Dating Service Launches for Alumni of Top Schools (onlinedatingmagazine.com - January 30, 2004) The Square, an online networking community for alumni and students of the world’s top schools, has unveiled a new dating service, SquareDating. Unlike other Internet dating services, SquareDating’s membership criteria serves as a de facto pre-screener and therefore provides its members with a smaller, more eligible pool of singles. “Online daters are looking for one thing: a site that offers the best opportunity to meet compatible singles,” said Nicholas Ascheim, CEO of The Square. “Since SquareDating members come from similar schools and share so many cultural references, they are much more likely to make meaningful and lasting connections.” SquareDating, which serves a community of alumni and students from the top universities and colleges in the United States, Canada and Europe, allows members to search each other’s profiles by school, graduation year, geographic region, ethnicity, interests, religion, etc. Adding a measure of comfort and security for their members, SquareDating screens all members at registration to verify that they attended the schools they say they did. “We provide functionality that’s comparable to the mass market dating sites,” said Ascheim. “But the key difference is that our members don’t have to sift through hundreds of incompatible profiles to find the right match.” Contacting another member requires a monthly subscription to SquareDating, which will cost $24.95. Posting a profile and searching for compatible matches is free to all members.