FROM THE WEB: HowAboutWe’s Aaron Schildkrout Writes For TechCrunch’s #Love Column

Aaron Schildkrout, the co-founder and co-CEO of HowAboutWe has written a piece for TechCrunch’s new #Love column.

Launched in March, the section is for articles “dealing with digital matters of the heart”, and for this installment, Schildkrout speaks about the budding relationship between love and technology, how to design for love, and the many issues and refinements that are yet to solved.

Amongst these he includes design issues around video, the fact that no company has nailed the booking of first dates, utilising increasing amounts of data for better matches, and perfecting the friends-of-friends-of-friends area.

Schildkrout also speaks about the couples market and the wealth of opportunities it brings, in light of the release of HowAboutWe’s new app, You&Me, a messaging platform where couples can share their relationship.

Their first standalone app, You&Me lets couples share messages, customisable pictures, music and videos.

He uses Tinder – and You&Me – as an example of how the dating industry can achieve success – by using technology to mirror, and improve, real-life situations and age-old problems.

As he says:

“LoveTech is going to get better and better.

“So how do you design for love? How should current and future makers think about creating products for love?

“In my opinion, the key design principle to keep in mind is that we already know how to love. Accordingly, the job of technology products is to take what we already know about how to love and help us do those things better.

“Tinder enhanced the very simple experience of making eyes across a bar. We already know how to do this. We’ve been doing this since we were fish in an infinite prehistoric ocean. But with Tinder it just got a whole lot more…effective.”

Yesterday, HowAboutWe told VentureBeat that, since its release on the 1st May, You&Me has been downloaded 143,514 times, with 2m messages sent – 111,033 messages per day.

Korean couples app Between, which recently launched their main monetisation strategy of an e-commerce store, has had 7.45m downloads since their March 2012 launch.

Read Schildkrout’s piece, #Love: Design For It, here.