The last story on Channel 4 news tonight was that Groove Armada have left their record company and are now being sponsored by Bacardi for the next year. I find this a fascinating development in where the fate of flailing record companies lies and very interesting to see how the element of a corporate sponsor will work out for Bacardi’s branding. There is definitely an obvious connection of the two attracting a similar youthful party loving crowd to each of their camps. Interestingly, Groove Armada’s commitment only extends to about four new tracks and six global gigs during this period. Will their weekend festival in London now be renamed the ‘Bacardi’ Lovebox Weekender?
HMV finally are cottoning on to social networking. Their site getcloser.com is released in beta and it takes a few weeks to get through a series of emails, waiting for an invite and then to finally sign-up. It differentiates itself from pure music networks such as last.fm by combining people, film, tv and music and connecting them with the knowledge of its users who can contribute content and make friends with each other. Getcloser.com is launched live in the summer.
Social networks galore, will this one succeed? Some interesting changed ahead for LinkedIn and I’m liking the new look and feel too 
‘Till next time!
Filed under: Social networks, Technology | Tags: browsers, flickr, Flock, Netscape, YouTube
And so as one era ends with the passing of Netscape, another begins with Flock. We spent far too long this Friday thinking of meeting room names for our new and improved office. One of the ideas in keeping with being a technology based company was naming our six rooms after browsers. We were stuck at five names and now I’ve discovered the existence of Flock and duly downloaded onto my laptop. I shall try it out and update this entry with my thoughts in due course but so far I’m liking the clean look and it’s forward thinking in bringing together our many Web 2.0 and social services. First impressions are that there is a slight learning curve to go through to really understand all the functionality but there are lots of hints along the way to help you.
We know that in the UK at least that the Google homepage is very popular amongst web users so it will be interesting to see how market share may shift with the Yahoo! search engine being the preferred affiliate with Flock.
So far I have added my flickr page and YouTube and it looks pretty cool…
