So what do you do if you see the man or woman of your dreams in the street, on the beach, or in a disco, yet you’re too shy to approach them? A 28-year-old Italian medical student, Simone Giancola, has come up with the perfect solution: the Shyno dating service. Simone says he had his idea when he saw a beautiful woman on a sailing boat and felt frustrated that he couldn’t contact her. ‘I saw this stunning girl on a boat, quite the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen in my life. The boat had a number, and I thought, “If only the number of that boat was a telephone number! ”’ This experience gave him the idea of using T-shirts with a code saved on a database so that people could contact the object of their desire. The Shyno dating service works like this. First, you buy a T-shirt with a nickname and number printed on it, which form acode – for example Cayman 232 or Emily 14. The organizers issue you with a membership card bearing a secret password so that you can register online with the website: www.shyno.com. Then, when you see the man or woman of your dreams wearing a Shyno T-shirt you can make a note of the code and send an admiring text or video message to the website. Your message is passed on to him or her with your details and your own mobile phone number. If he or she gets in touch with you, then you can take it from there. The scheme began after a trial in a night club, when 1,000 free T-shirts were given out. Within a week they had generated 14,000 text messages. More than 20,000 T-shirts have been sold since Shyno was started in Italy last year and the scheme is being advertised on Italian television. La Stampa newspaper called Shyno ‘the future of the eternal game of seduction’. Mr Giancola expects to have 200,000 customers by the end of this year and a million within three years. So, what has happened to the stereotypical image of Italian men? Have they lost their macho instincts? Mauro Falcinelli, the scheme’s Rome representative, says that times have changed. ‘Young women are wary of responding to approaches by strangers. Romance has become a risky business.’ Shyno is also considering extending the dating scheme to car number plates. ‘Think how many times you pull up at traffi c lights and exchange glances with an attractive person in the car next to you,’ Mr Giancola said. ‘We Italians sometimes throw across a folded piece of paper with our phone number on it. How much simpler to take a note of the number plate and see if the car is registered on the website.
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