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posted by martyb on Sunday March 18 2018, @04:35PM   Printer-friendly
from the burning-desire? dept.

Tinder's parent company, Match Group, wants to acquire Bumble, which rejected a $450 million offer from Match Group last year. Match Group appears to be forcing the issue with a patent infringement lawsuit:

Match Group, the online dating company that owns services like Tinder and Match.com, wants to buy Bumble, another popular dating app that lets women make the first move.

But Match may be trying to push the deal along in an unconventional way: A new patent infringement lawsuit filed late Friday in U.S. District court in Waco, Texas.

Match Group is suing Bumble, which was founded by one of Tinder's co-founders, for infringing on two of its patents, including a design patent for Tinder's now-famous swipe-to-connect feature, according to the suit.


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  • (Score: 2) by looorg on Sunday March 18 2018, @06:22PM (2 children)

    by looorg (578) on Sunday March 18 2018, @06:22PM (#654549)

    Doesn't seem that odd as far as a business offer goes, hostile takeover by patent proxy. Make offer, they reject it. Sue for some kind of infringement and drag them into an expensive legal battle to drain their funds. Make new lower offer and/or try and buy them on the cheap later. Sounds like a fairly good plan from a business perspective.

    As far as the app goes, seems like an interesting idea. Would be interesting to see some data from it. I know OKCupid provided data for a few books by Rudder (Dataclysm ...), perhaps not so odd since he is one of the co-funders of the company if I don't recall wrong. But it would be interesting if there was some data to back things up with cause otherwise most of the dating sites have the tendency to be filled with shallow narcissists looking for some kind of prince (or princess) charming that only exists in their fantasy, filled with men wanting to hook up or they are not to blunt about it and they are in essence just "swipe-a-fuck"-apps trying to pass off as being about "dating".

    If they are all about putting the power into the hands of women, like almost everything else -- the patriarchy is a bluff, they might as well just call the site what it actually is -- Golddiggers! They are only in it looking for men that they like, they want to sort out all the creeps, and they go for men with wealth and looks. Quite shallow, not that men in any way shape or form are any better. But at least they don't try to hide that by talking about "love" or whatever.

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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by bzipitidoo on Sunday March 18 2018, @08:17PM (1 child)

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Sunday March 18 2018, @08:17PM (#654569) Journal

    "All's fair in love and war", eh? How about, "live by the sword die by the sword"? It all depends what the dating public thinks of Match's move. Maybe men overflowing with testosterone will think Match is making a winning move, but the rest of us might think otherwise.

    Match is rather evil anyway. I was on their site for a very brief time when they were experimenting with various concealments and lies to string their customers along, like keeping active the profiles of people who'd left the site, and just as your membership expires, someone finally messages you! Of course you must renew to read the message. And then you might find the message wasn't from another customer, it was match.com having their employees fake it. They never said they were or were not customers, or already married or whatever, so they weren't exactly lying, you know.

    I refused to renew to read the message that arrived with such suspicious timing. I got 0 messages, and a dismal 10% reply rate, which could certainly be explained if my initial messages were to ex-customers whose profile Match kept. Or, maybe that is about right, maybe I was even lucky to get that much (though it was a "sorry, I'm not interested" reply), as that's the only way the women can handle the mountains of spam they receive. And then someone finally messages me first, just as my subscription runs out? Yeah, right. Perhaps it was a genuine message from another of their customers who thought I might be worth dating. I'll never know. Oh well.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 18 2018, @10:16PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 18 2018, @10:16PM (#654603)

      FWIW, while the number of responses I got on match was abysmal, the only woman that wrote back was actually a real woman actually looking for somebody. Unfortunately, she wasn't looking hard enough to find time for anybody.

      As opposed to okcupid where I'd get a ton of responses back and probably a first date about 1 out of every 10 contacts that I initiated, but never a second date. Well, with women, the first man I messaged resulted in a date and I could have gotten a second one if I had wanted to. He was great, but I realized that dating men wasn't really where I wanted to be going at the time.

      Really, dating depends a great deal on their being people worth dating out there. Here in Seattle the women are some of the worst anywhere in the world when it comes to dating. There are worse women, but not by much. Even the ugly ones are narcissistic and selfish as hell. Up until they hit their late 30s and realize that the music has stopped and the men are mostly already taken or no longer willing to deal with women's bullshit.