DEMO: Will singles use Skout Out’s kiosk for mobile dating?

We’ve already written about Skout, a location-based dating application that recently came to the iPhone — but today at the DEMO conference in Palm Springs, it just announced a big addition to its service. That addition is the Skout Out, a kiosk of sorts for location-based dating that features a jukebox and a 42-inch plasma screen.

It’s one of the more out-there concepts I’ve seen at DEMO, and I mean that in a good way. At first, it seems silly to add a giant device to a service whose big advantage is mobility — and that silliness is underlined by the fact that Skout Out kind of looks like a giant mobile phone — but after hearing the pitch, I think it could actually function as way to “anchor” Skout in a physical location, as the company claims. Not only can you perform the basic Skout functions, such as finding nearby single folks and sending a flirtatious message to their phone, but you can also buy them a drink or play them a song on the jukebox.

The concept is fun enough that people would enjoy trying it out — at least judging from all the snickering conversations about Skout Out that I’ve heard today — but it also allows for a more traditional business model. The service isn’t just based on virtual goods and advertising, but also involves buying real products and forking over real cash to play music, just like a normal jukebox.

(And I swear I didn’t come up with this, but other DEMO attendees pointed out addition money-making possibilities, such as paying a big fee to hide a bar or club from the rest of the network if you don’t want to deal with too much competition. Again, I didn’t come up with this.)

Of course, as with any social service, the real issue is adoption — but chief executive Christian Wiklund and Business Development Vice President Redg Snodgrass say the Skout Out will “soon” be in 10,000 locations. The San Francisco company has raised around $1 million in two rounds of angel funding.


Skout OUT from TechCrunch’s Robin Wauters on Vimeo.

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About the Author, Anthony Ha

Anthony is VentureBeat's assistant editor, as well as its reporter on enterprise technology, cloud computing, and tech policy. Before joining VentureBeat in 2008, Anthony worked at the Hollister Free Lance, where he won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for breaking news coverage and writing. He attended Stanford University and now lives in San Francisco. Reach him at anthony@venturebeat.com. You can also follow Anthony on Twitter.

  • The vid shows good looking people using it.................not what I would think users of the service would look like.

    Michael (Sorry I'm taken) Kassing
    Marktend.com
  • Unattractive people deserve need love too!

    Anthony (woefully single) Ha
  • Apps - I love them! And maybe someday they will make us more sensitive, more receptive and more responsive, too! And then meeting that person will be really wild....