LessWorkMoreLove adopts new name Love Out Loud Asia, sends love matches to your mobile at noon

While some of you are getting psyched for the weekends and planning date ideas with your other half, some of us are just dateless. While being single can be fun too, LessWorkMoreLove.com has recently rebranded into Love Out Loud Asia (LOLA), and encourages you not to be shy, get out there, and start dating.

The entire sign up is pretty straightforward. You sign up or log in with your Facebook profile and post a date idea. You go off to do your own stuff and be pleasantly (or otherwise) surprised with the matches that the system sends at noon. Fancy the match sent to you? Click on “Like” and you can start chatting on the LOLA mobile app.

And yes, apart from rebranding, LOLA has also launched its mobile app on both iOS and Android. According to co-founder Wong Say Jon, the shift from email notifications to mobile makes it less likely that users miss their matches. The previous method of using email notifications also requires users to exchange personal information such as their mobile number. Now they can chat privately without doing so.

Image recognition put into play, along with other factors to send the perfect match

So how does the system effectively know and match you to the correct one? In a coffee interview with Say Jon, he revealed four sauces in its recipe:

1. Activity-based approach: Once a user enters a date idea, based on the event or activity, it reflects what he or she enjoys doing. Date categories such as ‘outdoor adventurer’ and ‘domestic lover’ help determine your personality. Matches are based on the common traits found between the two.
2. Profile details and Facebook login: LOLA’s profile will require you to state your occupation, height (because they know height is a sensitive issue), and Facebook login details to suggest better matches.
3. History: At a quantitative level, the system learns more about you based on whether you “Like” or “Pass” a match, so they will avoid sending you similar matches where you have given a thumbs down prior and matching you to those whom you have liked before.
4. Image recognition technology: Say Jon also emphasizes on the team’s focus on Asia, and hence has incorporated image recognition technology by partnering with NUS School of Computing. According to him,research shows the more similar you and the opposite gender look, the higher the compatibility. You will be more attracted to people who look like you. In Chinese, we call this fuqixiang (夫妻相).

Catering the service to audiences in Asia

In essence, the team (pictured right) built LOLA to address major and present issues in online dating angled towards Asians who are generally shy and conservative. Co-founder Kenneth Lim elaborates:

[It is mostly] superficial interactions on dating sites, so we use date ideas to make the experience more activity-based, [encouraging] users to meet up in real life.

Our simplified interaction model of one quality match a day and use of date ideas appeals to both new and existing online dating users. We want to make our service simple, effortless (where they are not allowed to browse), private (where we reduce profile exposure), and direct our users to focus on offline interactions.

He also added that the current percentage of females and males are 56 percent and 44 percent, respectively, with mutual “Like” rates consistent at approximately 20 percent. One-third of its users are already using the new mobile platform, and the team is expecting half of its users to convert to mobile in a week’s time.

Funding from FatFish, plans to expand to more cities

The LOLA team has also received funding from FatFish Medialab under Singapore’s Media Development Authority i.JAM Reload scheme.