Social dating company Zoosk has acquired Woo Media, the company behind sites like WooMe.com, Shufflepeople.com and Monsterchat.com, for an undisclosed sum.
You may remember WooMe from when I called the company, which was a finalist in our TechCrunch40 conference, out as lowly scammers (I signed up as a horse and turned out to be phenomenally popular among young super models). → Read More
A friend just said I should sign up for WooMe with a picture of a horse instead of my own handsome face, just to see what happens next. Wow.
I know there’s a lot of fierce competition in the online dating industry, but I’ve rarely seen a site with tactics as aggressive as WooMe’s, which I should point out was a TechCrunch40 finalist back in 2007 (albeit with a slightly different positioning than today).
Since I’ve signed up for the site, again with a horse as my picture and in the middle of the night in the United States, I’ve been receiving a ton of unsolicited emails, direct messages, pop-ups, live chat sessions and alleged visits to my obviously fake profile by hot women.
And I only signed up about 15 minutes ago. → Read More
WooMe, the site that throws users into 60-second one-on-one online video sessions to form new relationships, is launching a new public version of the site that should appeal to the voyeur in all of us. The site will now allow users to post recordings of their brief dating sessions to the public in a portion of the site dubbed “WooMe TV”.
Following each dating session, users will be asked if they’d like to post a recording of their chat to WooMe TV. If both parties agree, the video is posted to the public (everything is opt-in).
At first, the idea sounds a little bizarre. WooMe (and other online dating sites) are appealing because it’s so easy to escape a awkward introduction or an botched joke – just close the browser window and pretend that it never happened. Sharing these special moments with the public is probably the last thing some users will want to do . → Read More
Speed introductions site WooMe, which we reviewed two weeks ago while in the site was still in private beta here, has officially opened its doors to the public. WooMe puts users in quick, 1-on-1 video conferencing sessions during which they can determine whether to pursue a relationship (romantic or otherwise) with the stranger on the other end. While the site is not explicitly marketed as a dating site, it competes quite directly with SpeedDate, which we have also reviewed. CrunchBase Information WooMe Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
WooMe – a website for “speed introductions” that presented at TechCrunch40 but is still in private beta – is giving out one thousand invitations to our readers (redeem yours here). You would be excused for mistaking WooMe for a speed dating website like SpeedDate.com (covered here). WooMe users are put into one minute-long webcam sessions with one another to decide quickly whether or not they are compatible. After five subsequent sessions, you indicate which of the people “woo’d” you or not. If they were woo’d by you too, then you can choose to contact them for $1. This obviously lends itself to speed dating, and indeed 75% of the 30,000 total sessions conducted in private beta have been for dating purposes. However, the company is insisting that the service has many non-romantic uses. You can leverage WooMe to find a travel partner or someone to babysit your kids (hopefully you’ll make that decision after more than a 1-minute long face-to-face). You can also just use it to find people with similar interests to you. Last night, WooMe hosted an event for UC Berkeley that got students together to meet over topics such as “I still love Cal football”. CEO Stephen Stokols says that almost 7,500 people have mutually woo’d each other on the service so far. On Friday, WooMe will add the ability to tag the people you meet over webcam. These tags will stay in people’s profiles so new introductions come loaded with some basic information about a person. CrunchBase Information WooMe SpeedDate Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
You may not have come to TechCrunch looking for love, but we might be able to help you out anyway. SpeedDate, which launched as public beta in the last few days, brings the concept of speed dating to the web. Rather than asking its users to fill out surveys describing their interests and personalities, SpeedDate gets right to it by throwing you into 3-minute long “dates” with potential matches. All you need to do ahead of time is enter the basics: your zip code, your gender, the gender of the person you are looking for, the age range of that person, and how far you are willing to travel for them. The dates are conducted by webcam so you can hear and see your date. Curiously, you can also communicate through a chat box. When you’ve made a judgment about whether you like the person, just click “Yes” or “No” to indicate whether you want to follow up with the person after your first three minutes are up. Since the service has yet to gain a substantial user base, SpeedDate has been organizing “events” in which users are encouraged to come online at the same time. The first one took place this past Thursday while the service was still in private beta. About 230 San Francisco Bay Area singles went on 1,100 dates. The next one is tonight at 8:00pm and doesn’t appear to be meant for a particular region. The company says it has received positive feedback about these events from both men and women. SpeedDate demoed at the TechCrunch40 conference and will compete with soon-to-be-released WooMe, which presented on stage at TC40. Last summer we wrote about thirteen Web 2.0 sites to find love. → Read More
