JDATE CO-FOUNDER STEPS DOWN

News bulletin: JDate co-founder resigns... ["Nothing to to with the growing power of fledgling weblog JDaters Anonymous," says an unnamed source...] Alon Carmel, one of the company’s co-founders and co-chairmen, has resigned his positions with the company to pursue other entrepreneurial and philanthropic interests. Mr. Carmel has agreed to continue to serve the company, as a consultant, and Joe Shapira, the company’s co-chairman, will become chairman of the company’s board of directors. Since launching JDate(R).com, eight years ago, Mr. Carmel helped build the company from a fledgling startup into one of the true leaders in the online personals space. In addition to JDate.com, Spark Networks owns AmericanSingles(R).com and a host of other growing vertical market players in the online personals industry. One industry insider indicated that, inspired by the "truth in advertising" theme of his new favorite movie, "Crazy People," the 1990 comedy starring Dudley Moore and Darryl Hannah, Carmel has taken on a quest of a personal nature that he could not legally undertake as co-founder: to count by hand the number of JDate users who are actually active and contactable, and offer up this new number as the number of actual profiles available on JDate. This move would be a momentous step towards honesty, as it would thin out the pool of perceived availables, which currently includes men and women who are now married and forgot to take their profiles down, or people who have been so dissatisfied with the online dating service that they cancelled their paid plans and now receive email notifications in their inboxes that they cannot read.