Behind the not so ironed curtain

Up at 4.15 this morning looking at dating sites, got up early in case Lucy looks over my shoulder and catches me studying one of the profiles too intently. Almost worse than porn from a 'getting caught' point of view and she would never have believed that old chestnut about research. I mean,look what happened to Pete Townshend for heavens sake!

It seems most of the sites are variations on a theme and just work on the numbers game, but I have found a few more exclusive sites which seem a bit more classy than the 'friendfinder' variety, which all seem to be owned by one or two huge companies. I found the site above; Citydating (as opposed to the rest which should all be called shittydating) in Central London and I like the vibrant look and feel. The owner seems to be of East European origin, judging by the name and I have sent her an e-mail to see if she is interested in chatting about some kind of franchise. We will now just have to wait and see what Mrs Dateski has got to say.

A dating site - LOL, WINK, WINK,

Found this in the Guardian:

"Guardian News & Media is planning to build on its online dating
and travel strands and develop its ecommerce offering as part of a
strategy to increase digital revenue.The strategy forms part of Guardian.co.uk’s plan to create revenue streams beyond display advertising, as the market continues to be hit by the economic downturn.

Guardian News & Media commercial director Adam Freeman says that while the downturn is affecting a lot of client sectors, online dating continues to do well. “We’re working on putting further investment around [our online dating business] Soulmates, increasing its scale and awareness,” he says. “Right now we’ve got over 95,000 members but we think it could be even bigger.”

Cataracts

I have chatted through the site with plenty of people and they all love it! The singles are bored and need people and places, and the couples want more to do and would love to meet other couples (DO NOT EVEN GO THERE!) and there were even a few 'halves' of couples that got just a little too excited about the dating site. I am now thinking social networking and dating coupled with an informative site about things to do, where to eat, restaurant reviews, a la Michael Winner, AA Gill and car reviews of the Jeremy kind. This place has so much to offer but you try finding it, Duffy, Coldplay and a group of the most fantastic artists played at the Q awards ceremony in Monaco a couple of weeks ago and no one even knew about it until the week after. The organisers would have loved to have had a gaggle of star spotters hanging around outside with the paps and who knows, some of the well connected could have even tried to get tickets, had they known it was happening.

Then of course there is the printed media; A few glossy seasonal mags (yes, four times per year is hardly up to the minute) full of houses plus the real perennial (their word not mine!) favourite Riviera Reporter. Make sure you pick a copy up next time you're in the doctors waiting room, it's a great old institution but we need more for sure.

Lifestyle and dating

I am starting to think that maybe we need more people to make a dating site really work, the stigma of internet dating is certainly diminishing fast but we need to get more people through the doors. My initial idea was that we set up a dating site aimed at the English speaking market between St Tropez and Monaco, a great big sexy market with lots of financially OK ex-pats but now my thoughts are on trying to open that market out with some kind of lifestyle/dating site which should give us a much bigger market and even make sure the 'daters' hang around once they have met the love of their life. An up to date AngloINFO with plenty of what's on (ideal for dating) and perhaps some lifestyle stuff thrown in as well. I am going to chat this through with some people and see what they think.

Do you serve croissants?

Met up with a lady friend in Carrefour for an expresso and a croissant (petit dejeuner en France) this morning. I was going to opt for a healthy 'very berry' smoothie, a tall skinny double shot latte and a bowl of granola with Greek yogurt but she was too busy to come to my favourite Pret in Piccadilly because she had a date that evening and in any event I had to pick the kids up from school!

Dating: Now this was my real reason for the meeting, this woman had experience by the lorry load and I had heard through the grapevine that in her latest pursuit of the perfect Pierre, she had resorted to dating internet stylie. She loved it, she loved the chatrooms, the instant messaging, the ability to chat up eight men at once and all whilst sitting at home in her dressing gown and rollers gulping down her favourite Chardonnay. She just wished that there were more English speakers and locals on the site, they are there of course but there is a whole lot of country to trawl through before you can find them. All in all though, she could not enthuse enough and in fact could not hang around because she needed to get her roots done for her next rendezvous. I liked the sound of this, playing Eros to all the ex-pats and collecting a tenner a month from each of them. Maybe I am on to something at last.

Watch out Wilma

Been going back and forth with the lovely people at AI and it seems they have no interest in any ideas or suggestions, be they from Mark Zuckerberg, the irrepressible Candy boys or more importantly (and astonishingly) even me. These guys are in the Dark Ages and have no desire to turn the lights on. Their idea of clubbing is what Freddie boy Flintstone did to his old lady when his pterodactyl burger hit the stone dining table five minutes late. AngloINFO are nice people, really, really, really nice people in fact, who have created a great local service site, where you can find out everything from how to tax your 4 wheel drive school buggy through to where the nearest local Monday market is, just in case you need to replace your yellow and blue provencal plastic tablecloth, but if you're looking for anything outside their very organised box then forget it. In the words of the great Duncan Bannatyne: 'I MOST DEFINITELY AM OUT.'

PS: Check 'em out if you don't believe me.

More Oz, less Dross

Looking at a product called AngloINFO which is the main forum/site here on the French Riviera to gather information, swap ideas and chat. It is great and everyone here uses it, partly because of its great functionality and partly because there is just nowhere else to go. There is a huge population of English speaking folk between Monaco and St Tropez and they are a great target market. I have called up AI and they work on a franchise basis with head office running about 1/3 of around 30 sites. Most of their sites are in France but they also have franchises as far afield as Singapore and Sao Paulo. I am toying with the idea of looking at their franchise for the French Alps, they seem keen but to be honest it all just seems a bit too much of a tired and sleepy product for me.

New media and the web is such an exciting and vibrant place to be and this is very much anything but that. It is difficult to believe that one of the most exciting and glamorous places in the world has nothing with a bit of life in it. The same can be said of our radio station (Riviera Radio) and the bi-monthly magazine (Riviera Reporter) they are great and they serve a function but why carry about a 10-year-old Motorola transportable phone weighing three kilos when you can slip a sexy 3G iPhone in the silk lined pocket of your Ozwald Boateng suit.

Just found this on Wikipedia:

'There has been speculation of a second dot-com bubble to succeed the first that occurred roughly between 1995 and 2001. Some refer to it as Bubble 2.0, as many companies involved are in the Web 2.0 sphere, like Skype, Facebook and Google. Various suggestions have been proposed as to why there may or may not be a second dot-com bubble.

Well, I love the internet anyway and will take my chances, just as soon as I think of the way forward. Buying and selling is a major problem for ex-pats living here, eBay France is just too complicated with the culture and language problems and shipping from the UK means credit cards and currency cause more hurdles, not to mention getting across that 21 mile dirty stretch of ocean they call the English Channel. Maybe an auction site could be good here, was thinking about a site called http://www.e-bayofbiscayne.com/ but am not sure if that is France or Spain so had better check first, also might be worth trying to sell the domain name to eBay for a couple of million!

So what if I am not Chinese...

I searched the internet for a photo of a bored person and this is the best I can find; I know I am not Chinese and what hair I have left is certainly not black but there is no denying that this fella looks bored and I for sure am bored too. I want to work and I NEED to earn some money, I miss lots about London people but I certainly do not want go back so I need something to do desperately. Business has been kind to me and divorce not so kind but hey, I am happy at least and now just figure I need to work out something to do. I keep getting bollocked for being on Facebook and the net so maybe if I can think of a decent internet business idea then at least I will be able to keep in touch with all my 789 great 'friends' without too much trouble. I need these people in my life, I have no idea how I lost touch with them all in the first place but boy, am I glad they are back. So internet it is, could start a search engine but that seems maybe a tad ambitious even for me. Porn site? No, not well hung enough. A something-to-sell kind of site maybe? Something for the Brits here that can't speak French (which is most of them btw). Chinese restaurant perhaps? I like the food and Lucy is a great cook but restaurants are just too much like hard work plus all the customers will be asking for instructions on how to use chopsticks and the business will have gone down the Yangtze River before you can say egg fried rice. Stupid idea and I don't know what made me think of that to be honest!

It is inside my head for sure and I know it will pop out soon, I just have to keep thinking but at least I know this time next year I will have the boys from Google offering me zillions of dollars which is some kind of small step in the right direction.