Ross Williams

So I’m in New York at the moment for the Future of Web Design Conference (and ad:tech and half a dozen meetings with people who want to invest in my business WhiteLabelDating.com).

And - there’s the small matter of the American Election as well.

It’s the last day of voting today and it’s been an awesome experience seeing and feeling the lead-up to the election and, above everything else, I’ve been absolutely amazed and surprised by the passion Americans have for this election.

I’ve travelled enough in the USA to recognise the political and cultural polarisation in this country but there is a sincere and discernible undercurrent of optimistic passion in people here.

It’s all to easy to slate Americans - it would be true to say that on the whole they’re not all necessarily well travelled or culturally astute. But my God they’re passionate about this election and anyone has to respect them for that.

It’s a refreshing change to the lethargy shown by Brits when it comes to politics - it’s a record turnout here and everyone cares. It’s no surprise that most of the people I speak to are vocal Obama supporters but I have spoken to a few people who will be voting McCain for economic reasons (and is it just me or is McCain’s wife a bit of a Milf?)

I’m heading out tonight for the event party and I’m looking forward to going by Times Square on the way back to soak up the atmosphere before flying home tomorrow - hopefully on the dawn of a new American political era.

For the last 2 months I’ve been Aston-less, having traded in my Aston Martin Vantage Roadster at the end of August to minimise the ridiculous depreciation I was seeing.

Since then, I’ve been pottering around in the Smart ForTwo - when I had the Vantage, I considered the ForTwo a great little runaround to pop to the shops, nip around town and really not care what anyone thought as I knew I had a rather lovely v8 to go home to in the evenings and to enjoy on longer journeys.

However, without the Vantage, I need consider the ForTwo a masculinity-sapping, testosterone-depleting clown car and have only been kept sane by the impeding delivery of my beloved Aston Martin DBS in January.

The DBS was the flagship car of Aston Martin - the very best Aston Martin you can get - until this…

There’s only 77 of the cars being built and these were snapped up within minutes of the One-77 being announced a couple of months ago so I didn’t really take it seriously but - wow, what a stunner.

More info at http://www.evo.co.uk/news/evonews/230355/aston_one77.html

Just checked and realised that it’s been bloody ages since my last post and I need to get going on this properly. Does anyone know an offline Wordpress tool for Mac? Need to make better use of travelling time to blog.

It’s been a manic month with iDate, ad:tech London, budgetting, house buying, server moving and recruiting like crazy.

For readers of .net magazine, you’ll notice my mug plastered around every other page in November - no we’re not taking over the magazine, just done quite a lot of marketing recently for WhiteLabelDating.com.

It’s amazing to think that just over 12 months ago I was still full time at Rawnet and am now running a business generating almost £1million/month in revenues - the last year year has been an incredible journey, so much learned and I hope to put metaphoric pen to paper and put up my thoughts on this blog.

Really looking forward to attending FoWD in New York in November:

http://www.futureofwebdesign.com/2008/newyork/

I’ll be going with the guys from ServicePals.com - we’ve been working on a new version of the site for the past 3 months and there’ll be almost a year’s worth of development going into the new version which launches in November - very exciting, it’ll blow away every competitor and indeed most social networks!!

I’ve got a few days in New York at the beginning of November and am taking some of the guys working on the new version of ServicePals.com with me.

We’ll be visiting http://www.ad-tech.com/ny/adtech_new_york.aspx on Monday 3rd November - drop me a line if you’d like to meet up!