Chaos reigns......

Yesterday was most definitely the most frustrating day so far in the short but exciting life of FR2DAY.com. As we speak our wonderful website has been down for about 12 hours and the only reason I am on here writing this blog is because I can not get on to the site to do anything more productive or continue with the humongous work load that caused me to set my alarm and crawl wearily from my pit at 4am yesterday morning.

Confusion and chaos leaps mercilessly from my outbox and the number of possible reasons has now hit at least treble figures. Me; a mere layman caught up in this day of terror and angst is beginning to think that maybe in an effort to be multi-cultural and all kind of cosmopolitan I might have just gone one country too far in my almost Barack style efforts to break down barriers, feed the third world and Skype the complete universe down to the size of Slough.

Content is king so they say in the publishing world but it has to be said that communications are almost nearly as regal when it comes to developing a website of this magnitude. There is something to be said for strolling round London’s WC2 and being able to sit on people and refusing to get off until they promise to deal with your problem. No time difference, no language barrier and even a crayfish and rocket sandwich en route.

I will give you my insight into the possible problems and hopefully some of you will see where I (and particularly our team) are coming from and maybe just why today was so chaotic. Karen and I are from London and live in France, the fella I am working with on the business lives in LA and is from Holland. Our server is in Paris but we deal with London because our French is so bad. I have great technician from New Zealand who also lives in France. Our wonderful support system is run by a guy just up the US coast (4000 miles away!) called James who manages three developers called Niraj, Viresh and Shahid who hunker down in various corners of the Indian subcontinent and who all probably speak different dialects of Gujarati. Usually we all get on as famously as a class full of school kids in a Peckham Primary but today was just not a great day at the curry house and chaos kicked in like closing time on New Years Eve in Newcastle.

Time difference, language barriers and generally different understandings of the word urgency have certainly not helped our cause but before we start going all 'local,' remember that at FR2DAY we love a challenge and our whole business ethos is 110% maverick and about breaking down barriers so we intend to continue in our search of the ultimate Peruvian print provider and a couple of Malawi marketing men to add to our already winning team of names to rival any premiership football side.

Tomorrow is another day. Niraj has promised to cheer me up by posting his recent Indian Holi Festival photos up on Picasa - he also said he reckons he might get the site back up if we are lucky! Shahid says it shahid be working too and as for Viresh he has promised to keep his fingers crossed and see how it goes!

That's the beauty of this business - You just can’t get that sort of culture in Slough!

WB

Live at last

Well here we are, with a taster page finally live on the web and it feels good. So much has happened in the past few weeks so this is an 'in a nutshell' job. Some fab keen people have come on board, including the former director of photography for Vogue and Conde Nast Traveller, one of Britain's top facialists, who showed me how to massage away the wrinkles (my fingers have never been so fit) and a couple more writers and seeing the magazine live, even if it is in a 'come back soon when we have some features to read' kind of way, is a fantastic feeling. It's made all the more special by the fact that everyone who has seen it, be they contributors, friends, acquaintances, former colleagues or family, has said how brilliant it looks. Potential advertisers are already chomping at the bit to promote themselves and it's fair to say the bar is set high, all we have to do is keep it there and that is the next challenge.

I got lost in the Esterel mountains on a 27 k training run last weekend ...the short version is the four other much faster runners went one way and I (armed with an iPod touch, but no phone, water or chocolate) went the other, and as I was trying not to panic about being eaten alive by mountain goats in some godforsaken gulley, all I could think was 'Damn (or similar), after all this hard work, I'm not even going to make my own launch party.' After an hour of panicked navigation in the fog, I found them and all was well but Wayne says the fact that my first thought was of missing our party rather than my husband and children in my hour of need speaks volumes.

This week is a frantic subbing/planning/laying out marathon and by next week, we will have some great features, restaurant reviews and showbiz gossip ready for consumption.

Until then amigos.....

KH

We are sailing

Evening campers,
It's all go chez FR2DAY with the server ready to go, features winging their way in from various lovely contributors and just under one month until lift off. One of the pluses of setting up a magazine in a new country is the amount of people you get to meet who under normal circumstances you might never cross paths with.

Mat and Milly own a fabulous classic sailing yacht called The Blue Peter which is moored in Cannes Harbour and they came over for drinks and sushi on Saturday night along with many other friends. It was the first time we'd met and we got on brilliantly and a trip on the boat is in the offing...all very lovely.

A straw poll on Saturday evening yielded the general opinion that a comprehensive, up to date, witty and informative guide to the best restaurants in Cannes, the coolest clubs in St Tropez, the latest gigs in Nice, the best shopping in Monaco and beyond and much more besides would be a welcome addition to the Cote d'Azur. That's a relief.

KH

Richard and Judy

Bonsoir FR2DAY fans,

Well, we are four weeks away from launch now and it's all looking good if a little manic. But anyone who strolls nonchalantly towards a launch without late nights, frazzled nerves, snack food and no social life is in my view doing it all wrong.

Spoke to lovely Richard and Judy today (that's uber TV duo Richard and Judy, not my neighbours in Bar sur Loup) and Richard has agreed to write a review of his fave restaurant down here, La Colombe d'Or. He and Judy can see their house from this restaurant and they spend lots of time there, sometimes in the company of Gloria Hunniford, so keep your eyes peeled for a good, honest, funny, read (although I may have to delete a few swear words as his language can be a bit fruity.)

My lovely best mate Sarah, who runs her own pr company in Mayfair with major league clients, has also been giving us her considered opinion on all things marketing and pr wise so at this rate, we should be in Forbes magazine this time next year (I hear there are lots of places going begging in this year's Rich List, poor Bill Gates is down about 15 billion dollars, sorry Billy but bring it on.)
The launch party is taking shape, with the Three Butterflies due to play, fabulous Cotes de Provence wine and a late licence....the perfect ingredients for a night to remember. But if you're not on the list, you're not coming in.......

If you change your mind....(there's an ABBA theme going down)

Once you are in deep with a project, it's hard to be as objective as you were when it was just a clutch of ideas on scraps of paper. So it was after much discussion and thought that a few weeks ago, we decided to change the name of the magazine from Riviera2DAY to FR2DAY.

There are a few reasons behind the decision, the key ones being that the word Riviera is associated with so much down here (not all of it good either) and also that FR2DAY sits more tightly and comfortably as a brand with LA2DAY, our sister magazine. An added bonus is that FR2DAY looks a bit like Friday (no bad thing, Fridays are good) and FR actually stands for French Riviera (not to mention France, which could lead to national, maybe even world domination one day.) Reader, you are right to assume we are thinking BIG.

A less radical decision was to change Rendezvous, our social networking page, to Meet. This seems even more timely given that during some idle research yesterday on your friend and mine Google, one of the top listings was for Rendezvous, an 'adult contact magazine offering a wide selection of adverts from ladies, couples, gays and lesbians seeking.....' well, who knows what? I can hazard a guess but I didn't dare click in case Issy sneaked onto my laptop as she often does to get her Stardoll fix and ended up with rather more that what Britney's latest outfit looks like.... but I did wonder why no men were mentioned.

Burning the midnight oil

Wayne and I have very different hours of working. He is up at 4 in the morning, even at weekends, much to the consternation and annoyance of everyone else in his house and his lovely partner Lucy, who prefers to keep daylight hours. To be fair, dealing with LA every day means either ridiculously early starts or incredibly late nights.
I, on the other hand, only get out of bed before 7am if there is a major emergency, a plane to catch or the cat has brought a squealing rat or mouse through the cat flap (mercifully these are all rather rare occurrences.) I make up for it at night, being the stamina-fuelled party girl that I like to think I still am (all those early mornings creeping home when the birds have long since started their dawn chorus have clearly trained me well.) But what it does mean is that someone is working continuously flat out on FR2DAY for the best part of 20 hours a day. How cool is that? You readers had better appreciate it.

Money, Money, Money

Never have I felt happier after spending far too many thousands of pounds than I do today (not even my infamous New York two-hour beat-the-clock spendathon in SoHo en route to JFK can match this buzz.) The contract is done, the money is winging its way to our mate Tim in LA and finally we can say that after a fruitful gestation period, the baby that is FR2DAY.com is born. She’s going to be a beauty.
Now it’s just the little matter of pulling together fabulously witty writing, arty images and up to the minute information on all the hottest, hippest hang-outs, the best French Riviera restaurants, the most beautiful Cote d'Azur beaches, great Monaco bars and the coolest boutiques in St Tropez and all the other hidden gems from Monaco to Marseilles and then we’ve cracked it. Oh, to have the budget of Time Out to play with. Instead, we are frantically recruiting by trawling the web (probably the best research tool ever), begging favours from talented friends and spreading the word that this is going to be one helluva rollercoaster ride.
Launch is mid-April which means early starts and late nights pulling everything together. There will surely be stress, fraying tempers and fatigue but we all believe the end product will be worth it. The icing on the cake is our launch party at the Cannes Film Festival on May 13th, which we are holding at the uber trendy bar Ear to the Ground in Cannes. It promises to be a huge celebration, with much chinking of champagne flutes until the wee small hours, as long as no-one keels over with exhaustion or collapses with a heart attack. Plenty of time for that after the launch!

And so it grows....

We have been overwhelmed by the responses to our pleas for help with the launch of FR2DAY. It’s war as far as we are concerned, with time running out on us, so it has been really heartening to get such great feedback and positive responses from the people we have found.
Flo Flozard, a talented artist and singer, has come on board as creative director and Susana Iwase Hanson, a Japanese-American writer based here, will be a valuable contributor to Food and Travel. These people, amongst many others, are all agreeing to work for nothing to help us get FR2DAY off the ground. And once the dosh starts rolling in, they will be amply rewarded (by us, as well as by God.)

Wicked Whispers

I love email – probably the best means of quick, effective communication there is – but sometimes it can get you into trouble. Tonight I was emailing various potential contributors to FR2DAY and as is our habit, Wayne and I were forwarding the emails from various people we’d found across to each other. I got in touch with a girl down in Cannes who organises parties for like-minded single social butterflies and instantly thought she would be a useful person to meet. Then she let slip that she also runs a global gay internet site. BINGO! Our gay contacts down here are currently thin on the ground so this was mannah from heaven.
‘Found a great girl in Cannes who is big on the party scene,’ I wrote above her email to me ‘she also runs a wordwide gay site and think she is probably gay herself (but people will probably say that about me and you!)’ then I merrily pinged it off to NO, not Wayne, but said networker!
Two minutes later, her email shows up with ‘Hey Karen, I haven’t stopped laughing yet, somehow don’t think that was meant for me, was it?’ I couldn’t wait to tell Wayne how stupid I’d been, and he promptly sent me back a similar looking email from a French forum he’d been trawling. He’d found an American woman in Cannes who seemed to know everyone, and thinking he was mailing me said, ‘See below, this bird knows everyone, especially the Yanks, so could be worth a punt.’ But he’d sent it back to her instead, only for her to come back with ‘Hey Wayne, now I’m confused...are you after my email address list?’
Très spooky, as Dame Edna might say.

Why are we doing this again?

I have a feeling one of the highlights of this job will be getting the heads up on all the latest parties, events and gigs. Currently, unless you are a fluent French speaker and can find the listings in Nice-Matin, or happen to pop into FNAC once a week, you have no way of knowing what is going on down here.
I can think of many events in the last six months – the International DJ festival, featuring Roger Sanchez, the great Stephane Pompougnac of Hotel Costes fame and the sublime David Moralis, the World Music Awards, Jamie Cullum playing to a half capacity audience at Mipcom, Oasis playing in Marseille – where most people have only known what’s going on after it’s happened. A bit pointless really and one of the reasons our What’s On guide will change things forever on the Cote d’Azur.

TWIT ter...

I have been Twittering since Sunday and already am addicted. This is quite something from a Luddite whose idea of keeping in touch is to pick up the phone or write a letter (ok I do email, but Facebook MSN messenger and Myspace, sorry you still leave me cold.)

Jonathan Ross is a Twitter, it has taken over from insulting grandads on air as his favourite new pastime (how he manages to find a minute for his day job is anyone’s guess.) Luckily, my partner Wayne (yes Karen and Wayne, we have just ordered the furry dice and the windscreen sticker) is to technology what I am to the written word - a gift from God - and we reckon this could be a valuable promotional tool when FR2DAY is up and running.

I’ve noticed that a high flying BBC contact of mine uses Twitter to talk about dramas and series that are coming up on Auntie (complete with transmission times and days, shameless huh? That one is on C4 though) so if it’s good enough for Pablo Almondo, it’s good enough for me. A joyful bonus is when an email pops up telling you that someone from your dark and distant past is following you (so far, my best schoolfriend from age 11, two very cool ITV prs who made my job a pleasure in London and inexplicably, a bus driver called Dan who seems quite amusing but doesn’t know me from Adam). Mind you, navigating my way around is a nightmare, so I might be doing the same as the chick above very soon.

look out Trip advisor....

On Friday we cracked open the champagne at Lucy and Wayne's to celebrate the launch of our new online lifestyle magazine FR2DAY.com. It’s grown from a dinner party conversation fuelled by copious amounts of wine to several meetings a week fuelled by cappuchino and enthusiasm, no mean feat when you’re knocking on the door of jaded post -40^th birthday cynicism. We are going to cover all the hottest news, events, comings and goings, festivals, fashion, shopping, restaurants, bars, beaches and anything else you can think of on the Cote d'Azur. It’s not just about providing a public service to under serviced ex pats here (although that is our top priority dear reader) it’s also about the VIP backstage passes for Madge, Lenny K and Oasis…joking) Lots of work to do and the site should be up in April, so all very exciting. I went to the loo and found myself in a pitch dark hallway, three glasses of Champagne down, tripped over the giant dog basket and found myself splayed across it complete with bruised shins (will that be enough to get me out of running the London Marathon in April?) Cue three worried partners racing out to said hallway to check I was okay. ‘Thank God you’re all right’ said Lucy, ‘Wayne’s sister in law tripped over that last Christmas and broke two ribs!’ Rumours of my growing up, slowing down and maturing are vastly exaggerated.

Dealing with elephants

Wikipedia says.....the elephant in the room is an English idiom for an obvious truth that is being ignored or goes unaddressed. It is based on the idea that an elephant in a room would be impossible to overlook; thus, people in the room who pretend the elephant is not there might be concerning themselves with relatively small and even irrelevant matters, compared to the looming big one of trying to get some money out of Iain.

Deal done.....

After weeks of protracted negotiations I finally agreed a deal with Tim @ LA2DAY last night. It is a great compromise with him remaining involved for the foreseeable future. It will obviously be a great help having someone with so much web experience involved in the project. We just need to finalise the contracts over the next week, pay the money, get the site and voila we will be web-entrepreneurs on a mission, albeit with an ENORMOUS amount of work to get done before our aimed 'live' date sometime in early April and the inevitable party/launch during the Cannes Film Festival.

Larry carrying out his day job....

You 'Cannes' not be serious

Went to a fashion party in Cannes last night, purely in the interests of making new contacts for our fantastically exciting new business venture. It sounds glamorous doesn't it, fashion party, Cannes, I mean, how could that not be fun? I hate networking with a vengeance after 20 years working the London showbiz party and launch circuit (lots of bad canapes, cheap wine and even cheaper celebs) but had my best schmoozing hat on. The reality was arriving 15 fashionable minutes late to find two screens showing archive footage of the catwalk collections to an empty hotel bar, being charged 10 euros for a miniscule flute of Champagne which I drank a bit too quickly by myself as there was no-one to mingle with, all the while trying to look like I was a busy career woman in demand by emailing Iain, various pals and my friend's 13-year-old daughter so that I didn't look like Billy No Mates. I came home, took off my not-trying-too-hard-but-bloody-expensive Isabel Marant dress and ate a reheated chicken curry with my girls while watching Celebrity Big Brother....(highlight - Ulrika & Verne's tune-free duet of Endless Love.)