NAOMI, a 28-year-old single woman from north London, is fed up with online dating sites after failing to find love in cyberspace.

“They’re awful,” she sighs. “People put their best foot forward on them, putting up the best photo they can find of themselves and the most interesting stuff about them, and you get your hopes up. But when you get to meet them, they turn out to be a bit sad, not that clever and not very good looking – all the reasons they’re single.”

There are lots of people like Naomi who have become disillusioned with online singles sites. Asurvey carried out by YouGov earlier this year found that only 25% of people using internet-dating sites were confident of finding what they are looking for via the net.

That percentage may improve with the launch in the UK this week of WooMe.com, a new site that hopes to provide a better experience and help to cut out some of the more dubious claims made by those surfing for love.

Some of the cynicism that exists among people such as Naomi does not seem to have hampered the sector’s progress. According to Jupiter Research, a consultancy, the industry will grow from 2.8m paid users in Europe in 2006 to about 6m by 2011. At the same time, revenues are expected to grow from €243m (£170.4m) to €549m.

In the UK specifically, the demographics are working in favour of the industry. According to government data, 10 years ago, there were 6m single people in Britain. Today, that has risen to 11m and is forecast to rise to 16m over the next 10 years.

And as the online-dating sector has evolved, it has also become more sophisticated, with a proliferation of sites, many offering particular niches, whether they target the super-rich, single parents or particular ethnic groups.

The backers of WooMe, who include Niklas Zennstroem, the co-founder of the internet telephony company Skype, now hope to capture a slice of this expanding industry.

Their site is different from more established internet-dating services because it allows members to meet new people in one-minute bursts using webcams before deciding whether they want to follow up. It is an online version of speed dating.

The idea for the site came about when the sister of one of the co-founders, Stephen Stokols, was studying at university in San Diego and became frustrated with how time-consuming it was to meet people she had come across on social-networking sites such as Face-book and MySpace. The original thinking behind WooMe was to cut through that and allow people to connect almost instantly.

The founders raised $1.9m (£908,000) from Mangrove, a leading venture-capital firm, as well as Zennstroem’s company Atomico and business angel Klaus Hommels.

The way the new site works is relatively straightforward. Users register their details, and when they log on they join a session that will have no more than 10 participants – five men and five women – or create a new session and invite others to take part.

Once the session starts, you get to chat live, using webcams, for one minute with the other participants and at the end you give feedback on the people you met. If two people match up, then they have the opportunity to pay to get their contact details. The fee will probably be $1. There is also likely to be a system that allows people to get unlimited numbers of contact information in exchange for a monthly fee.

Crucially, says co-founder George Berkowski, a former Nasa engineer, unlike many dating sites, the service is free to join. And to make it more secure for all involved, users can only get contact details for people they want to follow up with if there is a mutual match.

The site has been in test phase for the past two months. Berkowski said: “The feedback that we’ve had is that anyone will give anyone else a minute of their time. The likelihood of you making a good first impression is pretty high.”

And there is limited scope for people to paint a less-than-accurate picture of themselves, he added. “WooMe achieves identity verification by users seeing each other in real time . . . there’s no way to hide behind fake profiles,” he said.

The business model of WooMe is somewhat different from the established dating sites, which usually charge a fixed monthly subscription, no matter how many or how few potential partners a user contacts.

Berkowski believes that the service taps into some key trends. For example, he points out that the market for offline speeddating events has grown from nothing to about $1 billion in less than a decade. Second, he said that the growth of social-networking sites was grooming younger people into accepting that their core relationships could be found online.

Although it launches this week in both the US and the UK, WooMe.com is not the first speeddating website to go live.

It was beaten to the punch by SpeedDate.com, which started up at the beginning of last month. For its first couple of weeks it was available only to residents of San Francisco, but it is now being extended across the US.

The site was set up by two graduates of Stanford Business School. One of them, Dan Abe-lon, said the early response had “exceeded” their expectations.

The creation of this second generation of internet-dating sites come as a market for similar services provided via mobile phones also begins to take off. Operations such as America’s MeetMoi, allow potential dates to get together via text message.

What all these services have in common is a greater immediacy and an ease of access that is significantly enhanced from more traditional online singles sites.

But the established operators are catching on to the possibilities that are opened up by improved technology. For example, Britain’s biggest dating site, DatingDirect, part of Europe’s market leader, Meetic, a French company, is experimenting with voice and video features.

Gail McLaughlan, who runs the online-dating division of Friends Reunited, the third-largest dating site in the UK, said live video represented a potentially exciting development for the industry. “It’s not something we do currently but it is definitely something we will keep an eye on,” she said.

All these bells and whistles may not be enough to tempt back those like Naomi who have been turned off the whole concept of internet dating. But even she admits that some of her friends found true love via the web, so maybe there will be a happy ending after all.

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