James proposed that perhaps in the future Zappos might start an online dating service, like Match.com or eHarmony.

NEWYORKER: Happy Feet

In 2005 a predecessor of a GreenShift unit, called Incode, was flogging KissyKat, an online dating service for pet lovers.

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How does a single person decide which online dating service(s) to use?

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Forty men and women work the phones around the clock at Spark Networks, an online dating service in Beverly Hills, taking 1, 700 calls a day from love-starved subscribers.

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Sites such as YouTube or even Craigslist, which offers an online dating service among a myriad of innocuous free-of-charge classified advertisements, are often banned in whole or in part.

ECONOMIST: The internet and government

YouTube began its life as an online dating service.

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Qiming Ventures has five Chinese portfolio companies in the cue to go public soon: ramped up car rental service eHi from Shanghai, dating site Jiayuan, online video programming PPLive, social networking service Kaixin001 and kids entertainment site Taomee.

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For instance, eHarmony, a prominent online-dating service, touts the results of a survey conducted on its behalf by Harris Interactive, a market-research firm, that concludes it was responsible for an average of 542 people getting married every day in America between the start of 2008 and the end of June 2009.

ECONOMIST: Online dating

Late last year, the online-dating giant launched a service called Match My Friends that lets members create profiles of friends, instantly adding new members to Match.com's 20 million.

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Last week, the online-dating giant, also based in Dallas, launched a service called Match My Friends that lets members create profiles of friends, instantly adding new members to Match.com's 20 million.

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