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!

Still busy here, with a bit of travelling on my part as well. Flying to Dallas on American Airlines last week, I was suddenly jolted back to the reality of normal airline travel— dear God, have I been that utterly spoiled on Virgin Atlantic?! On AA, the seats were cramped, flights were late, staff was unenthusiastic, and the "$4 for snacks" pitch made me laugh out loud. Actually (true story), I picked up some food at TGI Fridays at DFW and was waiting at the gate when I thought I’d use the restroom before the flight. I asked the AA woman at the counter if I could leave my single-clear-plastic food container there for a minute, and she quite authoritatively told me I wasn’t allowed to and that she’d have to throw it away. Talking to a friend a few minutes later, we joked: "Damn, if this were Virgin, they’d not only hold it for me, but when I got back, they’d ask if I wanted it reheated!" It’s hardly surprising that Virgin Atlantic passengers rave about the airline while American and other airlines stumble their way toward bankruptcy with business-as-usual obliviousness. (I wasn’t even joking when I said the VAA staff at the gate mailed my postcards, etc.)

Also reminded me yet again of why we blog about Branson companies here on BransonBlog.com… With our 1.5 year milestone quickly approaching, our spring cleaning is well underway behind the scenes. We’ve been promising new features on the site forever now, but got caught up in something bigger along the way, and that work will benefit this site shortly. Here are some of the features we’re working on these days… [Read more]

When we launched BransonBlog last year, the reaction from most people was one of amusement and oh-how-cute pat-you-on-the-head-ed-ness (yeah, I know, not a word). The assumption, of course, was that BransonBlog was just a Richard Branson fan blog, celebrating the most entrepreneurial hot-air balloonist ever and rambling incessantly and only glowingly about his many achievements. In the past few months, though, at least five people have instead asked a better question: Is BransonBlog a brand blog or a fan blog? It’s something we’ve been thinking about quite a lot lately, the biggest question as we rethink and redesign this site.

BransonBlog was originally intended to be a brand blog covering Richard Branson’s ventures. We wanted to follow the news about companies administered by Branson, to consider his marketing strategies and recognize his attack patterns when invading new industries. There’s a subtle (and, many would say, pedantic) difference between BransonBlog and other Virgin brand blogs, in that we care about Richard Branson’s companies, not necessarily companies carrying the Virgin name. The reasoning is simple— if you’re trying to find patterns in the strategies of a specific business leader, the moves of Virgin Radio (no longer owned by Branson) are pretty irrelevant and only add confusing data points. [Read more]

Wow, has it really been three months since my last post?? We were in the middle of migrating the site to another content management system but realized that it wouldn’t serve our needs and decided to delay the upgrade for a bit. Then, I got busy with university, car accident, upgrading my own site, and other random time constraints… and here we are. There’s tons of Branson news to catch up on, including the recent Yahoo contest, and hopefully we’ll be able to cover everything properly over the next month. We’re also hoping to finish that previous upgrade this summer, bringing message boards and other features to the site. Of course, we’d love to hear your suggestions too, so drop us a note at editors @ this site. Cheers.

Thanks to everyone who reported problems with the RSS feed this weekend… Not content to leave well enough alone, I’ve been tinkering with new features in the background and mangled a few things in the process. I’ll repost the Rebel Reactions and Branson vs. Trump posts here this week, but first, let’s roll out a few quick fixes… [Read more]

In the good ol’ days (five years ago), a site launch would’ve been a big splashy event with features to "present" and games to play and all of that. But this isn’t an old-school site. In this new era of blogs and citizen-journalists, we wanted to build organically, rolling out new features step by step, and collaboratively including your feedback and suggestions as we find our direction. Ultimately, we want to be the Slashdot of Richard Branson news, but how we get there and what this site ultimately becomes are up to you Richard Branson fans everywhere. [Read more]