Windsor, UK, 18 September, 2012: Award-winning Windsor-based online dating company Global Personals Ltd, held their second Hack Day on Friday 14th September to much success.
The fastest growing technology company in the South East (Deloitte UK Fast Tech 50), Global Personals Ltd generates annualised revenues in excess of £40m. Its B2B platform, WhiteLabelDating.com, is a multi-tenant service catering to 1,500 partners and plays home to over 7,500 sites worldwide and is used by over 15 million members.
The Hack Day is a chance to inspire the company’s talent by pausing normal work for one day to create innovative and revolutionary software and ideas that could be potentially integrated back into the company’s platform. The online dating industry is moving at an astonishing pace and the company’s development team work hard to keep the company at the forefront of the industry. February’s Hack Day inspired some major developments across the Global Personals platform, including an innovative map search tool and a notification bar.
The team spent the day coding and creating their ideas, followed by presentations back to the team and directors where they had to present their hacks. Three awards were also presented:
Founders’ Award: Tom Giddings, Tim Tait, Jason Kneen
Rewarding members who have been the most active on the dating site with virtual trophies and points that can be collected for future gifts.
People’s Choice Award: Paul Bowsher, Kriselda Rabino, Peter Lambert, Keith Clark
A fast instant messaging/chat application that allows members to speak to other members via the website.
Innovation Award: Matthew Ward, Jamie Milburn
A centralised logging service to allow our Operations team to quickly diagnose problems within the platform.
Barry Frost, CTO and Technical Director, comments:
“Hack Days are a great way for the business to encourage ideas and innovation from its developers and Friday’s projects didn’t disappoint. From instant messaging and video chat to a new way of finding compatible matches across our network of 15m online dating members, we’re now planning to turn some of these prototypes into the next killer features on our platform.”
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About Global Personals
Launched in 2003, Global Personals Ltd is one of the largest privately owned online dating companies worldwide. With annualised revenues of £40 million, the company currently employs over 130 full time staff and owns and operates an online dating and bingo portfolio including Singles365.com, DatingAgency.com and SmoochBingo.co.uk, whilst its B2B service,WhiteLabelDating.com, offers a platform for brands and individuals to power their own dating sites that currently includes The Independent, Bauer Media and Dennis Publishing as partners. WhiteLabelDating.com provides the dating software, membership database, payment processing, customer support, hosting infrastructure and much more. You provide your brand, website design and marketing and we do the rest.
Global Personals has received a collection of accolades including fastest growing company in the South East, UK, in the 2011 and 2010 Deloitte Fast 50 and the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 EMEA, won Digital Business Of The Year 2010, highly ranked in The Sunday Times Virgin Fast Track 100 (2010, 2011) and the European Media Momentum Top 50 (2011, 2012).WhiteLabelDating.com has also won ‘Best Dating Software Provider’ for the last three years at the industry awards, iDate.