New Jersey Tech Entrepreneur Launches Innovative Online Dating Website

March 16, 2011 - PRLog -- Woodland Park, NJ - March 16, 2011 - A New Jersey based Software Engineer has recently launched an innovative Web 2.0 dating website which allows its members to organize themselves into exclusive groups into which entry is restricted based on custom-selected criteria. In a rather impressive feat, the website’s developer -- Jonathan Awotwi, a graduate of Montclair State University’s Computer Science program completed the design and implementation of the entire application after 4 months of solo-development.

The website, dubbed GroupeeLove (http://www.groupeelove.com) -- a tongue-in-cheek reference to the underlying group related features that sets it apart from other dating websites takes basic website groups a step further by allowing group creators to specify a custom list of criteria that prospective members must meet before they are allowed to join. As far as criteria go, anything from physical features to locations is fair game. Awotwi elaborates,  “Suppose You are a single male living in Upper Montclair who loves and owns pet dogs, and wants to meet single females who also own dogs. GroupeeLove allows you to create a group and assign it a criteria indicating that all prospective members must live in the Upper Montclair vicinity and own pet dogs. Behind the scenes, when anyone tries to join your group, the website scans through their profiles to make sure that they meet these criteria, before they are allowed to join.”

The site’s groups function like bite-sized niche dating websites within a larger dating portal. Even outside this creative use of groups to filter daters according to specific interests, the site provides an impressive range of well laid out features that provide a great user experience, including inline-chat and graphs that relay a visual snapshot of a group’s demographics by age, ethnicity, gender etc.

Awotwi graduated from MSU’s class of 2005 and has held various Software Engineering positions mostly in New York City -- a good environment for nurturing software development talent, even in spite of the downturn. Wired magazine recently stated in an article, “The demand for programmers and engineers to work in the city’s burgeoning internet startup scene is stronger than it’s been in a decade.”

What sets Awotwi apart from other programmers is his uncanny ability to produce great design-work alongside his usual programming functions. He adds, “Although my Computer Science major did not expose me to graphic design, I’ve always had an unwavering passion for digital design. Fortunately for me, what was once a hobby now proves useful in allowing me to envision and execute my own designs as part of the application development process.”

Top digital media Blog Mashable estimates the online dating industry’s earnings at $1.049 Billion annually, with mobile dating currently earning $550 Million and expected to reach a $1.3 Billion by 2013. In light of the success of online dating in recent years, dozens of online dating destinations have sprouted up which differentiate themselves according to one basic niche or the other. Awotwi saw this as an opportunity to use technology to differentiate his offering. Rather than use what he calls a “one dimensional” niche to differentiate his service, he opted to allow users to spawn as many niches as they could think up within the confines of one dating website.

For a beta release, it’s safe to say the site holds promise for growth, but it will undoubtedly need to be given the right attention in terms of marketing in order to stand out in an industry that’s rapidly getting saturated with look-alike offerings.

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