Top 86 tips from iDate 2013 Cologne (Köln)

Mark Brooks had published a list of Top 86 tips from iDate 2013 Cologne (Köln).

Not sure if they had talked about the future of the Online Dating Industry.
Worldwide there are less than 7 million paid members (adding up all the ones at eHarmony, Match, Chemistry, Meetic, MeeticAffinity, OkCupid, PeopleMedia's Communities, PlentyOfFish, Parship/eCift, and others). The market remains enormous for new players.

The Online Dating Industry needs to kill the Matchmaking Industry, like computers killed typewriters.

- Legislation for example. Perhaps the SPIN  (Seriöse Partnersuche im Internet) Kodex can evolve as a prospective NEW Legislation for Online Dating Sites to force them disclose how many active members they have (Premium members: paid or with gift subscriptions) ?
And also force them to conduct ID verification ?
Actually, the Online Dating Industry has no/weak Legislation, no ID verification, low reliable background checks, no Quality Norms.
No one compatibility matching method is Scientifically Proven.
A variety of new laws, or new interpretations of existing laws, could subject dating sites to claims or otherwise harm their business. (extracted from IAC SEC filing)


 

- Innovations for the Online Dating Industry.
NO INNOVATIONS SINCE YEARS IN THE ONLINE DATING INDUSTRY.
C level executives are cooking barbecues under the water (selling smoke) and not paying attention to latest research from Academics which could be beneficial for the Online Dating Industry. Wasting precious time with Matchmakers which should be obsolete.  
eHarmony , True, PerfectMatch, MeeticAffinity, Parship, Be2, PlentyOfFish, Chemistry and others have a low effectiveness/efficiency level of their matching algorithms.
The Online Dating Industry does not need a 10% improvement, a 50% improvement or a 100% improvement. It does need "a 100 times better improvement" , a BIG innovation.
Actual matching algorithms used by eHarmony, Chemistry, PlentyOfFish and others, even behavioural recommender systems, can not be improved, they need to be discarded NOW. Because they are in the range of 3 to 4 prospective mates as selected / recommended / compatible for dating purposes per 1,000 members screened in the database. They all 3 are performing the same for serious daters, with a high percentage of false positives, like gun machines firing flowers.
They can not break the online dating sound barrier!
You do not need to improve a piston engine when you need a jet engine to break sound barrier.

Also Personality Based Recommender Systems are the next generation of recommender systems because they perform far better than Behavioural ones (past actions and pattern of personal preferences)
That is the only way to improve recommender systems, to include the personality traits of their users. They need to calculate personality similarity between users but there are different formulas to calculate similarity.
Recommender systems are morphing to ......... compatibility matching engines, as the same used in the Online Dating Industry since years, with low success rates, because they mostly use the Big5 to assess personality and the Pearson correlation coefficient to calculate similarity.
(Personality traits are highly stable in persons over 25 years old to 45 years old)

Please read also:
The power of word of mouth killed Be2!
EliteMedianet GmbH. won lawsuit against Consumer Protection Center of Hamburg (VZHH).