Reviews

The San Francisco Bay Area lives and breathes tech. As home to the iconic companies of Silicon Valley, and a mind-blowing number of plucky startups, there are few places in the world with a more unabashed love of all things that come with the digital age.

Naturally, that extends to dating. Countless dating apps and websites call the region home, helping its tech-savvy and time-strapped residents find love despite their busy lives. The latest to join their company is Belong, a smart dating app that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to curate personalised matches and social experiences for accomplished singles.

Belong makes the bold promise that it’s “reinventing the modern dating experience.” The app becomes smarter the more you use it, allowing the machine learning mechanism to provide hyper-targeted matches and date suggestions designed just for you.

Dating apps catering to exclusive clientele are becoming an increasingly prominent part of the industry. The League may be the most famous example, but there’s also Inner Circle and the mysterious Raya. Even Tinder has gotten in on the game with Tinder Select, a secret, members-only version of the app for its top users.

Loveflutter is the latest company to jump on the elite bandwagon with a new premium version of its app, called BLUE. BLUE promises to admit users into an exclusive world full of “celebrities and other Twitter blue tick holders” - in other words, you can woo Twitter’s hottest verified singles, providing you too have that little blue check by your name.

In a world overrun by YouTube stars and Instagram influencers, BLUE may sound like a ploy to appeal to today’s social media-obsessed singles - and in some ways it probably is - but it also serves a genuine purpose: safety.

Online dating may have started as a young person’s game, but it’s rapidly become a platform for singles of all kinds to make connections. Services like OurTime.com, Senior People Meet, and Stitch cater to older users in search of love and companionship, and now they’re joined by a new offering from Snap Interactive: 50more.

SNAP, a leading provider of live video social networking and interactive dating applications, announced the US rollout of its newest platform on July 12, 2017. 50more was built to celebrate life and the enduring potential for romance and enrichment for singles over 50 years of age. The service aims to create higher quality connections by matching based on three key compatibility factors: vitality, openness, and culture (VOC).

VOC-driven matching is rooted in scientific principles to effectively bring people together with similar interests, passions, and goals. The service sends users a selection of personalized introductions each day, carefully selected based on each individual’s VOC percentage, eliminating the need to spend hours searching for matches.

How many trends and buzzwords can you fit into a single business idea? Matchpool may have set a new record.

The company is a dating platform that describes itself as “a decentralized matchmaking protocol which uses group dynamics to help participants match with each other.” Others simply call it “Slack Meets Tinder.”

Matchpool raised over $5.7 million in 48 hours in an Initial Coin Offering (ICO), a crowdfunding mechanism modeled after the Initial Public Offering (IPO) process of conventional companies. And in keeping with that high-tech theme, Matchpool’s most successful users earn cryptocurrency rewards for their matchmaking efforts.

Welcome to the brave new world of falling in love - one that doesn’t just use technology to find matches, but also uses it to analyze your dates and determine the best of your romantic options. Evolve, launched April 2017, employs machine learning to help singles identify their dating patterns and make smarter choices.

It sounds like the creation of a sci-fi novel or a Black Mirror episode, but Evolve calls itself something much less intimidating: “the world’s first dating and relationship manager.” Unlike other dating apps, you’ll find no matches on Evolve - instead the app is designed to help you date with intention by offering personalized insights backed by data.

Each time you go on a date, log onto Evolve to enter details about the outing. Rate your date from 1 to 10, and indicate whether it ended with a kiss or “more.” Select your match’s pros and cons (the choices include “Trustworthy,” “Sketchy,” “Ambitious,” “Baggage,” “Shared Values,” and “Great Chemistry”) from a list of options. You can also add photos and basic info about people into Evolve, either manually or by letting the app pull the information for you automatically using a screenshot.

Once upon a time, the world’s great lovers wooed with songs and sonnets. Today, we express our deepest feelings in 140 characters or less.

Or at least you do if you’re on Loveflutter, a dating service that has partnered with Twitter to prove social media feeds are the new windows to the soul.

Originally founded in 2013, London-based Loveflutter relaunched this May with an updated approach to modern matchmaking. Like other popular dating apps, users swipe left or right on candidates in hopes of scoring a mutual match. But unlike the competition, where singles pay attention to little more than looks, Loveflutter takes appearance out of the equation.