• battlefield-13a_01battlefield-13a_02

  • Pile 'em high – Glam One rolls out two new verticals, warns Glam Media off its turf

    Steve O'Hear

    Steve O’Hear is probably best known as a technology journalist, currently at TechCrunch where he focuses mainly on European startups, companies and products. He was previously co-founder and CEO of expertise platform Beepl where he helped the company navigate its first VC round, along with seeing the product through development, private alpha and a high profile public launch. In November... → Learn More

    Thursday, December 3rd, 2009

    acquia_marina_new_logo[France] Paris-based Glam One, not to be confused with US company Glam Media, has rolled out two new verticals. GlamZic.com and GlamSport.com will target “independent professionals” in the worlds of music and sport. This brings the total number of Glam One offerings to 7, although the company is at pains to point out that additional verticals “can be deployed in under 48 hours from start to finish”, which struck me as a little odd. Build it and they will come rarely works out on the web.

    Each vertical site offers a mix of social networking, branding opportunities, productivity tools and ecommerce. Or at least as far as I can tell. The sites are exclusively in french. Oh and there’s realtime search too courtesy of a partnership with Collecta. When I checked out GlamSport, however, there didn’t seem to be much going on, although admittedly it has only just launched. It could also be a reflection of the company’s pile ‘em high strategy.

    It’s rare, for example, that a company boasts about the number of domain names it owns. In this case Glam One says that it has registered over 400 two-syllable “glam” domains – number of syllables, apparently, is the new metric for domain names. And since when did buying a domain name constitute a successful business?

    Which brings us to the underlying tone of Glam One’s announcement today. It and only it owns the ‘glam’ brand in France (via a number of local trademarks), a reference to US-based Glam Media’s plans to launch in said country. The press release even signs off with this friendly piece of legal speak.

    “Any unauthorized commercial use of the word “glam” for goods or services in France similar to those of classes 35, 38 or 41 constitutes trademark infringement and could lead to criminal prosecution.”

    In other words, Glam Media, stay off our turf.

    • Moilo

      Google translated the sites… wow… talk about a lame offering… what year is this? 2001?

    • http://voluptuousdate.com/ Chris Klume

      This is bad news for Glam

    • arnold

      This all a non issue, for a couple of non companies. It also points to the problems for companies which are at their core….Ad Networks. Low value and easy to rip off. In 2 days new channels can appear.

    blog comments powered by Disqus