Maybe even dating sites deserve to find a special someone at one point in their lives… it looks like Badoo, the UK-based dating site, has joined forces with rival Hot or Not.
The two have yet to issue a formal release of any kind, but Hotornot now boasts the same amount of registered users as Badoo (146 million+), and Hotornot now directly refers users to Badoo’s terms and conditions… → Read More
Feedback is rolling in on our Scamville post last night. Even more people are coming forward to talk about their experiences getting ripped off by Offerpal and SuperRewards, or how they were pitched by these companies to add offers to their apps.
We’ve got a lot more to say about this before we’re done. And we’re hoping that Facebook and MySpace make the right decisions for users and begin to… → Read More
San Francisco based HotOrNot, founded by James Hong and Jim Young in October 2000, has been acquired, we’ve heard from multiple sources. The buyers are investors connected with Avid Life Media, and paid somewhere around $20 million for the site. Hong and and Young have been taking money out of the very profitable business all along the way – which we reported was another $20 million or… → Read More
Social network Piczo has released a new feature into private beta: Piczo Zone. It’s being tested by a small group of users now and will be released generally in a few weeks. What is it? Product Evangelist Keith Crowell says its a way for users to decorate their profile pages in much the same way as teenagers decorate their rooms – with posters, music, etc. Users take (or create)… → Read More
Hot or Not have abandoned their much publicized move to a free model. According to an email from Hot or Not’s founders, since moving to a free model the site had become inundated by spam: You also warned us that this would probably lead to more spammers and fake profiles. You were right, this is exactly what happened. The spammers got aggressive to the point where they were screwing up the… → Read More
Crunchyroll is a San Francisco based startup that is a sort of YouTube for anime and other mostly Asian video content. The three founders, who asked to remain anonymous, are all employees of HotOrNot and the company operates out of HotOrNot’s San Francisco offices (although HotOrNot has no financial interest in the company, according to the founders). The site launched in the summer of 2006… → Read More
San Francisco based HotOrNot, a popular online dating site which has broken most of the de-facto rules of running a silicon valley startup, is shaking things up again. For the last several months they’ve been testing a new service called Hotlists, which lets users add a little brand bling to their profile and build out their identity through association. Co-founder James Hong writes about… → Read More
Read this excellent post by James Hong, co-founder of the nearly seven year-old startup HotorNot. He talks about the history of the startup, and touches on where it might be going in the future. A lot of this I wrote about last month after interviewing Hong, but there’s lot of additional information that people will find fascinating. The company never raised venture capital, and was throwing… → Read More
When James Hong and Jim Young founded HotorNot in October, 2000, they had no real plans for the service to be anything other than a fun site for a few friends. They turned a free low end computer they received for setting up an etrade account into a web server, launched the site from their house in Mountain View, California, and emailed 40 friends. By the end of the day, 40,000 people had visited… → Read More
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