Ross Williams

Some good news today:

http://www.onlinepersonalswatch.com/news/2008/07/plentyoffishcom.html

We run a few hundred dating sites now, generally in the UK but also growing worldwide. It was good to see that we’re already at number 6 in the UK and looking at the numbers we think we’ll be challenging Gaydar and Match.com by December this year.

I’ve just got back from a great meeting which included lunch by helicopter - very flash!!

As you may know from the flying in my bio, I was lucky enough to get my pilot’s licence after an RAF Flying Scholarship when I was 18. Unfortunately through uni I failed to keep up the hours, it was simply too expensive to do well. I decided to wait until I was in a position to be able to fly regularly again so I could revalidate my license.

I got my license after only around 41 hours flying - very quickly in comparison to most pilots - so I didn’t have much experience of critical things like emergencies. Although we practised engine failures after take-off, forced landings, flapless approaches, etc, we’d only done enough for me to get my license.

In the same way you might practise emergency stops for your driving license, there’s a whole bunch of emergencies to practise to get your pilot’s license. Once you’ve got the license, it’s rare to do these kind of things again unless you have the resources to spend a lot of time and money practising. Of course, most of the time, people just want to jump in and go fly.

So I’d decided to wait until I could fly regularly - and I’ve also been thinking for the last few years about a much greater challenge and going for a Helicopter license. It’s been on my mind quite a lot recently and  the timing of this lunch trip was pure Providence.

Together with a colleague, I went to meet with a very well established businessman to talk about some of the things we’re doing at WhiteLabelDating.com. The business has grown massively in the past year, with turnover increasing four-fold and profit following it. We’ve had a lot of people contact us offering investment, but we really don’t need the cash - it’s the skill and experience I’m after.

So we drove to this businessman’s house - a fantastic place in the thames valley - and he’d arranged for his helicopter to be prepared to fly us about 20 minutes to a great pub south of Reading for lunch. Although he had hundreds of hours of flying experience, he also had a safety pilot with him who instructed on the aircraft as well - something I understand is common practice with helicopter flying and absolutely sensible in the grand scheme of things. So he flew there together with the other pilot besides him.

Although extremely successful, the businessman is also very down to earth, straight talking and generous. Not so down to earth when he’s at the controls of his helicopter though - myself and my colleague with in the back as it took off, hovered, then flew over the trees of his estate before gaining altitude and flying over Reading.

I’ve flown in civilian and military helicopters before, but it’s a different experience when it’s with someone you know, flying over places you know.

We landed in a flat stretch of grass five minutes walk from the pub - that was absolutely fantastic, definitely the way to arrive - and had a great lunch talking about the business and the opportunities for the future.

I was looking forward to the flight back anyway, but as we approached the aircraft I was very kindly invited to take the controls beside the safety pilot. After take off, he gave me control and we flew back over Reading.

Suddenly like a flash I remembered why I loved flying so much when I was younger - it’s very, very hard!!

By the time I got my license, I’d become disillusioned with fixed-wing flying, it just wasn’t much of a challenge. That’s not meant to sound cocky, it’s just that if you’ve got good flying aptitude then flying fixed-wing aeroplanes isn’t particularly hard. Landing can be a challenge of course, particularly when there are cross-winds which blow you off course while trying to get on the runway. But generally anybody can learn to fly and someone who takes 150 hours to get their pilot’s license has as much right to airspace as someone who can get their license in 40 hours.

Again, it’s a bit like the roads - you can pass your test first time with no minors but you have to share the road with people who take five or six attempts.

The big challenge from any flying is, for me, the multi-tasking - monitoring all the instruments, navigating, radio procedures and all the time making sure you’re not going to fly into someone else.

Helicopter flying seems to take that onto the next level - the aim of landing in confined spaces while monitoring the wind in particular is very challenging and definitely something I want to do.

I’ve got a lot of travel this year but on the back of my experience today I’ll definitely be putting a helicopter license on the to-do list for 2009!! :o)

I’ve just got back from an absolutely fantastic roadtrip around France, Monaco, Italy and Switzerland.

We left England on the evening of Thursday 17th and took the car onto the Eurotunnel that evening, driving a couple of hours to Honfleur where stayed that night.

We had breakfast beside the harbour and then left for the 12 hours drive to Nice.

Originally when first organising the trip I had planned to stay around Limoges, which is right in the middle of France and kinda half way between Honfleur and Nice. However, an overdose of watching Top Gear on Dave the week before convinced me that driving an Aston Martin all the way down in one day would be a wonderful romantic experience.

It’s not.

Jeremy Clarkson is most definitely a God for managing to pull off those races of car vs train etc - by the time we’d done 6 hours I was definitely ready for nap time, but knowing that a 30 minute rest meant we’d arrive 30 minutes later - when we weren’t due to arrive til 10pm anyway - really does focus the mind.

It also focussed my right foot - I rarely speed in England but seeing 300miles to go on the GPS and being rather too tired to do complex distance/speed/time calculations resulted in a rather simple goal of maintaining an average speed that would let me cover those 300 miles in 3 hours.

And the French were undoubtedly the very best drivers I’ve seen (with the very definite exception of Parisians, who are quite simply a difference species). The roads are wide, flat and well maintained - no doubt in part due to the extortionate road taxing system with toll booths every few miles.

Drivers would always pull over straight away after overtaking which meant that on the three-lane autoroutes, most of the cars would always remain in the slow lane. Whether this is due to culture or simply road conditions I’m not too sure, but it’s a billion times better than the UK.

The local Gendarmerie weren’t too much of a problem either as most of the autoroutes had speed cameras instead of police. Which is great when you have a UK registered car which can’t be tracked - and makes you wonder what happens to all the european-registered cars on British roads who get flashed for speeding but can’t be tracked down.

Eventually after almost 12 hours on the road we arrived in Nice at the Hotel Negresco where there was secure parking (eventually, when the valet parker realised how to release the handbrake on the Aston) and we could spend the next few days car-free in Nice.

Unfortunately, I spent the next few days on the E-Coli diet after eating what turned out to be some rather dodgy beef at an Autoroute service station on the drive down so Tarry had an arduous time swimming and sunbathing by herself while I developed a very personal and intimate relationship with the bathroom porcelain.

On Monday we drove through Monaco before stopping for some lunch en route to Menaggio beside Lake Como. This was our furthest destination and a place I’ve wanted to see ever since it was featured in Casino Royale (and Star Wars, bizarrely).

The drive around the lake to the small village of Menaggio is incredibly beautiful, although not the most relaxing - with ten tonne Italian juggernauts charging around the roads, intent on demonstrating their machismo superiority, it was a bit stressful guiding the Aston through thin, winding roads.

We passed an Alfa Romeo 8c Competizione coming in the other direction and it was evident he’d had the same problem!!

We stayed at The Grand in Menaggio for a few days - the view was absolutely fantastic, right beside the lake and close to the small ferry stop which toured the villages around the lake. We took the boat across to Bellagio for lunch (thanks Terry!) and explored on foot.

After a few days in Menaggio we had to get back, driving through the villages into northern Italy into Switzerland. This was by far and away the most beautiful part of the trip - ornate Italian and Swiss villages, good overtaking roads and picture postcard scenery everywhere.

We drove through southern Switzerland with everything in Italian, then German and finally French - that is one schizophrenic country!!

With nowhere booked to stay that evening, we stopped at a service station just across the border in France and - thanks to the wonder of the iPhone - found a town and hotel within just 5 minutes.

I still get a kick out of how useful the iPhone is in situations like that. Within a few minutes, I’d managed to calculate which towns were a reasonable distance between our current location and Calais, researched them in Wikipedia (Metz won). Then a quick google search for hotels gave us the location and phone number of all the hotels in the town centre before a quick check on Trip Advisor rated all the hotels with reviews so we could find somewhere decent with secure parking (we settled on La Citadelle).

Metz was a really nice surprise - a great find. Lots of old buildings, not dissimilar in ways to Bath or even Windsor. We had dinner out in the main square while the Frenchies were playing Petanque behind us.

After a great night out we headed back for a good night sleep before the final drive back to Calais and home.

It was a strange experience seeing the Eurotunnel terminal in Calais - then I realised that although I’ve taken the eurotunnel three or four times now it’s not often I’ve actually taken it back as in my TVR days the car would often break down in France or Belgium and I’d had to come back without the car as it was recovered and sent home a few weeks later.

All in all a great trip although next time we had to south of France, it’ll definitely be by plane!!

About 5 minutes ago I was planning to write about a great experience booking a hotel room for an upcoming road trip. Then 90 seconds ago it went from great to stupid. Let me explain..

I’m off on a roadtrip with Tarry on Thursday to France and needed to book a place to stay for our first night. We’ll be arriving in Calais by Le Shuttle around 10pm - rather than stay in Calais for the evening, we decided to drive a couple more redbull-powered hours to Honfleur. My parents have been there a few times and recommended that we stay at a Campanile which is basically a relatively posh travel lodge - it’s outside town with secure parking which a bonus. So we can stay there the evening and have brunch in the town before continuing.

So I go along and visit http://www.campanile.com - first, extra points for checking my IP address and recognising that I’m accessing the site from the UK, therefore defaulting my language choice to English (but allowing me to select another language in case, for example, I’m a frenchie living over here).

I’m there to make a booking, but I don’t really know what departement (county) of France Honfleur is in, so I just search for the town name and enter my dates. It’s all easy to do straight from the homepage which is good so far.

The site then brings back a Google map of the region with the Campanile hotels super-imposed on the map. I can choose the hotel closest to the town and am taken direct to room selection. I can also access hotel information (it’s 1.5km from the town centre, perfect!) and see what facilities it offers (clean and secure parking, ideal).

I can then select my room configuration and am taken to enter my payment information to make the reservation.

An impressive checkout screen - the country drop-down list defaults to the USA (I guess because the language selection is English, not bad). The drop-down list of countries also includes a flag next to the country - a nice touch, I make a mental note to prepare a screenshot to show Barry and pester him for us to add flags to our drop-down lists.

I can’t select United Kingdom (a common annoyance) which would be faster as it’s next to USA on the drop-down list. I hunt around for what they may have called my country and find Great Britain - this is annoying but forgivable (hey, I’m just chuffed the French recognise us as a legitimate power).

The site asks for my credit card details but doesn’t ask for my address - an interesting omission and a smart one - after all, the business isn’t shipping goods and the chances of me making a fraudulent transaction when I’m going to the hotel in person is unlikely.

This makes the checkout process faster and less required information means less chance of user error or user frustration - helping to maximise their conversion to paying customer.

An area for special requests allows me to request in my best Frenglish that as we’ll be arriving late, could they please reserve parking for us.

I submit my details and am presented with a confirmation page with my reservation number.

And then…. um, nothing.

I can’t click to continue to book other hotels - which would be useful as I’m on a roadtrip. I’m not offered other hotels or related services that might be of interest (how about breakfast or perhaps a guided tour of Honfleur). I’m not directed to partners or shown adverts which may be suitable.

In fact, the only way I can progress with the site is to enter the address of the site into my browser and start again.

This wouldn’t be so shocking if the first half of my experience hadn’t been so good - I’m used to seeing companies waste opportunities like this, the larger companies rely on sheer volume to make up for these lazy mistakes. But it’s very unusual to see a site which is so promising to start with - Google Maps mashup, very web2.0 - but at the point when I’m most valuable (I’ve paid, they’ve generated a return from their marketing and have broken down the barriers to a commercial relationship) the site just thanks me and wants me to go away please.

On our dating sites we’d be crazy to treat customers like this. When someone pays for membership of Singles365.com, we’re then in a perfect position to sell them additional credits to use on the site, register their mobile phone details to use our mobile site and cross-sell them onto some of our other more niche dating sites which may be of interest. In this way we can get an ROI on customer acquisition in half the time that our some of competitors manage and it’s the easiest thing to do if you’re smart enough.

Am I really getting that old?

I was reading through the stories of people queuing up early for the new generation of iPhones launched today.

I’m usually classed as an early adopter, wasting a lot of money paying twice the price for something that will be discounted in 6 months. I had an Apple TV about a year before it actually became useful in the UK (thanks Apple) and I’ve been playing with a version one iPhone for about 4 months now.

The iPhone is definitely life-enhancing (the term life-changing for a phone is just too wanky) - and I certainly wouldn’t go back to a Blackberry now.

Most of those queuing outside stores since silly o’clock will already have a first version iPhone - and there just isn’t that much of an incentive to upgrade to version 2 yet. The GPS is nice but I’ve never needed it (especially with the excellent Google Maps application which ships with the old iPhone) - maybe when iChat comes onto the iPhone there will be a more compelling reason (always on IM wherever I am).

My big wish is for a better camera - the iPhone camera really does suck.

It would also be nice to be able to send and receive MMS messages please O2!!

TVR is back :o)

Just announced that the Sagaris 2 will be going into production:

http://www.pistonheads.com/news/default.asp?storyId=18359

This is very, very exciting news to me - I’ll be keeping close eyes on this, ready for the disappointment :o)

According to the Gallup Strengths Finder, my biggest strength is meant to be Strategy - pretty handy given my job (and also very beneficial to regularly whip Adam’s ass at Command & Conquer in the early days of Rawnet).

However, the weakness of strategy people is that they can be bad finishers - getting all excited about new ideas and how they can be implemented, but then glazing over when the work needs to be finished.

Most good strategists need a do-er and I’m lucky to be surrounded by some great people like Barry and Ian who help clean up after me.

Crucially though, I’ve learnt over the past three months the need to consider where the finish line is and not commit resources - time and money - to projects unless you can deliver on them.

It sounds obvious, but it’s amazing how easy it is to lose track of this and get carried away developing opportunities which are great for the future, but won’t give a return in the next three months.

I’m guilty of this big time - we initially developed some concepts for a new dating site over a year ago which we still haven’t launched. We got some designs done and then dropped it down the priority list. It’s a fantastic brand and has massive potential - if we’d launched it a year ago it would be generating over £150k/month by now and I kick myself for not finishing it. There’s been dozens of examples like this over the last few years.

It’s by no means restricted to the less experienced strategists - I work closely with a very good strategist who’s great at opening doors but as a result sometimes opens opportunities about six months before there’s anything we can do for the opportunity.

Over the last six months we’ve been building a strong development team at WhiteLabelDating.com and are now starting to close off some of these projects which have been sitting around for a year or two. Over the next two months we’ll be launching more revenue-generating features than we’ve been able to launch in the previous 12 months.

We’re staying focussed on delivery of new features which will bring in significant additional revenue for us and our partners which then allows us to spend a bit more time on strategy for the longer term.

As some of you will know, I’m a bit of a fan of Aston Martins (although still have a disturbing infatuation with my first love, TVR). I’ve got a new baby on the way in November, which coincides with the release of the new Bond film featuring the same DBS.

It’s great news that they’ve managed to get the DBS featured in the new movie after the three accidents (a great marketing ploy by conspiracy theorists).

I’m really chuffed with the new videos the guys have added to http://www.whitelabeldating.com.

The videos were recorded and put together by Deano and the guys from http://www.lovefilmproductions.com and they’ve done a fantastic job.

Some really nice things said by partners and staff - really great!!

It was really good to see Rawnet join the Williams F1 team at Silverstone this year:

http://rawnet.com/news/2008-07/living-life-in-the-fast-lane

The team at Rawnet have done an absolutely fantastic job building up the relationship with Williams - they started with a small presentation project and grew the account to the point where Rawnet is now responsible for the entire AT&T Williams F1 Website and other projects.

It was a pleasure working with Williams whilst I was at Rawnet and it’s great to see how well the relationship has bloomed over the last year.

Well done guys!!