Tis the Week before Christmas

And what a week – after two difficult years we can look forward – and we are looking forward. The big big news is that I have just launched the start of the beginning of my rentals site .

This is the brief story – once upon a time my family and I crossed the sea from England and came to live in France, like many before us we planned to rent accommodation, chambre d’hotes, to give us some income. My background was in informatics and marketing so as it was the mid 1990s and I could see that the Internet was going to be huge, I put everything into marketing our rentals on the Internet through my own websites.

In those far off days I could find and register names like RentalsFrance.com and 1stVacations.com – I had three letter domain names and many local and National town names – I was one of the first people to make a villas rentals website and I regularly talked with other sites for joint ventures and ideas, some of those sites are now huge and selling for many millions.

I decided to keep my sites developing, but I was always looking for a strategic partnership to help me realise the potential of property rentals and sales, not just in France, but globally.

In December 2005 I thought I had found the perfect partner and I let them take control of all the sites (except one thank goodness). In return I was promised involvement and a share of the future – nothing happened, I was paid a little for the use of the names, but I lost my business, the sites went dead for six months and I have never recieved another penny. It was heartbeaking to see ten years of work thrown away. Today only one of the websites they took over is operating and it is a shadow of what it was.

So today I am starting again, to begin with I am rebuilding exactly what I had, contacted all my old friends and customers and will be getting back into the Internet business – except things will be very different in 2008 to what they were in 2005.

The Internet has grown up – from being an untidy noticeboard it has become a vast network of communities offering opinion, entertainment and education.

Instead of making owners pay to display, my philosophy is to give the supply and delivery of all information free and to create a place where owners and renters or buyers can find each other. I will make applications and integrate the sites with places like Facebook and Myspace where I can also make similar groups. That is the dream and I am working hard to make it happen.

I will be using the only website I have which is www.Nizas.com but for now you can see the first of my new rentals websites (OK it looks a lot like my old rentals site at the moment) at wwww.AllRentalsFrance.com .

I hope to be working with some new friends I have met through this newsletter, but I need some good business and development people, writers and designers and all the help I can get. I would love to hear from you so please contact me.