, I do not think so 😉

GeekWire recently found a Microsoft patent filing from 2009 which explains a matchmaking system based on matching peoples private affinities:

The claimed subject matter relates to an architecture that can leverage private affinities in order to facilitate or enrich relationships between people. In particular, the architecture can receive a profile associated with a user wherein the profile includes a set of private affinities that are cryptographically protected from public inspection. The architecture can decrypt and/or cryptographically compare a private affinity from the profile to an affinity in a disparate profile (associated with a disparate user) in order to identify a matching affinity. Once a matching affinity is identified, a message indicating such can be provided to the user along with a request to publish certain revealed information to the disparate user, possibly based upon a mutual exchange of commensurate information from the disparate user.

So basically this sounds like a matching system based on a person’s attributes that are not available for public viewing. I doubt Microsoft would run with something like this directly (i.e. create a dating site) but I could see them maybe eventually incorporating it into Windows Live profiles.