Apple had no shortage of new things to announce at WWDC 2013 today, and iTunes Radio is one of the highlights. The company’s new music service has been long-rumored, but now the curtains are drawn and we can see what the Pandora-like streaming radio offering actually looks like.

iTunes Radio is essentially what we’ve been hearing it would be: a streaming music service that takes your tastes into account in order to play tracks that are likely to be in line with your tastes. Apple really has essentially taken its Genius jukebox-style feature, which combs your library and builds genre-based playlists, or suggests recommended artists and tracks based on what you’re currently listening to. The difference with the new service is that it can access the entire iTunes catalog, which, at this point, is well over 26 million tracks. Sony, Universal and Warner are all on board.

The service will be free for U.S. users, and will use both text and audio ads to support the free streaming. iTunes Match subscribers won’t receive ads, making the subscription service a bit more compelling. Track skipping is supported, which was something that was reported to be a sticking point in negotiations with music label partners leading up to this product launch.

What’s striking is that it looks a lot like Pandora. On iOS, you create your custom stations, you can give a thumb up if you like a song. In the corner of every song, iOS shows a “Buy” button to make to funnel song purchases in the iTunes Store. It was probably one of the requirements to sign the deals with major music companies and could become a good revenue generator for the iTunes Store.

As a reminder, Google has just introduced its own streaming music service, All Access for Google Play, which will cost users $9.99 per month after June 30 and provides complete access to 18 million songs available on Play. This service competes more with Spotify and Rdio than with Pandora. Google is also releasing an app for iOS devices to provide access to the service. Pandora, which has around 20 million tracks, offers its basic product for free, but also has a premium tier called Pandora One for $3.99 per month that drops ads, provides access to a desktop app and ups the number of skips a user is allowed per day.

Apple’s iTunes Radio will arrive sometime in the fall for U.S. users initially. The release should coincide with iOS 7. In Addition to iOS devices, the Apple TV will get iTunes Radio.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Apple’s rumored iRadio support has just scored a major win, signing up remaining holdout Sony Music according to a new report from AllThingsD’s Peter Kafka. This follows reports earlier this week that talks had successfully resulted in arrangements with Warner Bros. and Universal, which should mean Apple is in a good position to be able to launch its streaming radio service soon, possibly as early as next week at WWDC.

Recent reports suggested that Apple has been negotiating aggressively with labels in order to get them on board with the service, which is rumored to resemble Pandora and offer free, ad-supported listening to iOS users. The reason for the sudden renewal in talks, which had previously hit a brick wall according to earlier rumors, is that Apple wanted to be able to announce the new service at WWDC on Monday. Kafka says we “should expect” to hear about the service at the event via official announcement, which could occur during Apple’s WWDC keynote happening at 10 AM Pacific, which we’ll be reporting from live.

Apple is said to still have some potential hiccups in the way, according to the report, including landing an arrangement between Sony/ATV, the publishing part of Sony’s music business. But it was apparently closer to a deal with that group than it was with Sony Music, which Kafka says is probably a good indication Apple will work through that minor barrier as well.

An iRadio announcement would be well-timed, given the recent launch of Google’s own All Access music service for the Play store. But Apple’s offering also sounds like a very different kind of service, with perhaps more in common with the kind of DMCA streaming radio service offered by companies like 7digital. The big appeal of the service, for both Apple and for its record label partners, might be that the company can use it to drive even more iTunes direct music sales, by integrating the service closely with Apple’s traditional digital downloads-driven music store, and with other offerings like the iTunes Match digital locker service.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Digital dating is nothing to scoff at; it’s a big business, and it’s changed a lot of lives — mostly for the better. Yet, while dating has seen enormous progress during the Digital Era, there’s still a lot garbage out there, and the space is still mostly dominated by a handful of old names. A gaggle of dating sites and apps have appeared over the past five years, but few have had real staying power, and many have gone the way of the dinosaur.

While it’s still too early to make any pronouncements, it’s looking more and more like Tinder could buck the trend. Created by Hatch Labs — an LA-based startup backed by IAC, the same Barry Diller-led digital media giant that owns Match.com and OKCupid — Tinder has grown like a weed since it launched in October. A crazy, dating weed.

In part, that’s due to timing, and in part because Tinder is based on a familiar, throwback model, drawing on the same addictive formula behind Hot or Not. Essentially, it’s Hot or Not made mobile, casual and connected to Facebook, but rather than promising to introduce people to their one true soul partner/life mate, Tinder just wants to make it easier to flirt — and get you off your ass to meet people. In the real world.

By focusing on reducing the “creepiness” factor (always a relative term in dating, mind you), reducing spam and by targeting young people, Tinder has been able to find that elusive, exponential growth curve. (Unsurprisingly, it’s initial growth spike came from college campuses, and the average age of its users is still 23.)

It’s also fairly easy to use: It’s free, it doesn’t focus on building traditional profiles, instead pulling basic info from Facebook, is location-enabled, and matches users to other people nearby based on similar behavior, interests and so on. If you’re not interested, you can pass. If you are, it connects you with the other person, allowing you to chat and arrange a meeting offline.

Thanks to the above, the app has been seeing the same kind of growth that Facebook, Instagram and Twitter saw in the early days, Tinder co-founder and CEO Sean Rad tells us. But what does that mean, exactly? When we wrote about Tinder in early January, it had served one million matches and users had made 35 million profile ratings. Today, Rad says, Tinder has served 50 million matches and users have made 4.5 billion ratings.

So, while the team is keeping a tight lid on the number of downloads and users it’s attracted to date, from what we do know (and what we’ve been hearing from other sources), it’s safe to assume that both number well into the millions. And keep in mind: The app was released in late October.

Tinder also seems to be avoiding a common trend among popular mobile apps: High number of downloads, but comparatively low engagement. In Tinder’s case, Rad tells us that around 50 percent of users open the app once a day, while approximately 75 percent open the app once a week and around 85 percent use the app every month.

Based on this growth, rumors have been circulating for months now that claim Tinder is in the proces of raising a big round of outside funding, or is in the process of being acquired. At this point, the founder says, neither of those are true. While the company isn’t sharing how much it’s raised to date, we do know that IAC is it’s primary investor, and owns a minority stake in the business, having been the sole investor in its seed and series A rounds (which we hear total in the millions). And the startup was incubated within IAC.

IAC would likely love to own Tinder outright, as would others, but at this point the startup is resolved to stay independent, and go public rather than sell. Of course, there’s a long road ahead, and these things have a habit of changing. Furthermore, while Tinder has opted not to raise outside capital, our sources tell us that this hasn’t stopped venture capitalists from courting Tinder in every way possible.

With plenty of runway ahead and initial growth and scalability snags behind, Tinder has begun to focus more on product development as well as an area that will be key to its future: International markets. To date, 15 percent of Tinder users hail from outside the U.S., the CEO tells us, with the highest adoption coming from Canada, Australia, Brazil and Ireland. (In recent weeks, Rad says, Tinder was seeing 2,000 downloads/day in Brazil.)

Going forward, the team of 13 will begin its international growth efforts in the UK, Australia, Latin America, Germany, France and China, in particular. To do that, the company is working on additional language support, targeted marketing and hiring local reps in each of these countries. Rad also sees big opportunity for growth in Asia, thanks to the explosion of mobile adoption, and is currently working on partnerships that will help it move into Asian markets and localize the Tinder experience to native languages, networks and so on. (Like how to leverage the biggest Chinese and Asian social networks for authentication, as opposed to relying on Facebook, for example.)

Tinder has also been busy building tools that will help it follow through with its mission to solve social, discovery and networking problems outside the confines of dating. Today, for example, the startup is releasing a new feature called “Matchmaker,” which allows users to create matches between any two Facebook friends — for any purpose.

Once users establish that connection, the two friends can chat within Tinder without sharing their contact information. The idea is to create a casual, simple way to make an introduction, whether you want to set two friends up on a date or make professional connections. Rad tells us that Matchmaker is anonymous and solves the awkward problem of introducing people and then being included on the resulting thread — an annoyance often experienced in email and Facebook intros.

With Matchmaker, the introducer doesn’t have to be removed from the thread, they can send the message to the two people they want to connect, and that’s it. If the recipient isn’t on Tinder, they’ll see that they get a message on Facebook, and they can then quickly create a Tinder login if they want to see the post.

Another cool feature of Matchmaker is that the person who makes the introduction can see if the match is active and they can get a sense of their success rate. Rad assures me that this feature is intended to be high level so that it’s not creepy, allowing users to get just enough of a sense of the activity level of the intros they curate so that they can check back in (or send a reminder) if the conversation goes silent.

Again, the idea is that, while there are plenty of media through which people can make digital introductions, those connections tend to carry more weight if they’re friend-approved. If that intro comes from a close friend, you’re more likely to follow through on it than if not. Of course, there’s the question of whether or not people will want to make introductions in a professional context through a networking that’s primarily associated with dating. For this reason, the startup is launching the feature in beta to test it out and to see if it catches on.

As part of this new release, Tinder is also making some improvements in the areas where its user experience has been less-than-impressive. In particular, many users have complained that the app’s sorting algorithm has matched them with teenage or underage users. (Not cool, Tinder, not cool.) So, in this release, Tinder now includes age filtering, so that users can select their preferred age range, along with making some general improvements to the accuracy of its matching algorithm and improving the speed of chat within the app.

As of now, Tinder remains exclusively an iPhone app, but the CEO tells us that the team is working on an Android version, which will be ready “within the next few months.” The team also has plans to develop tablet apps, but don’t expect Tinder to show up on the Web anytime soon. Tinder is going to remain mobile-centric for the foreseeable future.

In a crowded space, Tinder has, so far, managed to buck the trend and find that elusive, exponential growth curve. Of course, the next year will be critical. As growth inevitably levels out a bit, Tinder will have to keep evolving if it wants to avoid being another flash in the pan. International could hold the key to sustaining that growth, but it remains to be seen whether users will be willing to think of Tinder as more than a casual flirting and dating tool. That could be a tough sell, but if they get there, expect Tinder to stick around for awhile — and be on the receiving end of calls from every VC on the block.

For more, Find Tinder here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Predictive sports game startup PrePlay has closed a $4.7 million Series B round, led by Trilogy Equity Partners LLC. RSE Ventures, the VC fund founded by Miami Dolphins’ owner Stephen Ross and Matt Higgins, also participated in the round.

PrePlay closed its $3.1 million Series A last July, with RSE Ventures’ CEO Matt Higgins participating in that round as an angel investor.

The startup, which was founded in 2010 and has just clocked up its 100,000th registered user, acts as a second screen companion for live TV shows. It creates social gaming apps for smartphones and tablets that allow sports fans to compete with each other by predicting the outcome of the match — you know, just like they do down the pub anyway — such as in its PrePlay Football app, shown below:

PrePlay says a total of eight million predictions have been across its platform to-date. Earlier this month, on Baseball’s Opening Day, users made more than 200,000 “play-by-play predictions” — double its prior single-day record.

The company is particularly proud of its engagement metric — claiming an “industry leading” average of 50 minutes per user session (albeit, the frequency of app use would probably be a more interesting measure for an app associated with live sports).

Commenting in a statement, CEO Andrew Daines said PrePlay fits into “the category of ‘second-screen’” but takes a different approach to the “generic one-size-fits-all check-in apps” or apps “made by TV programmers who want you to watch their shows” because it’s a game first and foremost.

“We’re tackling the problem of engagement from a mobile-first, gaming perspective. We care deeply about creating rich, high-quality game experiences, and believe TV tune-in and engagement with content and brands flow naturally from there,” he added.

PrePlay said it will use the new funding round to grow its Ruby on Rails and native iOS and Android teams in order to expand its sports   portfolio (currently it offers apps for baseball, hockey, and football), and also to grow its advertising, in-app purchase, and platform licensing businesses.

Having different sports in its app portfolio allows it to cross-market other titles to users and also to bridge seasonal gaps when one or more sport is taking a break, it added.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Apple is said to be getting very close to nailing down streaming licensing agreements with Universal Music Group and Warner Music, according to sources speaking to The Verge. The report follows news from the NY Post that claimed Apple was well under where labels were expecting in terms of its streaming rates, and now says that Apple’s service will pay fees pretty much on par with those paid by Pandora. If Apple does launch this service, it’s about to become a lot harder to operate as a competitor in this space.

The so-called iRadio service, as it’s often referred to, has on-demand streaming as well as radio style play, according to the report, which means that it could compete not only with Pandora and Last.fm but also with Spotify and Rdio. Those companies have a first-mover advantage in the streaming market, and one that has helped Pandora pass the 200 million user mark just this week. But Apple has over 400 million active iTunes accounts, according to data that’s now over a year old, with credit cards on file. That’s more than double Pandora’s numbers, and it represents an active population, not just total registered users.

Apple has yet to make as much progress with Sony Music Entertainment, but once that piece of the puzzle falls into place it reportedly hopes to launch a service as early as later this year. It’s an eventuality streaming services have likely been anticipating and preparing for anyway, but it’s hard to overstate the impact of the single largest force in digital online music sales getting into the streaming business – Apple recently announced that it had sold its 25th billion song through the iTunes Store, which translates to a lot of consumer influence.

Apple could also have a big advantage in terms of international market reach. Other streaming music companies have been slow to expand, and reach only a fraction of the markets that Apple can on a global scale. There’s no guarantee that Apple would be able to launch an iRadio product in all the markets where it currently offers the iTunes music store, but it did a good job of rolling out iTunes Match quickly to international locations, so it’s reasonable to expect it could do the same for streaming services.

For startups and streaming music companies, this means looking closely at the competitive advantages offered by their own platforms and decided how best to position their own services. A key advantage, and one that will likely get emphasized by virtually everyone challenged by an iRadio, is cross-platform compatibility. Apple will likely be able to offer something along those lines through iTunes on Windows, but for the most part it’ll be a strictly iOS/Mac affair. That, combined with personalization and recommendation engines, along with other value add features, will be the way to combat an iTunes streaming service, but no matter what, an Apple product will change the face of this market.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Now former Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch is headed to Apple, the company who famously blocked out Flash on the iPhone and likely precipitated that technology’s long slide into relative obscurity, Adobe has confirmed to TechCrunch in a statement. Lynch once wrote a vocal defense of Flash on the Adobe company blog, but lately his role has been all about ushering Adobe into the future, not dwelling on its past.

Lynch has been instrumental in spearheading and helping Adobe’s Creative Cloud efforts get off the ground in recent years. Both Creative Cloud (and Marketing Cloud, which Lynch also led the development of at Adobe) were about moving Adobe away from boxed sales and building its products into primarily cloud-based offerings, with an SaaS approach to sales. You could say that Lynch helped Adobe succeed at becoming a cloud-first company faster than any other technological giant currently trying to master the same shift.

Apple has made no secret about its belief that the cloud will become the center of the computer user’s universe, and iCloud, which it announced at WWDC in 2011 during the keynote, was meant to be just that for Apple and its ecosystem. To some degree, it has taken strides to make that happen, by making iCloud the glue that ties iOS to OS X in terms of keeping information and media available to all devices. In others, it hasn’t fared so well: Apple constantly faces complaints about the performance of cloud-based products like iCloud and iTunes Match, and outages are not infrequent.

Apple’s SVP of Internet Software and Services Eddy Cue is currently in charge of iCloud at the company, and has been since he was given control of its predecessor MobileMe, which was even worse in terms of its reputation. Cue heads up a host of Apple’s other offerings, however, including iTunes and the App Store, as well as Siri, Maps and iAd. It’s very conceivable that Cue could use some support from a proven cloud services veteran to shore up iCloud’s continued deficiencies.

Lynch is also responsible for championing Adobe’s commitment to multi-platform product development and responsive product design. He’s the reason Adobe has done much to address user demand for full-featured products on mobile devices, with the launch of Adobe Photoshop Touch for iPad, and more recently, Photoshop Touch for iPhone.

AllThingsD’s John Paczkowski and CNBC’s John Fortt reports that Lynch will be reporting to Apple SVP of Technologies Bob Mansfield as VP of Technology. Mansfield’s areas of expertise are wireless and semiconductor tech, but his official title gives him a wide berth at the company. Lynch’s software role at Adobe may not seem an immediate match for Mansfield’s team, but Mansfield was said to be staying on to help oversee development of “future products” after reversing his decision to retire last year. Apple is a company that rarely silos hardware and software products, so if it is planning a big cloud push that works across all its devices, Lynch could be a good candidate for that no matter who he ends up reporting to.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Swiss mobile development and design firm Clever & Son bills itself as a “maker of premium apps,” and judging by Couch Player, its latest creation, the startup lives up to its name. Couch Player is essentially a replacement for the built-in Apple Music app on the iPad, but it manages to be much more with just a few simple tweaks.

In particular, Couch Player emphasizes the playlist, and reorganizes the entire experience to make that the central focus of the app. Playlist creation on Couch Player is handled via simple drag-and-drop gestures, with a browsing interface that takes better advantage of the iPad’s ample screen real estate to make it possible to simultaneously navigate your entire iTunes library (either stored locally or in the cloud via iTunes Match) while also keeping an eye on and adding to your playlists.

You can easily create multiple playlists on the fly, and switch between them too, all while keeping your library open and browsable in a column on the left-hand side. Small features like the ability to swipe left on any song in a playlist and get related albums, artist and song suggestions for other content to add to the playlist add feature functionality.

Couch Player doesn’t offer much flare in terms of interface design, but there is a playback progress bar that’s color-coded based on the album cover for the currently playing track. And the simplicity is actually one of its most attractive features: everything gets out of the way so you can concentrate on building the perfect playlist for an outdoor picnic or pick-up basketball game.

Simplicity was the name of the game for Clever & Son co-founder and managing director Tobias Gemperli in designing Couch Player, he explained in an interview. The point wasn’t to replace default system software, but to transform playlists from a feature into a focus.

“Our aim was not to create a feature complete music app but rather to concentrate on the core functionality which is the playlist creation,” he explained in an email interview. “Since we couldn’t find any app which does this well on the iPad we decided to build our own. Our aim was to make playlist creation an experience on its own.”

Some unfortunate things missing from Couch Player include an AirPlay or Bluetooth sound device source selector from within the app, but it’s a relatively minor complaint because you can still use your iPad’s multi-tasking bar to choose a speaker to connect to. But the simplicity with which you can build and switch between playlists is what makes Couch Player appealing, and that part is well executed.

Couch Player will be released Thursday, March 21 in the App Store for the public, where it’ll be available for a starting price of $2. If you’re looking for a home jukebox experience that works with your existing library, it’s an intelligently designed app, and the kind of thing Apple should be looking at for clues about improving on its own inbuilt player experience.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Although playing against someone else in real-time has a kick that nothing else can quite mimic, turn-based multiplayer games have thrived on iOS and Android.

That’s partly because slower data connections prevented studios from having enough confidence that they could provide a fast, twitchy user experience. At the same time, it was questionable whether there would be enough of a critical mass of players to match them in real-time.

But one Founders Fund-backed company called Jawfish Games says it has a multiplayer platform that can pit up to 16 players against each other in a single tournament at the same time. They’ve partnered with Seattle’s Big Fish Games, a privately held casual gaming company that made more than $180 million in 2011, to distribute a game called Match-­‐Up!

The title is really a collection of several well-worn classics like a word unscrambling game, a puzzle game that has players match items of three colors in a row and Mahjong. Players advance through a bracket that matches 16 players, then eight, then four, and then — you catch the drift. In keeping with short attention spans on mobile devices, each round is 30 seconds, so a full tournament is only a few minutes long.

At first, the title will be more of a proof of concept. Then the two companies will build it out with more games going forward. Since Big Fish has a library of more than 300 mobile games, there are plenty of titles they could work into Match–Up!

Jawfish took an $885,000 seed round in January of last year and then added a $2.8 million bridge note with participation from Founders Fund. (Yes, I was surprised that Founders Fund — as in Peter Thiel’s fund that wants flying cars, not tweets — backed a gaming company.)

But they did it because of Jawfish’ CEO’s track record. The startup’s CEO, Phil Gordon, has a colorful history. He was the first employee at Netsys, a company that Cisco later acquired for $95 million in the first dot-com era. Then he went onto a championship professional poker career that included stints as a broadcaster on Bravo’s Celebrity Poker Showdown and The World Series of Poker and five books on the game.

“We believe we’re the best in the world at supporting mobile gaming in real-time,” he said. He’s facing down a number of other companies eyeing this area. Zynga expanded its capacity for supporting synchronous multiplayer mode in its arcade games, while other startups like Israel’s Nextpeer partner with third-party developers to offer multiplayer support. Nextpeer often matches up players with a “replay” of their opponent’s gameplay, however.

Jawfish’s platform shows you your opponent’s screen and performance in real-time in a small “Spycam” in the corner of the game.

“It’s such an obvious idea, but it’s an extremely difficult technical challenge,” he said.

Gordon says he’s only partnering with Big Fish Games and isn’t looking to expand his platform to work with other big gaming companies.

Match Up! is naturally free-to-play. If a user wins a tournament, they’ll start accumulating virtual chips that they use later on. They’ll have special tournaments that more experience players can wager more in. “As you build up your chips, you can imagine where this is going,” he said, hinting that players might be able to top-up on extra chips through in-app purchases.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

A new patent application published by the USPTO (via AppleInsider) today shows that Apple has been thinking hard about how it might be able to make it possible for users to resell or lend digital content they’ve purchased in the past. Amazon has worked on a similar problem with its own patents, but Apple’s solution carries provisions for making the lending or resales process much easier directly between users, without necessarily involving a marketplace intermediary.

Apple’s patent accounts for transfers that can take place either through the original content provider’s store (i.e., the iBookstore, possibly with a “used” section), or directly between users. In the method where an online store wouldn’t be involved, the user devices themselves determine when an item can and can’t be sold based on criteria put into place by the original publisher (i.e., movie X can’t be sold for at least 60 days after release, and must carry a minimum price tag of $5), and whether or not a percentage commission on the sale is transferred back to either the online store or the material’s publishers.

Items don’t even need to be stored locally for this to work, as the application describes how it would work for cloud-based properties as well. That indicates Apple is thinking about how this might work realistically today, when a lot of iTunes content can be stored in the cloud for later retrieval by a user on any device associated with their iTunes Store ID. Ownership history is established on all digital properties under the system, making sure that the right person always has access to it, and that the right person also has legitimate resale powers.

Apple might have a hard time convincing publishers that this is the way to go, since they arguably stand to make more by ensuring that DRM content is available only new direct from the source, where they get the biggest portion of the profits. But with iTunes Match, Apple proved it can convince media creators that it’s better to make some money off possibly ill-gotten goods, rather than none at all. A used digital goods market could still drive revenue back to publishers, from users who might otherwise just pirate content instead of paying full price.

Digital resale capabilities could go a long way towards convincing consumers hanging on to physical media to go digital, but with too many concessions to publishers, it could also end up looking like a bad joke compared to the simple practice of selling a used DVD at a garage sale. Still, it’s interesting to see Apple addressing this issue in a recent patent application, which takes into account the changing way in which it distributes music.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s Note: Event Partnerships Manager Leslie Hitchcock is a non-editorial TechCrunch employee. In addition to working at TechCrunch and being super fashionable, she reviews startups and tech products occasionally on her personal blog, Leslie Just Joined.

A few months ago I broke down and did something I swore I’d never do. Yes, that’s right. I opened a dreaded OkCupid account. [Y'all, I'm so embarrassed right now, you just don't even know.]

For many years I’ve dated successfully in real life. But curiosity got the best of me and it was enhanced by, uh, let’s call it a dry spell despite working in a target-rich environment. As my friend Morgan says, in our industry “the odds are good but the goods are odd.” Go tech scene!

So I opened an account just to see what would happen. In the three months I’d been a member of OkCupid, I went on one date. The site was creepy, felt really amateurish in its design, had a reprehensible mobile product and wasn’t terribly inspiring to me as a single woman in San Francisco. As a result, I called my online “dating” experiment a wash and closed that brief chapter of my romantic life.

Enter Anthony Ha‘s piece last week on the growing Los Angeles-based application Let’s Date. Considering myself something of a mobile app anthropologist, I downloaded it, prodded along by Anthony’s glowing description of a beautifully designed app experience. I’m a sucker for aesthetics. Here are my thoughts and some feedback from some of my amazing lady friends I wrangled to test Let’s Date for me.

Let’s Date is nothing like other dating sites.

Perhaps it’s because Let’s Date pulls in data from your Facebook profile, but all of the people my friends and I encountered seemed like actual real people. Not like “1happyguy000″ or the like on other identity shielding sites.

So @letsdate is super-addictive, but half my interactions involve trying to convince the app that I really don’t want to date 19-year-olds.

— Anthony Ha (@anthonyha) February 8, 2013

While it hasn’t worked so well for me and my lady friends, in theory you’re supposed to be able to train the app to stop showing you the types of people you theoretically wouldn’t want to date. No 20-year-olds, no “smokes like a chimney,” no Paleo, etc. The basics. Plus being able to cross things out on someone’s profile is pretty gratifying; it makes it seem like I have autonomy over who shows up in Let’s Date’s cards.

Some type of filtering would be great, too. Says a self-described borderline cougar friend of mine: “It was so frustrating to be like ‘oh this guy is cute’ and then to realize of course he’s cute…he’s 22.”

Continuing in its differentiation from other sites, according to Pando Daily nearly a quarter of Let’s Date users go on dates within the first two weeks of on boarding. That beats my half-hearted one date in three months OKC experiment by a long shot.

Let’s Date is a lot like other dating sites.

Checking out this Let’s Date app because rejection before 10 a.m. really builds character and my editor is out sick techcrunch.com/2013/02/07/sea…

— Casey Newton (@CaseyNewton) February 7, 2013

There are lots of guys on Let’s Date and once women on board, from my experience (and that of several girlfriends who I coerced into testing the app under the condition of anonymity), the fellows tend to bombard any potential match with interest.

“It’s a really good ego boost,” unnamed friend #1.

That it may be; it gets incredibly overwhelming. While I don’t have very many notifications in my phone’s lock screen by design, the first night I tested Let’s Date I kept the traditional settings turned on. When I awoke in the morning, I found about twenty notifications waiting for me of people who had indicated they’d date me over the night. I quickly adjusted my settings and am able to ignore the alerts easily.

With the combined number of notifications from the app, it does not surprise me that users spend an inordinate amount of time on Let’s Date. Also according to Pando Daily, over 25 percent of users visit 10 or more times a day. That’s astounding to me and leads me directly to my final point on why this app is so successful.

Let’s Gamify Dating, y’all!

What is so fascinating to me about Let’s Date is how they, in effect, gamified dating. Here’s how it works: Choosing from one of the random alerts the user receives, she goes into the app and attempts to guess who indicated they would date her. The prospective suitor’s information will show in the first five profiles the app shows our user. If she, too, indicates she’d date the person who chose her, then and only then would they be connected through the app to set up a date.

A little trip into my psyche: I like to win. I’m a recovering competitive person who tries to enjoy the game and not be a sore loser, blah blah blah. But the phenomenon that Let’s Date creates makes that hard. When I got connected with people, I was elated. Not because we both theoretically found each other interesting, mind you, but because I was correct! When I didn’t choose the “right” person, I was bummed because it seemed like I “lost” that round.

In the same way that I had to eventually delete Angry Birds because I was furious with those damn, smug pigs, Let’s Date will most likely go the way of the app graveyard. My serenity is more precious to me than “winning.”

Bottom Line

A worthwhile suggestion from one of my friends I enlisted to test the app was for Let’s Date to tell a user if you have any friends in common on Facebook, since it pulls from Facebook to make your profile. Not tell you who, just that you have people in common.

As for my online dating experience, it went fine as far as dating goes. But I haven’t made an effort to my match a second time. Not once did we ever talk about how we ended up on our date. Absolutely no one mentioned online dating, which I find amazing. Were we embarrassed? Is this normal? If so, I see no real reason to subject myself to my own prejudices and other people’s shame about the process. At least IRL, in my experience, we’re pursuing each other for mutually interested reasons.

Let’s Date feels slightly different if not for the fact that people seem more earnest and, for lack of a better word, real than they do on OKC. Should I end up on a date with one of these Let’s Date folks, maybe I should bring a TCTV crew with me. How do you think he’d take it?

Article courtesy of TechCrunch