Spam is a problem for virtually everyone with email accounts. Understandably most companies and email providers, such as Google Mail and Yahoo! Mail, have taken steps to reduce the amount of spam email their users receive.

Users of MovieSite, our solution for Film Commissions, can send emails to crew, facilities, locations and other contacts easily through the system.

One of the ways in which companies prevent spam is through Sender Policy Framework (SPF). Put simply, this is a list identifying which computers are allowed to send email on behalf of a company. For example, there are a handful of servers in the world which are authorised to send email on behalf of openbrolly.com. Email purporting to come openbrolly.com but not from one of these authorised servers is, most likely, spam.

If we are sending email on behalf of one of our clients it is important that, where their company uses SPF, they include our servers in their list of authorised servers. This means that, when an email is sent through MovieSite, it is recognised as valid and not spam.

We have made it easy (if you know what you are doing) to do this.

In the current SPF record for your domain add:
include:spf-c.openbrolly.com

Please contact our support team if you need more information.

Best wishes,
David.

We keep an eye out for technologies that would interest our clients and Popcorn.JS turns out to be one that has particular potential.

Among other things, it provides a framework for synchronising video with web content. Some scenarios might help you visualise this:

• A screen agency creates a video promoting key residential properties in its region. As the video runs links appear next to the video which, when clicked, takes the site visitor to a pre-prepared MovieSite(TM) web brochure for the property currently being shown on the video.
• A travel destination creates a video which shows top attractions. Next to the video there are links to additional information, a list of nearby accommodation providers and a map of where the attraction is.
• A training company’s video is complemented by direct links to the page in the printed manual, or to a quick “test yourself” quiz. In addition that part of the video could be favourited so the user can jump back to it later.

Video in itself is a powerful tool. Complementing it with maps, web links, text descriptions and any other web based content ramps it up from both a marketing and training perspective.

See a demo at Anchored Web (although at the time of writing their server was struggling to serve the video – not a weakness of Popcorn.JS)!

Contact david.sim@openbrolly.com if you have ideas for using the technology or want to know more about the potential.

We will be on hand to discuss demonstrate our MovieSite application for Film Offices covering locations, crew and facilities and production tracking / relationship management. We will also have an official launch of our MovieSite mobile application and What’s On systems.

Cineposium is the Association of Film Commissioners International’s premiere member educational event, held annually in conjunction with AFCI University courses. Film commission staff seek out this lively event for its incredible educational and networking value to their profession.

This year’s Cineposium looks at strategic futures. Any discussion or exploration of future strategies, must seriously consider phrases such as “working sustainably” and “working in partnership”. Any effective organisation has to constantly consider what their back-up plan could be, should the funder or investor decide to withdraw or cut back. To be effective and withstand the ups and downs of decisions that may impact negatively, commissions have to think strategically.

To contact us about MovieSite before the event, or to arrange a demonstration, please email enquiries@openbrolly.com or telephone +44 1309 638077. See you there!

Search forms, search results and all database content can all now be integrated directly into third party web sites and portals. For example, a tourism marketing organisation could offer nearby attraction listings to its member businesses to display on their web site, updated in real time. A screen agency could provide a dynamically changing selection of locations on an industry portal.

Key advantages:

• More control over the look of the site by site designers
• Your database content becomes part of (virtually) any web site – change the look or navigation of your site without penalty.
• More control for web designers
• Leading edge search tools possible – on site widgets, fast retrieval of search results, offline mode

For more information contact David Sim (david.sim@openbrolly.com) or @davidrsim on Twitter.

The more we have looked at film tourism the more we have become convinced that it should become work integral to screen agencies and filmcommissions. Doing it that way means additional work load is minimal but the benefits large.

What are the benefits?

The benefits can be enormous, particularly for non-commercial agencies. Creating a wider relationship with businesses outside of the creative sector has a lot of ‘political’ benefit. A wider range of businesses, and  more of them, understand the value of the service. Also, you can form better relationships with tourism oriented businesses and agencies who often also have significant influence.

Oh, and of course there is the economic impact which is easier to measure if you have relationships with the tourism sector.

We, at OpenBrolly, continue to develop new ways of delivering valuable information and services for film tourism as part of an integrated service.

Useful links:

Kent Film Office Movie Map

MovieSite demo Movie Map

The Independent article

We operate high-availability web sites, portals and services on behalf of our clients, accessed by hundreds of thousands of end users every day. Our services have sophisticated processing capability and we store terabytes of images and videos.

Our clients’ businesses are evolving: new ways of working, increased collaboration and data sharing, more mobile, more visual use of information and more in-depth reporting. Overall usage of the services we provide continues to grow rapidly.

We are therefore evolving our server and data storage platform to enable us to grow with our clients and offer new ways of working.

All core MovieSite, TouristSite and other similar services will be delivered from the Amazon Cloud. In short, this is an incredibly flexible platform that enables us to allocate more data storage, processing power and bandwidth within minutes. Next week one of our clients will be launching a major competition which will generate significant volumes of web traffic and require the storage of large amounts of data. Using a cloud computing platform means that we will be able to bring a new server online just for the duration of the competition, tailored to the needs of our client.

Our existing data will be hosted within the EU – in Dublin – meaning there are no new data protection implications for our existing clients. However, we can now offer service delivery on other sites, including US East Coast, US West Coast, Singapore and Tokyo.

Security and safety of data remains key: all servers are firewalled against intrusion. All data is copied to a second data repository with multiple versions – then backed up again to our own, non-cloud servers. Finally, there’s off-line storage. You can never be too paranoid about data security.

Working with our clients is exciting: moving to the cloud is another way in which we’re continuing to innovate to move forward with them. If you have any questions, please contact David Sim at david.sim@openbrolly.com or on 01309 638077 (+44 1309 638077).

The industry days on film tourism were agreed to be successful, sharing best practice and demonstrating the emerging technologies.

A number of conclusions were drawn, not least that solutions must reflect the visitors’ needs and that engagement of the tourist, through social media, was the next step in developing a film tourism product. The importance of film goers understanding where a film was shot was illustrated – perhaps a condition of local funding and assistance could be prominence of the location in the credits.

OpenBrolly provided a review of the changes in technology: we are in the middle of a major transition to mobile devices, geographic and context described information. In addition, social media, has to be considered in any tourism product design and marketing strategy. New technologies, such as video delivery, QR codes and augmented reality offer exciting ways of delivering content but are not without their real-world constraints – such as mobile operator data caps and slow speeds in some areas.

OpenBrolly will continue to develop examples of film tourism solutions and David Sim is speaking again at Screentourism 11 – Friday 18th March 2011, The Princess Anne Theatre, BAFTA, London W1

The module allows users of your website (or Intranet) to add information about upcoming events. They can be categorised, mapped and can span multiple days or recur multiple times. All events can be edited and / or removed by an administrator, or require a pre-approval process before publication. Once an event is submitted your website users can amend the details of the event at any time – for example to add additional dates or change prices.

The events module is designed specifically to allow public submission of event information but for an organisation to retain control over its publication. Most similar systems require an administrator to rekey information.

Once in the system events can be published on any website. The listings are available as a WordPress plugin and can also be supplied as an iCal feed for import into Outlook or  Google Calendar.

For further details contact david.sim@openbrolly.com.