General News

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.

Chemistry is having another popular free communication weekend soon. Starting this Friday March 25 you will be able to communicate for free on Chemistry.com for 3 days. This means every single member will be able to communicate for no cost and with no credit card required during this time period.

To start, all you have to do is signup as a free member and take the personality test. Once the test is complete you will then start to receive matches based on the results of your test. These matches you receive from Chemistry are generated from a matchmaking system designed by famed Biological Anthropologist Dr. Helen Fisher. From your matches you can then choose which ones you would like to start up a conversation with. With communication being free from March 25 to March 27 you can expect the dating site to be extra busy during this time. This means you will have a greater chance of finding the one!

The last free communication weekend was just before Valentine’s Day (see Story). For more details about this dating service for singles who wish to find a long-term relationship, you can check out our Chemistry.com review.

It looks like FilipinoCupid.com has become pretty popular in the US and UK. According to information supplied by the parent company Cupid Media, the dating site has had over 2 million members since launch. This Philippines niche dating service also has over 2000 members joining everyday worldwide.

According to the traffic analysis website Alexa, FilipinoCupid.com is the 13,633 most visited site on the internet which is pretty good considering Alexa keeps track of millions of websites.

For more information on this story you can read the press release. For information on a similar Cupid Media dating site you can read our Asian Dating review.

I notice Dave over at the Online Dating Insider had a few scoops on the free dating site OkCupid which was just recently bought by Match.com.

First up is that there has been an update to the A-List Features. If you are an A-List member at OkCupid (costs $9.95 per month) you will now also be able to browse other profiles anonymously (i.e. members will not find out if you viewed their profile), hide your A-List status and change your username (only lasts as long as you are a A-List member).

The second bit of news is that OkCupid has removed their personality badges. A source at OkCupid told Dave that they were confusing members and that they did not improve the ascetics of the page.

To find out more about this online dating site, please read our OkCupid.com review.

Spark Networks dating site Single Seniors Meet (SingleSeniorsMeet.com), was renamed earlier this month to SilverSingles.com. This is the second name change that we know of for this seniors dating site. The last name change happened in November of 2009 when it went from PrimeSingles.net to Single Seniors Meet.

We have now updated the old review with this new information. To find out more about this dating site, you can check out our SilverSingles.com review.