COURTLAND BROOKS - June 20 - Is there a place in the word for an A.I. matchmaker? We think so at Courtland Brooks. This new book (out since May 28th) will give you some insight into the rise of A.I. virtual chatbot technology. Get it at Smile.Amazon.com here.
June 20, 2019
June 19, 2019
Happy 15th Birthday to Online Personals Watch!
COURTLAND BROOKS - June 19 - We are now 15 years into running Online Personals Watch. It was started this month in 2004, no less. For the last 15 years we've watched the news, selected what we think are the most strategically important news items for decision makers at dating companies, and summarized them. I started OPW when I was at FriendFinder. I realized there was some great intell in the news, but noone really had time to read it. Certainly not my CEO Andrew Conru. I figured, it would be awesome if someone could condense 3 hours of reading down into 3 minutes of essential news each day. Noone was doing this, so I created OPW, which you can now reference at OPW.news. We love the dating business, and are looking forward to an amazing future with you. You can subscribe via email and social media from the right hand side bar. ;-) - Mark Brooks, CEO Courtland Brooks, Host of IDEA.
May 07, 2019
Courtland Brooks Book-of-the-Month - The Players Ball
COURTLAND BROOKS - May 7 - If you've not heard of the tawdry story of the founder of Match, then you'll like this book. Actually, even if you know it, its worth a read. Stanford law grad, Gary Kremen founded Match.com and bought a number of top tier domains. This is the story of how he started Match and his fight to reel in a particular domain that was stolen from him. See the Amazon book.
Find out more about Courtland Brooks services. Please email mark@courtlandbrooks.com for more info.
April 09, 2019
April 07, 2019
Courtland Brooks Book-of-the-Month - PR for Humans
COURTLAND BROOKS - Apr 7 - I find the best PR advisors are former journalists. Mike Sergeant is part of that fray (CNN, BBC), and has authored this brilliant advisory on how to get PR right, and be human. PR for Humans is out April 18th. (Amazon UK book, or Kindle UK). I believe the people in the personals business need to be more personal with the public, so this book seems very apt. Mike argues that we should aim to 'connect human leaders with human audiences,' and his book covers new-school storytelling, reputation building and how to 'be a hedgehog!?' Why not. Enjoy. Please let me know your thoughts. :-)
Tinder has a story. Bumble has a story. Does your dating app have a story? You must be known for something, or you won't be known for anything. Find our more about Courtland Brooks services. Please email mark@courtlandbrooks.com for more info.
March 05, 2019
Courtland Brooks Book-of-the-Month - Talk To Me
COURTLAND BROOKS - Mar 5 - The March book-of-the-month is 'Talk To Me: How Voice Computing Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Think.' The book is out 26th March. I think we have to keep our eye on big media transitions. Voice is huge for search. Which means it should be huge for the way we enable people to search for singles. This book will walk you through the concepts around Conversational AI and what Google, Amazon and Apple are working on. Essential reading IMHO.
This post also appears on OnlinePersonalsWatch
March 04, 2019
A Great Pitch Email
COURTLAND BROOKS - Mar 4 - We get pitches for OPW.news quite a lot this time of year. Here's a great example IMHO. Short, sweet, got my attention, and shows they did a little research on us...
Hey Mark,
How much does it suck when the person you match with on Tinder or Bumble looks nothing like their pictures?
A lot, right?
That's why I've developed Filter Off, a dating app that allows users to participate in a facetime-style 60 second chat. There’s no messaging or swiping!
I know you've written about dating apps in the past, so I'd like to invite you to write about us! We launch on Saturday, March 9th at 9 pm ET. If that time doesn't work for you, we can do a private session.
Interested?
Sincerely,
Zach
--
Zach Schleien | Founder | Filter Off
February 24, 2019
Navigating (Dating) Industry Disruption, Mark Brooks HBS Interview
COURTLAND BROOKS - Feb 24 - I interviewed with the HBS testimonials team about my career in Internet dating, and my experience with the Harvard Business School PLD program. The dating industry has gone through some significant disruption with the rise of mobile dating, Tinder, and POF. Here's my story.
February 18, 2019
White Paper: Background & Reputation Checking Services for Internet Dating
COURTLAND BROOKS - Feb 18 - In this analysis, which was sponsored by MyLife, you'll learn:
- Are background checking services useful for dating services?
- Why should you do them?
- How do dating sites offer them?
- What are the Costs and Risks?
Contact: Jeannette Weinstein, Head of partnerships at MyLife.com at jw@mylife-inc.com
February 07, 2019
Has Facebook Been Good for the World?
VOX - Feb 4 - 15 influencers weigh in on the company's 15th birthday. Here's some key quotes relevant to us in the dating industry. - Mark Brooks
Sherry Turkle, author of Life on the Screen and clinical psychologist at MIT
Facebook friendships offered the feeling of connection without the demands of intimacy... At the Facebook launch, I expressed my disbelief that we could have intimacy without privacy and democracy without privacy. But I thought about the two problems separately. Facebook taught us that we can only consider them together. The social media business model sold our privacy in ways that fractured democracy.
Ro Khanna, US Congress member representing Silicon Valley
Facebook has been a net good for humanity by democratizing communication and mobilization... It has allowed members of a diaspora to stay connected to their relatives. It has helped provide a sense of community in an age when families have been split.
Steven Pinker, author of Enlightenment Now and professor of psychology at Harvard University
The problems created by social media differ in a key way from wars, dictatorships, epidemics, and other scourges: They are not imposed on people but chosen freely. Billions of people have decided that the benefits of social media exceed their costs. This doesn't necessarily mean that social media are a net benefit; people can make choices that are bad for them, like addictive drugs, and they can make choices that are good for them individually but bad for the world, like carbon emissions. Finally, many of the rumors about the social, psychological, and political pathologies loosed by social media do not survive fact-checking. Careful studies have shown that social media has not led to epidemics of loneliness, depression, and suicide (see the references in the "Happiness" chapter of Enlightenment Now and in my follow-up essay).
Jonathan Haidt, author of The Coddling of the American Mind and professor at NYU
There's an old joke about an optimist who fell off of the observation deck of the Empire State Building. As he was passing the 30th floor someone called out to him: "How's it going?" He replied: "So far, so good!" I think that joke has some relevance for humanity in the Facebook era. Facebook and other social media platforms are powerful centrifugal forces, binding groups together to fight other groups within their own country... By 2030 we will see the spectacular political collapse or geographical division of more than one Western democracy that seemed rock solid on the day Facebook was founded, 15 years ago.
Peter W. Singer, author of Like War: The Weaponization of Social Media and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution
"The goal wasn't to create an online community, but a mirror of what existed in real life." Mark Zuckerberg, [is] not just a billionaire, but the ruler of a digital kingdom that has more members than any single nation in the world.
by Sean Illing, Kurt Wagner & Karen Turner
See full article at Vox
Mark Brooks
