So much Branson news to get to, and we’re obviously lagging pretty badly these days. It’s hard to explain the start-and-stop nature of our work on this site without sounding like we’re making excuses. But the reality is, as we’ve tugged at various strings along the way toward building a better site, we’ve gone off on tangents about technology and features that are just as important to the few of us having fun with this site. (This isn’t a paid site— just a resource to aggregate news about Sir Richard Branson and his various companies worldwide.)

In the meantime, if you’ve seen the latest Superman Returns movie, you might have seen Sir Richard’s brief cameo as one of the shuttle engineers on a Virgin Galactic launch that figures prominently in the movie’s early scenes. In an interview in The Guardian, Branson confirms that he has cameos in both this Superman movie and also in the next Bond movie— definitely much higher profile than his Friends appearance back in the day. I’m sure this was considered a great product placement opportunity for the Virgin Galactic brand, but I’m also not entirely sure that the impression you want to leave with people is that of your plane plumetting out of the sky… Interesting trade-off in the brand marketing vs. viewer impression equation.

On a more serious note, Sir Richard also had a BBC interview that’s worth reading, where he discusses the issue of wealth and the disparity between the richest and poorest segments of the world’s population…

How does it feel to go to an impoverished part of Africa when you’re a multi-millionaire?

"Anyone would feel an enormous sense of guilt going to one of these places - and if you’re in a position to do something about it you’ve got to make an effort," says Sir Richard Branson.

The Virgin boss, who has turned entrepreneurialism into a boy’s-own adventure, is increasingly engaged in the serious business of supporting health and education projects in Africa.

And, speaking at his west London home, he spells out the type of extreme hardship caused by HIV and Aids that puts his own financial success into perspective.

These are some of the reasons that we find Branson an interesting person to track, and hopefully some of the upcoming site features will let us do a better job tracking not only his commercial ventures but also his non-profit efforts worldwide. There’s a lot to be learned from his successes (a very long list of several hundred ventures) and also from his disappointments ("Virgin Cola is still #1 in Bangladesh"), and we’re hoping to add more analysis and discussion of his ventures rather than simple reporting of them as well. So check back again on July 18th, for a new site launch hopefully less fiery than the one in Superman Returns!