Bitcoin users are probably the last people who would be into online dating — but don’t tell that to OkCupid.

The online dating site has become the latest company to accept the controversial digital currency, which users can use to pay for OkCupid’s $10 per-month A-List service. And it doesn’t make much sense.

Think of it this way: So far, one of Bitcoin’s most oft-praised features is its ability to be used to pay for things — both legal and not — anonymously.

Bitcoin + OkCupid = ????

But folks willing to do their dating online fall on the complete opposite end of the spectrum, privacy-wise.

Cognitive dissonance aside, OkCupid’s adoption of Bitcoin is yet another sign that the currency is reaching a critical mass. Companies like Expensify, Reddit, and WordPress are already accepting Bitcoin, so it doesn’t seem as if it will be particularly long until we’re able to use the currency to pay for just about everything.

That’s OkCupid co-founder Sam Yagan’s take on the matter.

“All of the OkCupid founders, including myself, believe that a digital currency will become mainstream at some point, and we want to be one of the first companies that accept Bitcoin when it is no longer a niche concept, but a standard transactional process,” he told VentureBeat via email.

Let’s just hope Bitcoin doesn’t completely tank before that happens.

Dabble in online dating? It turns out that the crippling fear of an awkward first date is the least of your troubles. A fraud is sweeping online dating sites, according to a special report in this month’s issue of Glamour Magazine.

The scam typically works like this: A con artist, usually based in an Internet cafe overseas, will lift a photo from Facebook or another social networking site. They will painstakingly craft a fake profile and begin targeting people that are looking for love.

Once they’ve made contact, they will typically request to move the conversation to a private instant messaging service. He or she will begin the courtship process by sending letters and love poems for a period of weeks and finally offer to fly to meet their victim. Within hours of the expected arrival time, an emergency will strike: A work visa has expired, or their aunt/niece/child is sick and they need a few thousand dollars to be wired over so they can finally meet their intended.

In many cases, scammers will choose to use pictures of military personnel. After discovering that his headshot consistently showed in hoax dating profiles (thanks to a Google alert), Army Master Sgt. C.J. Grisham set up a personal blog for soldiers to report their photo being used on online dating sites.

“Over the past few years, I’ve seen these scammers use all kinds of photos removed from open Facebook pages, blogs, official military websites, and command pages,” he wrote in a blog post last month. “I’ve also seen my own photos and name used.” (The image of Grisham that was used by scammers is pictured, left)

With a few of the largest player like OKCupid, Match, and others, there are precautionary measures in place. However, on smaller or niche dating sites like christiandatingforfree.com and datanta, there is no security system to spot a fraudster.

[Update: the site christiandatingforfree.com contacted us to notify us of the precautions they have in place, including a human editor who responds to complaints and reports, and ThreatMetrix, a cybercrime prevention software.]

“On some dating sites, as many as one out of 10 profiles is a scammer,,” Mark Brooks, editor of Online Personals Watch told Glamour.

The lesson here is that online dating startups will need to step up their game to keep consumers safe. “In the war against online dating scams and security threats, we’ve chosen to do whatever is necessary to always be a few steps ahead of scammers, and not the other way around – which is usually too late for our users,” said Cupid.com’s CEO, Bill Dobbie.

“This decision has its high price tag, but the alternative can be much costlier,” he continued. For this reason, Cupid.com, the online dating network behind Flirt.com and BlackMatch.com, announced a partnership this month with RecSys Ltd, an anti-scammer technology. The goal is to catch them 35 percent faster.

With the new system, any individual identified as a scammer is added to the master database, which other online dating companies can access. To identify rogue behavior, the algorithm factors in the user’s login location, IP address, profile photo, and behavior patterns. Additionally, the system can detect “bots,” often operated by organized crime gangs, which create profiles and engage real members in automated scripted conversations designed to elicit payment.

Already, through its quality assurance methods, the site has identified 20,000 scammers who get permanently blocked from Cupid’s communities each month.

Here are some expert tips on avoiding scams from Cupid.com’s Communications director, Sean Wood:

• Military pictures should turn on your scam radar warning. Some of the biggest scams occur from supposed soldiers in the armed services with a believable sob story and a desperate need to settle down.
• Try and keep the conversation going on the dating site messaging system rather than being dragged off to Skype or MSN, at least initially.
• Employ some basic conversational tests: If the person claims to be local, engage in a local-knowledge conversation (e.g. the weather, some nearby event, sports team, TV, or festival) and watch for mistakes. If the person is not claiming to be local, consider why he or she would want a long-distance relationship. Is there good reason, such as some particularly unusual common ground? If not, why aren’t they restricting themselves to people a bit nearer to their current location?
• Look out for words like “dear” and old-fashioned romantic language, as well as badly formed sentences.
•  Never, ever send money to anyone on a dating site, and especially avoid wiring cash.
• Always be on the lookout for get-rich-quick schemes. If it sounds too good to be true, then it’s probably a scam.

Word of caution: The FBI recently issued a warning about a different kind of online dating scam known as “ransomware.” It’s a virus that will make your computer inoperable until you hand over a payment. Read more about the ransom scam here. 

Have you ever been a victim of an online dating scam? To protect consumers, sites like romancescam.com are being set up for volunteers to post details of the counterfeit dating profiles they come across. Christine Davis, a design student who was duped by a fake profile, set up this particular site and wants to support others who have been targeted. Davis calls it the “Nigerian advance fee scam,” as it is thought that the majority of spammers are based in Western Africa.

Hacker image via Shutterstock

This is a guest post by entrepreneur Alex Mehr.

Romance is a part of all our lives at one point or another – whether you are a casual dater, looking for love, or in a committed relationship. So it’s not surprising that an entire online industry has been created around romance. With the emergence of new technologies and the growing popularity of social networks, the online romance industry is constantly evolving.

While online dating remains a core piece of the online romance puzzle, social networking for couples has recently paved the way for a new business opportunity for entrepreneurs.

Singles versus couples

Traditional dating sites have been around for some time with great success. Recently, my business partner and I noticed a lack of opportunity for couples to interact with one another, and we launched a specifically designed product.

Since then, we have seen a growing trend of couples turning to private social networks to interact with one another. Additionally, we’ve seen a growing popularity around location-based social discovery services that are geared toward helping users find and meet new people in their vicinity. Each of these services plays a key role in the online romance industry as a whole.

The challenge, we realized, is that people’s relationship statuses change, which makes it difficult to keep customers long-term.

Since the early days of our company, Zoosk, customers would send us emails thanking us for helping them find love, sharing photos and the story of their relationship. One of my favorite stories came from a couple who met on Zoosk and then realized they lived down the street from each other. Even though they were neighbors, they never ran into each other before meeting online.

As customers continued to engage with our brand, even when they no longer needed a dating service, we saw an opportunity to overcome the challenge of customer retention, and created a service for people in relationships. This way, they’d have a place to share their stories – not just with us, but with their friends and family.

Companies must now offer different tools to users at every stage of their romantic journey. That way, when a user goes from A to B, it will be possible for them to easily switch gears and use a different set of tools more appropriate for that stage of their life.

Not only does this business model create more brand loyalty, but it helps eliminate the churn that is often experienced in the industry.

Private versus social

We live in a social world, both online and off. Yet, many of the services in the world of online romance are limiting to users because they don’t capitalize on social.

As I mentioned, several new services have popped up that offer private social networking for couples. These social networks are designed specifically for you and your significant other. However, we believe it is much more rewarding for couples to share their relationship memories and milestones with family and friends. With private social networks, the element of “sharing” is lost, and it’s easy to get bored. Isn’t it more entertaining when friends “like” and comment on your pictures?

I believe social networking for couples should be a core part of the online romance industry, but when developing a product, entrepreneurs must think bigger picture and incorporate more social elements.

Furthermore, in the real world, singles and couples are friends. They set each other up on dates and they wish each other “Happy Anniversary.” I’ve found that friends in a relationship often make the best matchmakers. Yet, many traditional online dating sites do not offer a platform that allows for those friends to give dating tips and advice to their single friends.

The evolution of social networking has made it possible for online romance sites to bridge the gap between friends, and even family, both single and in a relationship, by giving them the opportunity to be a part of one another’s romantic journey.

“Hookups” versus long-term engagement

Social networking services focused on location-based social discovery often get dubbed “hookup” sites. Depending on the service, that may or may not be true. Regardless, I like to think of it this way – every city has a bar that would be considered a hookup spot. So, it’s a given that the online romance industry would have its fair share of hookup spots.

This is an element of romance that has become a large part of the industry, especially with the proliferation of smartphones, and it will be around for a long time. But again, these services fill a specific need, and will lose customers as they move onto the next phase of their lives. Consequently, they will always have issues with long-term engagement.

Together, each of the elements of romance that I mentioned above makes up the online romance ecosystem. They represent the various stages of our romantic lives.

As an entrepreneur in the online romance space, I believe it is important to evolve with your users and to offer services that cater to each facet of their romantic journey, providing them with different tools and resources that will be useful every step of the way. While there is no doubt that the online dating industry alone has been incredibly successful, it is really just the beginning.

By expanding our services beyond dating, we’ve been able to create more brand loyalty and have also built stronger relationships with our users.

Alex Mehr (@alexmehr) is the co-founder and co-CEO of Zoosk, the romantic social network. He co-founded Zoosk in 2007 alongside Shayan Zadeh, while attending the MBA program at the University of California, Berkeley. Alex holds a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the University of Maryland. Prior to starting Zoosk, he worked as an engineer for NASA and collaborated on several manned and unmanned space flights.

If LinkedIn and eHarmony had a baby, it would probably look and act something like HireQ, a nascent job-matching service that two Stanford graduate students built.

HireQ is a beta-stage product that attempts to predict how a job candidate will fit in at an organization. The two-person company uses a proprietary algorithm and behavioral data to match job seekers with potential life-long partners.

New users identify 10 different positions they might want, and HireQ then categorizes a panoply of attributes based on how similar the qualities are to their personality. It returns matches that should be a great fit for the candidate.

Behind the scenes, HireQ says it determines a person’s hidden preferences and unique traits to figure out their “Career DNA.” Participating employers receive an analysis in similar fashion, with the startup attempting to ascertain a company’s “Job and Culture DNA.” HireQ then scans its database and performs some algorithmic magic to find the right person-company matches.

“We modeled HireQ off of eHarmony in two specific ways,” cofounder Oliver Staehelin told VentureBeat. “First, much like the online dating site, we use questionnaires to gather relevant and valuable information about our users. Second and most important, we use proprietary algorithms focused on creating long-term relationships. The aim here is to help job seekers find their career ‘soul mate,’ a place they will be motivated, happy, and ultimately thrive in.”

Should a candidate find a job match, the person can apply directly through HireQ, and the employer will receive a HireQ-generated report that summarizes why the job seeker is a good fit for the position.

“Quite simply, we believe the recruiting process today is broken,” Staehelin said. “Job seekers still spend countless hours tailoring and sending their resumes to dozens of companies in the hope of securing a coveted interview spot. And employers spend just as many hours sifting through all these resumes looking for the most promising candidates to interview. This is inefficient and misleading for everyone.”

While the idea has merit, it’s very likely that job seekers may spend as much 15 minutes going through the profile set up process only to find that HireQ has no job matches for them. But the barely 1-year-old company is quite young and still looking to build out its employer database, so hopefully this is a problem it might be able to correct in the near future.

HireQ is a two-person startup based in Palo Alto, Calif., that is currently self-funded.

HireQ is one of 75 companies and 6 student “alpha” startups chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2012 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After we make our selections, the chosen companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Photo credit: Nicholaus Haskins/Flickr

Having learned of three separate rape cases in which adults used its app to target teens, Skout, a location-based app for flirting with nearby strangers, has shut down its under-18 community.

“We recently became aware of some abuses of our service, and as a result, decided to suspend the 17-and-under portion of our service in order to re-evaluate and adjust our safety and security measures including age verification,” Skout founder and CEO Christian Wiklund told VentureBeat. “It was a heart-wrenching decision, but we believe it’s the best thing to do until we finish reassessing our system.”

Skout is the five-year-old startup that makes web and mobile applications for location-based flirting. The startup is growing so fast (adding one million new users each month) and reporting such stellar engagement figures that it just landed $22 million in funding from esteemed venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

When VentureBeat caught up with Wiklund in April, the Skout founder shunned the location-based dating app label and said that his company’s real focus was on helping people meet new people. He likened the app experience to the mobile equivalent of chatting someone up at a bar, rock concert, or salsa class.

In light of recent rape allegations involving users — the abuses Wiklund references above — Skout must now reevaluate how it polices its network and shut down its teen community while doing so. Skout, prior to today, was operating two separate communities: one for 18-and-up adults and another for 13-to-17-year-olds. The latter offering, said Wiklund, was set up last year after the company noticed that a number of underage users were signing up for its service.

According to the New York Times, a 13-year-old-boy sent nude photos using Skout to a 21-year-old man posing as a minor. The two met in a park and were found performing sexual acts, police told the Times. In another case, a 37-year-old man chatted with a 15-year-old girl on Skout before meeting her and raping her. In the third case, a 24-year-old man is accused of raping a 12-year-old girl he met in Skout’s teen forum. Charges have been filed against all three accused, the Times reported.

For its part, Skout insists that it goes the extra mile to protect users. The company uses proprietary software to continually monitor activity and determine inappropriate behavior and content, Wiklund said. It also bans users for suspicious behavior. The locations shared between users are not specific to a user’s exact location, but instead a general half-mile proximity of a user’s whereabouts.

“Skout is partnering with a leading risk management advisory firm to ensure that its teenage community remains safe and that the most up-to-date technical safeguards are implemented, including mechanisms for age verification,” Wiklund said. “During this temporary closure we will be testing and updating safeguards to protect teen users.”

But should minors have a presence on Skout at all? One could easily argue that teens should never have been given a dating-like forum for meeting nearby strangers in the first place — and with that point, I tend to agree — but keep in mind that teens have been using the Internet since its creation for these kinds of purpose. I would know. At 15, I toyed with the idea of meeting a 25-year-old man I had been taking to in an AOL chatroom before my parents (thankfully) caught wind of my activities.

“Like other social networks, we believe that this connected, social community should include teenagers who act responsibly and under the appropriate parental supervision,” said Wiklund.

Teens and children using popular social media apps to connect with each other is a sticky issue, especially as we approach an interesting juncture in social networking history. Facebook, the world’s largest social network, is actively exploring allowing children under the age of 13 to use its service with additional parental controls in place.

HIRO Media grabs $5 million

Online video advertising service HIRO Media raised $5 million dollars from undisclosed investors Tuesday. The six-year-old company uses TV ad tactics to create high-grossing ads and offers analytics to track their performance.

Real Valuable Corporation raises $2.5 million

Store catalog app maker Real Valuable Corporation closed a first-round $2.5 million in funding. The company’s iPad app, CoffeeTable, lets you browse store catalogs without an Internet connection. Shoppers can also make offline purchases of items they see in each catalog without leaving the app to go to another site. Print company RR Donnelley led the round.

Pertino Networks snatches up $8.8 million in cash

Cloud networking service Pertino Networks raised $8.8 million. Its still-in-beta service will offer cloud networking for enterprise IT. Norwest Venture Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners led the first institutional round for the company.

Cloud-based video production company Aframe gets funding

Aframe announced its first funding round Tuesday, for $7 million. Octopus Investments and Eden Ventures led the round, with participation from existing investor Northstar Ventures. Aframe offers cloud-based video production software, so videographers can do work on the go.

BigDoor raises $5M for gamification platform

BigDoor has raised $5 million in new funding from the Foundry Group. The platform allows non-game online publishers to “gamify” their web sites by adding game mechanics that improve user interaction and engagement.

The Minerva Project raises $25 million

Attempting to build an elite university, The Minerva Project just announced it has raised $25 million dollars in seed funding from Benchmark Capital, the largest seed round the venture capital firm has ever invested. The company is building a new kind of university for students around the world.

Small business community Manta grabs $44M

Tuesday, small business community Manta raised $44 million. The company helps small businesses gain visibility and attract new customers, as well as create a community of small business owners. Norwest Venture Partners led the round.

Skout raises $22M for mobile flirting app

Five year-old Skout has raised $22 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz. The company has produced a location-centric iPhone dating app to connect busy young singles.

Nitro nabs funding for PDFs

Australian-founded Nitro raised $3.5 million for its PDF editing and signing software. Starfish Ventures led the round for the seven-year-old Adobe competitor.

If you’ve got any funding news to send out way, email tips@venturebeat.com. 

Founded five years ago, Zoosk started to make a name for itself in online dating through Facebook and other social networking sites. Last year, it generated revenue of more than $90 million and was named in the top 50 venture-backed companies by the Wall Street Journal.

Not only has the success propelled Zoosk into one of the top online dating communities, but its features have gotten the attention of millions. Now the company is working to integrate gamification, or the use of game-like incentives such as achievements in non-gaming apps, into its online dating platform. GamesBeat sat down with Shayan Zadeh, Zoosk CEO, to delve deeper into the company’s gamification feature and the Zoosk world. Here’s an edited transcript of the conversation.

GamesBeat: Can you tell me a little bit about why you’ve decided to integrate gamification into the online dating format and how you are doing it?

Shayan Zadeh: Well, as you know, gamification is just a fancy word for giving consumers incentives to perform certain tasks. It’s not even a new thing or a web thing. We all remember the badges we would get back in school. So, the idea is as old as human behavior. However, we have been smart about bringing the same concept into the online dating world leveraging our virtual currency system, we are able to build incentives into the product that help guide users towards deeper engagement and other behaviors we find useful. For example, using a simple popularity system, we are able to drive users to reach out to more members, send more interesting messages, or even purchase virtual currency to advertise their profiles using our boost functionality.

GamesBeat: So, based on how active users are at Zoosk, they will receive incentives for their activities? Also, what type of incentives will the users get in return?

Zadeh: If I am an active user, it results in me receiving more profile views, more messages, more friend requests, etc. All of these inbound attentions add up as points towards my popularity. So, in this instance, I satisfy an inner need to win the popularity contest by being more engaged. It’s not a monetary incentive per se, but the desire to be announced more popular drives my behavior and we use only inbound actions in this ranking so a spammy user doesn’t game the system. They need to write thoughtful messages that result in the other side responding to them to get points.

GamesBeat: How does this differ from other online dating communities? Isn’t the main idea of any online dating community to be popular and have people look at your profile more to hopefully find a match for yourself?

Zadeh: We are the only site that actually gives you feedback on how you are stacking up against the rest of population, what accounts towards your rank, and gives you a “badge” if you will. So really playing on the gamification on all the elements of it. Another big difference there is that we allow users to purchase advertising on the site using our virtual currency which is fairly unique among online dating companies.

GamesBeat: So, essentially, Zoosk is trying to stay ahead of the competition by offering more ways for people to promote themselves and their profiles?

Zadeh: That’s correct and user response has been great to these features as well.

GamesBeat: We hear Zoosk is planning on enhancing its gamification features. Have those new features been implemented and what are the differences since the early stages of gamification on Zoosk?

Zadeh: No, those changes have not been implemented. At this time, there is not much I can discuss about the upcoming changes since they are in flux and we don’t really know which ones will pass our final user testing.

GamesBeat: Why have you decided to improve on the gamification of the web site?

Zadeh: What we have learned from our experiments with gamification is that you can get more out of the system both for the users and for the business. For example, providing a positive feedback loop on “good engagement” to our users has not only given them more incentive to engage with the product, but also has been driving the members to send more thoughtful messages.

Win-win for everybody and all of this change just by utilizing some gamification principles. So really as any business but especially as a web business, if you are not utilizing these techniques you are not only letting down your shareholders you are also leaving value on the table where your users are missing out.

GamesBeat: Why do you feel Zoosk is better as an online dating community than eHarmony or Match.com? Is it mainly the gamification or is there more you feel Zoosk is better at?

Zadeh: The core differentiation is that we are built as a social network as opposed to the older guys (eHarmony/Match.com) who are a bulletin board.  A good way to think about it is to compare Linkedin versus Monster.com. Both sites help people find jobs or hire employees. The difference is how do you go about it.

Do you build a social graph that helps you achieve that goal or do you simply build a job board where transactions (applying for a job in this case) happen? The same is true when you compare Match.com and Zoosk for example. Our members build a special purpose social graph on the site which consists of people they would be interested in dating.

This graph evolves over time and has history. It allows for a more natural progression of relationships from the initial wink to actually going on a date. It also facilitates unique functionality in online dating world like chatting and online presence without the spam issues where others have failed. So, the graph is really the big difference. Then smart techniques like gamification, etc are just icing on the cake, and these differences have been the reason that we have been able to engage with an audience that was previously deemed unreachable by dating sites.

More than 70 percent of Match.com users are older than 35. They can not really engage with the younger audience. This is despite the fact that if you look at the singles population, most of them are younger than 35. eHarmony is even older. Zoosk for the first time made online dating available to below 35 audience. 70 percent of our membership is younger than 35 years old. a mind-blowing stat for the traditional online dating players.

GamesBeat: Zoosk is starting to offer more services to its community whether your customers are single or in a relationship. Can you tell me a little more about that?

Zadeh: Sure. we are working on a series of features that will allow people in a relationship to continue using Zoosk by building a digital home for their relationship. The idea is to allow members now in a relationship take advantage of features like date ideas, discounts on things to do together, etc.

We see this is a natural expansion of our offering so once we help you find somebody and transition to a new phase in your romantic life, we provide continue support to help build on this new relationship. We are really excited about this new feature set and will have more to share with the press and soon after the user base in a few weeks. We should definitely plan to get in touch in a few weeks when we can share much more.

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GamesBeat 2012 is VentureBeat’s fourth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. This year we’re calling on speakers from the hottest mobile, social, PC, and console companies to debate new ways to stay on pace with changing consumer tastes and platforms. Join 500+ execs, investors, analysts, entrepreneurs, and press as we explore the gaming industry’s latest trends and newest monetization opportunities. The event takes place July 10-11 in San Francisco, and you can get your early-bird tickets here.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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That’s the first question you’ll answer on the just-launched love-life improvement site TheIceBreak. Consider it a Formspring for couples.

TheIceBreak poses a daily icebreaker question for couples about their partner or relationship and encourages the user to “capture a moment.” That moment can be a love note or photo, which is sent via email to a partner. TheIceBreak is based on relationship theories, and a couples therapist helped design the program. Once a week, users answer a relationship survey that TheIceBreak then turns into a stats report used to compare relationship statuses for all couples.

“We want to recommend things that people can use to improve their love life,” says co-founder Dwipal Desai. “Everything that you do on the site will improve these recommendations.”

“Plus, people like to see other people’s answers,” adds co-founder Christina Brodbeck. “It makes it feel less lonely with their relationship issues.”

Former YouTubers, Brodbeck and Desai have worked together since 2005. Brodbeck was the first UI designer at YouTube (the flavor of the video sharing site is certainly reflected on TheIceBreaker) and Desai was the first engineer at YouTube to work on consumer attitude features. They both went on to work on YouTube mobile, then left to start online dating site Pickv.

“We had it up for three or four months and decided to take it down,” explains Brodbeck. “We learned a lot and saw we could only go so far as a dating site. Engagement was low and unless you got women on you couldn’t get men. So we started solving those issues and that process lead us to TheIceBreak.”

To answer the question burning in your brain, Brodbeck has a boyfriend and Desai is married. They work out of the Founders Den in San Francisco.

To become profitable, TheIceBreak will use three tactics. One, signup requires birthday and anniversary dates, which can be tied to a reminder and gifting service (pretty helpful). Two, interacting on the site leads to “date night coins,” which can be redeemed for gifts. Three, they plan on rolling out a subscription model to help users improve on specific issues and get customized solutions. The current beta release is open to anyone for free.

I took some time to play around with the site and found three issues.

First issue: When am I going to have time to answer these questions? I’m on the site in the name of journalism, but my boss wouldn’t be thrilled if I hung out here and contemplated my love life. When I’m home, I’m a mom and unless it’s YoGabbaGabba.com, I’m not online.

Second issue: How is this service going to grow if participation is private and anonymous? There are places to share on Facebook and Twitter, but perhaps that won’t be enough to spread the word.

Third issue: My husband isn’t buying it.

Me: “Sweet honey bear, I love you soOOOOO much! Did you get a chance to checkout TheIceBreaker?!”

Husband: “I did. Did you remember to rent a minivan for our vacation?”

Besides those few hangups, TheIceBreaker does pose some basic questions couples can benefit from answering, including “What was one of the happiest years of your life, and why?” or “What’s one of the most cowardly things you have ever done?”

More than anything, it’s just fun to have new questions to talk about offline. That’s the place relationships thrive. When the computer and phone are turned off.

Just when I had given up on my husband ever using TheIceBreaker, I get an email:

Hi regina,
[husband] just shared the following Icebreaker with you.
Do you believe in horoscopes? According to horoscopes, how are you and your partner supposed to get along?
His answer: I base my life on horoscopes and interpreting tea leaves, unless I have a fortune cookie handy. They all agree we are destined for greatness.

Awwww.

Quick: what words are Silicon Valley singles more likely to use than other Americans when describing themselves on Internet dating sites?

Try these: queer, decadent, robot, raiding, wacky and telepathic, to name a few.

Musician and exerimental media dude R. Luke Dubois aggregated data from 21 online dating sites in order to create this awesome visualization of the 20,262 unique words found in the dating profiles of more than 19 million single Americans. He then combined that info with geographical data to create an atlas of how people describe themselves and the people they want to be with. Each word appears in the place it is used more frequently than anywhere else in the country.

So why do we care? Dubois’ project underlines the fact that we can learn a lot about the people who live within a certain geographic area by mining data from social networking sites and combining that with locational information. The result is a powerful way to gain insight into what makes a community tick.

The singles data was harvested from Match.com, LavaLife, PlentyOfFish, Chemistry.com, Ok Cupid, Nerve.com, eHarmony, SinglesNet, PerfectMatch.com, FriendFinder, Great Expectations,  AmericanSingles.com, Date.com, Christian Mingle, Gay.com, Blacksingles.com, Jdate, AsiaFriendFinder, Alt.com, and Collarme.com.

And in case you were wondering, this is not an April Fool’s joke. The technorati just really love their robots, okay?

Know a company that is doing interesting things with social network/geographic data along these lines? Call them out in the comments.

[Image via R. Luke Dubois]

The San Francisco startup said that it’s current sales rate adds up to more than $90 million per year, an increase of more than 250 percent from a year ago. (Presumably, Zoosk is sharing its current “run rate” rather than the amount it earned last year, because the newer numbers are more impressive.)

Zoosk says it has more than 60 million registered users, and it points to comScore data showing the site placing number one or two (depending on the month) among the United States’ “personals” websites. 12.2 million of those users are active on the site in a given month, but that doesn’t count everyone who comes in through the iPhone and Android apps released last year, or the Zoosk Messenger desktop application, which is also new.

One factor in that growth has been Zoosk’s television ads, like the one below (which, coincidentally, briefly features a magazine that I contributed to).

Zoosk is vying for the number one spot with Match.com. Co-founder and co-chief executive Alex Mehr said the showdown between Match and Zoosk is like a repeat of the battle between Monster.com and LinkedIn to become the site where you find a job. The older, more established services (Monster and Match) are basically “bulletin boards,” he said, while Zoosk is trying to build a real “social graph” through dating, where you can interact with the people you’re interested in and add them as friends.

“We can’t kill them and they can’t kill us … but we really believe that we are going to win,” Mehr said.

Match recently acquired another dating site, OkCupid, but Mehr said he doesn’t consider OkCupid a competitor since it’s free (the free and paid online dating worlds are separate, he said), and he added that he’s skeptical that OkCupid will be doing much innovation in the future.

As for Zoosk, the site makes most of its money from premium subscriptions — users can join, browse, and send a limited number of messages for free, but they have to subscribe if they want full access. They can also purchase virtual currency to buy virtual gifts.

Zoosk has raised $40.5 million in funding from Canaan Partners, ATA Ventures, and Bessemer Venture Partners. Mehr said the company is around “cash flow neutral.”

SmartDate bills itself as an international dating site. Most other dating sites do have operations internationally but aren’t localized, whereas SmartDate is localized for Germany, the United Kingdom, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands. The site started in France, where it has become the number-one online dating site according to some metrics.

The site is free to use, but there are advanced settings users can change if they pay for them. OKCupid, one of the largest dating sites in the world, operates using a freemium model. Other sites like eHarmony and Match.com are pay-to-play sites, but still offer users a taste of the experience for free. SmartDate caps the number of messages users can send out to potential flings and petite-amies in order to entice them into paying for the premium model.

If the company has designs on the U.S. market, it faces a lot of competition. OKCupid is one of the biggest and has already raised $6 million. Match.com is another significant competitor run under the umbrella of oft-maligned media giant Barry Diller. But there’s also plenty of catty in-fighting happening between dating sites lately, judging from lawsuits flying back and forth between Match.com and competitor Plentyoffish.com. So now may be as good a time as any to try to break into new markets like the U.S.

French angel investors Pierre Kosciusko-Morizet and Pierre Krings, both founders of the major French e-commerce site PriceMinister, led the most recent fundraising round. The company had earlier raised a seed funding round led by International Business Angels and 360 Capital. The company has around 25 employees.

To make that happen, Groupon has launched Grouspawn, a dating site based around Groupons. The idea is that you and the mother or father of your future child must use a Groupon for your first date, as proved by taking a photo with your Groupon and the day’s newspaper while you’re out on that date. Then, if you make a baby, you can send the photo in and apply for a college scholarship for the child funded by Groupon. The company says the scholarship will be awarded twice a year.

If this sounds totally insane to you, keep in mind that Groupon has already launched one crazy challenge, asking a user to survive on Groupons for one year. And it’s pretty clear this is meant as a tongue-in-cheek promotion rather than a dating service that Groupon expects to take off. In fact, when the Grouspawn demo on-stage at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco seemed to stall, Mason seemed unconcerned.

“It’s basically a dating site,” he explained.

Since it’s basically a joke, will Groupon actually make good if you apply for a college scholarship? Well, let’s look at some answers from the Groupspawn Frequently Asked Questions page:

Q: Is this real?
A: Yes. Unlike the moon landing, Grouspawn is for real. It’s really real. For real.

Q: What happens after I apply for the grant?
A: Our crack team of nosy researchers will investigate if you have, in fact, gestated a true Grouspawn. This may include talking to friends and family, delving into your personal life, and taking samples of fluids you didn’t even know you had. By the time your spawn turns 18, college will cost a million dollars a second and will be located inside the moon, so it’s worth it.

Q: What does this cost?
A: Nothing. Grouspawn’s dating service, like love, is literally worthless.

Triangulate

The company’s Facebook application is dubbed a “one-click dating service.” Once the application is downloaded, a profile is automatically created based on a user’s profile information, actions and other social channels, such as updates on Twitter and Facebook, movie rentals from Netflix or check-ins on Foursquare.

You can join as a single or as a wingman — someone who helps their friends score dates — to see information on other singles and what their friends say about them. Only the information that’s shared with everyone is used to build profiles.

The application is free, but a paid version is also available through Facebook Credits, which includes exclusive features, like special virtual gifts and profile enhancements, as well as additional matches. Users are given 500 “coins” when they sign up for Wings.  You can use these coins to message and get to know your matches better.  You can earn more coins by completing more of your profile and inviting friends to help you. More coins can also be bought via Facebook Credits.

The company faces plenty of competition in the online dating industry with major players eHarmony.com and Match.com dominating the market — though working within Facebook gives Wings exclusive access to the social network’s 500 million users. But other Facebook dating apps are vying for the same audience, like Zoosk.

The PaloAlto, Calif.-based company, founded in 2009, will use its new funding not only to add features and functionality to Wings, but also to develop other apps. No additional details have been provided on these future projects. Funding was secured by Trinity Ventures and Playdom Chairman Rick Thompson.

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