AUSTIN, Texas, March 10, (Agencies): Not long after her husband left her “to live in a van down by the river” in Idaho, as she puts it, Elissa Shevinsky thought it was high time for a better mouse-trap. Or rather, a better dating website. The thirty-something app developer who divides her time between New York and California is the driving force behind MakeOut Labs and its “fun, free Jewish dating site” called JSpot. She says she’s engineering it to be more female friendly than the current big players in online dating — sites like Match.com and OKCupid.com — by creating “the first spam filter in online dating.” “We’ve built a site where women get fewer messages that are lower quality so that the great messages stand out and the great guys stand out,” she told AFP at the Startup Village corner of the ongoing South by Southwest (SXSW) festival. Shevinsky’s project is starting out small, but her dreams are big, especially given that online dating has grown into $4 billion industry as lonely hearts turn to the Internet in their quest for love — or at least a movie and dinner.

Global
Like many other apps being pitched at SXSW, springboard in past years for such global household names as Foursquare and Twitter, JSpot grew out of Shevinsky’s personal experience. When her husband left her — she insists they’re still friends — “I found myself single... I took a look around and I saw that we needed a better dating site,” she said. “You need to be a technologist and also really well-connected, and I thought I was the person to do that.” Besides putting a lid on excessive proposals from dubious suitors, Shevinsky said her project will include the novel ability for users to, in effect, create their own dating websites reflecting their individual interests.

“For many users, they might have an interest in dating vegans or dating people who love SXSW, and those demographics are too small to support for a company like Match.com,” which was founded 17 years ago, styles itself as the original dating website and operates in 25 countries. “We’re part of this movement towards an open web, where users can create and lead their own communities,” Shevinsky said. Improving upon existing online products, especially mobile apps, was a notable theme during a SXSW Startup Village workshop Saturday attended by dozens of youthful startup entrepreneurs, many in T-shirts with their venture’s logos.

Pitches
They were invited to make 30-second pitches to a trio of hard-nosed technology journalists, who in turn critiqued their ability to get media attention. (One common reaction: How will these bright ideas make money?) Michael Bergman, founder of Repp, wearing a T-shirt that read “Online, I’m a horny supermodel,” said his website enables users to carry out background checks on anyone from potential dates to prospective house sitters. He explained how the idea came about after a woman he met at a speed-dating event spent hours surfing social media websites to predetermine his credibility. The two now are married.
Tappr is a smartphone app that enables users to order drinks anywhere in a crowded bar without actually going to the bar and angling for the busy bartenders’ attention. Its developers are targeted it at craft beer lovers.

Dealflix does one better than established online box offices like Fandango by offering cut-price movie tickets in cinemas with too many empty seats to fill, and Junkio rides the wave of social responsibility by providing a virtual space for unwanted merchandise to be sold for charity. The 27th edition of South by Southwest kicked off Friday with a bold prediction that desktop 3D printing will unleash a new industrial revolution guided by “creative explorers.” Inventing or replicating everyday objects in three dimensions using laser beams and molten plastic is a major theme of the interactive segment of the 10-day SXSW festival that also celebrates independent film and music.

Delivering the opening talk, Makerbot co-founder and CEO Bre Pettis unveiled his Brooklyn-based start-up’s latest shoebox-sized desktop 3D copier that will carry a $2,200 pricetag when it goes on sale this fall.
It can recreate objects up to eight inches (20 centimeters) high and eight inches tall — including concepts from Thingiverse, an online treasure trove of designs just waiting to be downloaded and turned into objects.
Speaking to a capacity crowd in a vast darkened auditorium, Pettis said 3D printing for the masses has the potential to rewrite the rules of manufacturing by obliviating the need to make things in large quantities.
In the future, he said, if you need something — from children’s building blocks to a prosthetic hand — it can be made at home, or in a small workshop, in as few quantities as necessary. “There’s a renaissance going on right now,” Pettis said. ‘It’s never been easier to make and share actual things. Creativity is much more accessible now in the thing world.”

Also:
SAN FRANCISCO: Electronic Arts Inc’s launch of the newest game in its signature “SimCity” franchise this week was marred by a series of technical faults that shut out some gamers for days, triggering an outcry on social networks and Internet forums. Players of the city-building simulation, now hosted wholly online rather than stored on personal computers, were plagued by constant error alerts when trying to log in. EA blamed “server instability” caused by too many players.

The company has been in damage-control mode since the game’s North American launch on Tuesday, and has scrambled to bring additional servers online. But the botched launch is a black eye for EA and a 24-year-old franchise that has proven one of the company’s most reliable cash cows. While EA acknowledged that it had more to do, it said the situation had improved since Tuesday, when it expanded the game to Europe and elsewhere.

“As we continue launches in Europe, we’ve seen positive feedback where the additional server capacity has already shown improvement to the service levels,” said Lucy Bradshaw, general manager of EA’s Maxis label, which makes the game. “We have more work to do, but tens of thousands of new players are logging in, building their cities, and enjoying the game.”