Went on a nice early morning walk around Imperial Palace. Literally. All the way around, outside, around the moat. Its too early and its closed!

I’ve actually been up all night because I want back in to UK time as best I can and try to get some sleep on the plane. Very annoyingly I’ve come all this way and been so busy I have seen nothing of the place. Did go out for a meal last night in a very nice restaurant overlooking the whole city, other than that my only other excursion involved extreme Vodka, I can recall nothing.

So, from what little I have seen these are my conclusions!

If I were a lot less busy I would probably even investigate business out here. The population is 140m, with very high internet and phone usage… that has to be a a good starting point. Now you just have the simple problem of deciding what the business is and what the competition and market is like for that now. There is also a huge cultural difference that has to be understood.

7.10 am now, time for breakfast and check out.

I have had a very busy week in the Ukraine since flying in on Sunday night. I spent one day here in the capital, and then a few days with development office in Donetsk. I would like to come out for a little bit longer in the future so I have the opportunity to absorb some of the culture, unfortunately this week it has been all business and no pleasure, not even a couple of hours free to quickly look at the touristy spots.

I will write a little more soon as I get back and land in the UK, unfortunately I am pressed for time.

As usual, I have outshone myself with my incredible photographic abilities; take a look at these photos! If you’ve never been to the Ukraine, these will give you absolutely no better picture of what the country is like!

Wonderful View from my hotel room….

This is actually a very impressive landmark - which I do it no justice!

Again, I have taken something quite striking and made it look shit!

I am available for bar mitzvahs and weddings.

Will spend the rest of the day shopping and relaxing, then catching flight out of here while all of America watches the superbowl.

Been a good few days, lots of business has been done, presentation went well, and managed to have a little late night/early morning fun in the process. World Dating Partners is going to get a big boost in business from this one event… I would love to take all credit for it - but in reality I am just so excited to be a small part of it.

My brain is going to be ticking away non-stop for a while now because I have just been opened up to so many more massive opportunities. The second I am back in the UK I want to get started working on some of these:

This has been a bit of a mindless rant from me, could be because of my brain working on overload, or it could be that I have sunstroke! I am off now, time to hit some shops and enjoy the sun.

I didn’t enjoy my coffee this morning too much - filter with non-dairy creamer! Same as any other US hotel I’ve stayed in so nothing out of the ordinary or worth complaining about.

I have spilt some of this non-dairy creamer on my desk and it looks like I’ve wasted no time in obtaining class A drugs, however I assure you its not. I don’t do drugs, not this time in the morning.

For anyone wondering what Miami looks like, this is the view from the side of the hotel.

So, what’s the plan, why am I here?!
Tomorrow is the iDate conference where we, World Dating Partners, are gold sponsors and have a very sexy stand. I’m looking forward to the next couple of days, should hopefully meet some great potential business clients, do a spot of networking. Then on the weekend we’re going fishing. Not something I thought I would be looking forward to, but the prospect of landing me a shark has got me going!

Time now for my breakfast, then need to spend a few hours working as I have a mountain of emails to get through, a few calls to make and I will also be making some final changes to my presentation which falls at the end of the iDate conference. I am here after all, not to enjoy the weather, beach, drugs or women.

Let’s not forget I am a clean cut business and family man, a pillar to society!

I must admit I prefer the way busness is done out here, seems to be more laid back, more focused on having fun - for example I cannot remember the last time I was taken to a steakhouse/lap dancing club for dinner by anyone I have done business with in England!
To some extent things are getting more relaxed in the UK, more entrepreneurs about and more people working from home and earning from the internet. However, we are still a long way behind these chaps.

Now I need to find something to do, while the theme parks are appealing, I do not think that it is something one should do by oneself! Time to hit a Mall then, and probably to get ripped off by a cabby to get there too.

Peace brothers.

So all-in-all an incredible success and have so much work to do now going through all the business cards from individuals we met. However, the event was soured by White Label Dating (Global Personals Ltd)….

I was going to bite my tongue, but to be honest I have never seen such a pathetic and desperate display by a company.
whitelabeldating.com is a direct competitor to our site worlddatingpartners.com. I won’t go into detail as to why WDP (World Dating Partners) are superior here - just trust me! And we have been in business many more years.

At first glance White Label Dating do seem like a professional organisation, they also had very good marketing material while ours perhaps is more in need of updating. What let them down was not their cheap tarts hanging around our stand… but their behavior when we and the even the event organisers asked them to move on. Shouting and swearing, and strange practice of flashing wads of cash about. I assume that they have some issue with their personal banks restricting them to only being able to use cash.

Up to now we had not employed any aggressive marketing against them, targeted any of their business or even made comparisons of their system to ours. Obviously they want us to do otherwise. So I began on some very brief research. They are spending a fortune on marketing so it wasn’t difficult to find information:

In the last couple of days I’ve seen some pretty interesting articles about them. Some published by Industry “Experts” such as Mark Brooks from onlinepersonalswatch.com which are hugely inaccurate!

On his site White Label Dating make claims such as:

• “Last month, our top earning partner earned 175,000 pounds”
  This at the time was in fact closer to 8,000. How do I know this? I know that partner!!!
• “Global Personals currently has more than 3 mln members and this is growing at more than 50,000 new members per month”
  Again this is grossly exaggerated - 300,000 is closer to the mark - Join one of their sites, you will be given a member ID!!!

It would seem Mark Brooks is either not as impartial as he claims or not as knowledgeable as he claims - it doesn’t take a huge leap of imagination to believe Mark is in fact part of the White Label Dating PR machine.

I think thats enough on this topic for now, we won’t be declaring war on White Label Dating or on Mark Brooks. Facts will speak for themselves, and as we have already seen, affiliates who join White Label soon get fed up and come to World Dating Partners of their own accord.

Succesfull day: Met with many existing partners I have spoen with many times, lots of contacts for future B2B and new partner sites. Hopefully there might be a couple of contacts that although will not bring direct benefit to us, could be useful personal contacts for future devlopments. In fact was so busy I didn’t even get the opportunity to take break, eat or drink, let alone go around an check out some fellow exhibitors.

White Label Dating, an opposition of ours were very aggressive and confrotational, and in the end very ammusingly almost got thrown out. We have never used them as a target from which to poach partners so it was suprising to see a “professional” company stoop to such levels. Desperation is not good in business!

Another day of the same tomorrow, which if anything could be more intense, if a little shorter.

On a seperate note I cashed in the last of my shares a couple of weeks ago, I decided that holding the cash made more sense at this moment in time, especially all things considered - my inabilty to find time for due diligance, but much more significantly my past performance!