Cell Phones That Literally Locate Love

July 28, 2005 — -- Looking for love in all the wrong places or searching through too many faces online? Soon, your cell phone may help you find dates and mates -- or have them find you -- anytime and anywhere.

Sure, Web-based dating services such as Match.com and eHarmony.com have become the tools of choice for an estimated 40 million online romance-seekers. But in the fast-paced digital age, electronic matchmaking services are already shifting their focus to an even larger market -- cell phone-equipped singles.

"Today, there are more people accessing the Internet worldwide through their cell phone than PCs," says Mike Baker, president of Enpocket, a mobile media company in Boston. "In the U.S., the number of mobile [phone] accounts exceed the number of homes with broadband [high-speed Internet connections]."

And companies such as Enpocket believe that just as Web-savvy singles flocked to online dating, the hundreds of millions of people who depend on their cell phones every day will catch on to mobile matchmaking.

Already in Europe and Asia, where mobile phone use far outstrips that of personal computers, mobile dating services are attracting the attention of tens of millions of wandering singles looking for love. Services such as Enpocket's SpeedDater Mobile allow tens of thousands of British users to post and search personal profiles and then anonymously "chat" with others using short text messaging service, or SMS.

Such mobile dating services are slowly making inroads in the United States as well.

Top online dating sites such as Match.com and LavaLife.com offer "mobile" versions of their Web service through almost all of the major cellular services providers in the United States. From their cell phones, Match Mobile and Lavalife Mobile users can search short profiles and text-message each other -- just as if they were online on a computer.