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This Valentine's Day, more lonely hearts than ever before will use mobile dating services to make a personal connection, according to analysts and mobile dating companies.
The growth is happening in part because of newer cell phones that have cameras, broadband wireless connections and clear color displays, allowing singles to send and receive photos and text messages to check out prospective partners, according to research from analysts and vendors.
In addition, a cell phone is easier to use in the middle of the day; PC-based dating services, on the other hand, are used mainly in the evening hours, according to findings from Webdate Mobile, a mobile subscription service offered by Trilibis Mobile in San Francisco.
"A lot of the interest in mobile dating is tied to Internet communities, which are certainly growing," said Tole Hart, an analyst at Gartner Inc.
"Mobile dating will continue to grow because Internet communities like MySpace and Jumbuck Island will grow," Hart said. "If you can easily show somebody pictures or share music, that's almost inadvertently dating at times."
"A cell phone is a personal device which lends itself to mobile dating," Hart added. "Today's cell phones can do more things, with higher-speed data and with more picture capabilities." The ability to show a person something you are seeing via a wireless camera, often called "see what I see," supports this trend, he said.
Trilibis said it has noticed an increase in interest in mobile dating, with a 23% surge in Webdate Mobile subscribers in the past year, for a total of nearly 92,000 registered users.
Meanwhile, analysts at Frost & Sullivan put the revenues for global mobile dating services at $31 million in 2005, a number that is expected to grow to $215 million in 2009. Visiongain, a market research firm in London and San Francisco, said that about 13% of all U.S. dating service members were accessing Web sites through their mobile phones.
As a sign of mobile dating's popularity, carriers such as Sprint Nextel and AT&T Inc.'s wireless unit (formerly Cingular Wireless) are supporting mobile dating with faster wireless data rates, easy text-messaging connections and subscriptions to specific mobile-capable dating services.
For example, Sprint offers a Webdate Mobile subscription for $3.99 per month. Sprint also offers Jumbuck Island from Jumbuck Corp. for $3.99 per month, giving users the ability to create an avatar to meet and chat with others via cellular in a virtual world.
For its part, Jumbuck Island announced this week that it has upgraded its Fast Flirting service, making it available to carriers globally. About 40,000 unique visitors per day use the Fast Flirting service over various carriers worldwide, the company said.
Most mobile dating services are based on sharing text in real time via cellular, with users finding one another through a common database provided by the mobile dating service. Jumbuck's Fast Flirting service now includes the ability to upload a photo or video to be shared. It is kept on a Jumbuck server and viewed by Jumbuck to avoid transmission of pornography or other objectionable material, a spokesman said.
Jumbuck's users find one another in virtual rooms based on themes such as countries or islands. A user starts a session by asking to find others of a certain age and gender, and then by picking a virtual room. In that room, several names can be selected, and the two parties can agree to share profile information, photos or videos, the spokesman said.
"It's a transient activity, and do people get married after one of these sessions? Maybe, but I'd hope they'd meet first," the spokesman said. In comparison, PC-based dating services tend to use algorithms to compare profiles that users create, matching singles with others who have compatible profiles.
In addition, IceBreaker Inc. debuted an interactive mobile dating platform on Jan. 16 called Crush or Flush, which it described as mobile software that "provides an easy way to flirt, chat and meet real people with similar interests in your area — right from your cell phone." IceBreaker said it is the first dating application designed specifically for the cell phone.
Webdate Mobile said its subscribers sifted through 6.7 million mobile Web pages in December and found picture viewing the most popular application, followed by views of text profiles. PC-based dating is heavily dominated by men, but Webdate Mobile has found that 42% of its subscribers are women. In comparison, women make up 30% of the PC-based group, according to the company. Ages range from 18 to 77 for Webdate Mobile subscribers.
Both Hart and Philip Redman, another a Gartner analyst, said mobile dating appears to be more popular in Japan and Korea than in the U.S., partly because of the popularity of cell phones there. But U.S.-based carriers will continue to support third-party subscription services and new technologies, Redman said. "Mobile dating appeals to carriers for adding airtime minutes [to increase revenues], plus it gets them into a specific market segment that is based on social interactions," he said.
Adding location capabilities through Global Positioning System technology or other means is "suspect," however, Redman said, noting prior attempts have failed. One company in Japan several years ago offered a system in which a badge a person was wearing at a party or other gathering would flash if somebody with a compatible personal profile was nearby. The technology worked fine, but "the problem was that guys created such a broad profile that it appealed to everybody," Redman said. "Go figure -- who would have guessed guys would do that?"
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