Melbourne, Australia – 25 October 2010 – Club Intimate announced today it has been selected as a Finalist for Red Herring’s top 100 Asia award, a prestigious list honouring the year’s most promising private technology ventures from the Asia business region.

“This is an amazing milestone for us. We are quite exited and humbled by this experience”, said Arshad Khan, Founder & CEO of Club Intimate. “This achievement further reinforces our resolve to continue to innovate and become a leading social dating service in 2011 and beyond”.

People are passionate about the things they do and it’s often hard to find people with whom they can share those passions, Club Intimate’s interactive features bring people together into communities of shared interests.

In 2006, 747 Media conducted a feasibility study for Twitter, asking people in the streets if they would use it. They were shown the Twitter website, and were given a basic rundown of the text-to-phone and text-to-website options.

See the video below for what people have to say if they would use such a service and how they would use it.

Skype is a little piece of software that lets you make free calls to anyone else on Skype, anywhere in the world. Even though the calls are free, they are really excellent in quality. If you and your friends are using webcams, you can also make free video calls. Millions of individuals and businesses use Skype today. Every day, people everywhere also use Skype to make low-cost calls to landlines and mobiles.

Since recently, eBay had controlling interest in Skype. On 19 November 2009, eBay announced the sale of Skype in a deal valuing the business at $2.75 billion. The buyer, who will control an approximately 70 percent stake, is an investor group led by Silver Lake and includes Joltid Limited and certain affiliated parties, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and Andreessen Horowitz.

Sean Parker, Managing Partner of Founder’s Fund, gave a presentation entitled “The New Era of The Network Service” at Web 2.0 Summit 2009. In his presentation, Sean tries to prove the point that in the next decade ‘network services’ like Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin will dominate the World Wide Web as compare to ‘information services’ like Google, Yahoo and MSN.

I totally agree with Sean on this. Whilst there will always bee a need for information and data, the real value is provided to people by providing platforms that help connect people and build relationships. This is the core value of Club Intimate as well.

“Ping.fm is a simple and FREE service that makes updating your social networks a snap!” This is how Ping.fm promotes its services on its front page of their website. So about ten days ago I decided to take up the offer and signed up. Anyone who uses services like Ping.fm or Hellotxt will understand the value of updating their social profiles on various different social networks and bookmarking services with one click. This is exactly the outcome I was hoping to achieve.

So on the day I signed up, I set-up my social profiles at Linkedin, Facebook and Plaxo with Ping.fm. Setting up these networks with Ping.fm was a breeze. I also tested the service by sending one status update and a blog post.

A Turkish court recently blocked access to MySpace and Last.fm, according to a Turkish blog. Internet users are already prevented in accessing Facebook and YouTube. This latest ban may be as a result of a case filed by Turkish Union of Music Producers.

The Turkish blog site Webrazzi has reported this on their website.

Access to MySpace and Last.fm is banned by Turkish court. We are currently not fully informed about the reason of the ban, but it may be due to music copyright violations.

The new website is now launched. It was launched yesterday (8 September) at around 8:00pm AEST. It took about 3 hours to complete the launch process, this also included migration of user data from the existing site to the new site. No major issues were encountered. Users were able to login and use Club Intimate as they usually do.

Since the launch however, we have been engaged in the quality control process to make sure that all functionalities are working as they should. There are some known minor issues which we think will be resolved this week.

The engineering team was working till late last night and I thank them for all their efforts. This has been a long road but a major milestone has been achieved.

Eight months in the making, Club Intimate is planning the launch if it’s new website this week. This launch could happen as early as tomorrow depending upon if the engineering team gives the go ahead.

From design to development, a lot of hard work has gone in to this new site. This new site will represent the aspirations of its loyal users, the engineering team and my friends, family and well wishers.

During the design of this new site, I have taken into account of two major components, users’ feedback and additional interactivity between users.

Many people rush through the process of creating their dating profile but this is not something that you should hurry. Your profile is the way that you let other people know who you are, what you like, and what you are looking for.
Those that rush through the process of creating their profile will find out that it is much more difficult to meet the type of people that they want to meet than it should be. One of the most important elements of putting together a great profile is choosing the right photo.

Club Intimate takes pride in being a featured pack social dating service. Whilst Club Intimate was built in 2006, still today most of other online dating sites do not offer a comprehensive list of features as Club Intimate.

Club Intimate is a totally free service and stand tall among other free and paid dating services. Why would anyone want to pay $50 per month to a dating service where all you can do is to send offline messages and post a few topics in their forums? For those who do that, I would say ‘you are a bloody idiot’.

Listed below are some of the features currently being offered by Club Intimate. More features are coming soon.