When Roger Hodgson stepped out on stage last night to launch the next leg of his Solo Tramp world tour, he did so in support of the Northern California Center for the Arts and with the backing of a Macintosh application from Galleon Software. Perhaps best known from his days as lead singer of the British rock group Supertramp, Hodgson now takes his breakfast in America and graciously offered to perform a special home-town concert to benefit the arts center located in Grass Valley, about fifty miles northeast of Sacramento.
But with the final ovation still echoing in the hall, it is now the job of Jason Turner of La Vecchia to package it up for an Internet audience. This local Web development company has made their reputation in audio and video net delivery, and will be re-broadcasting Hodgson’s concert later this month in a series of pay-per-view cybercasts to thousands of subscribers in five different time zones. “We’re really on the cutting edge here,” says Turner, “with enough equipment and software to serve Real Video to as many as 20,000 people at once. The challenge is getting all those people to sign up for the concert.”
To that end, he’s been using good old-fashioned e-mail served up by eMerge, a Macintosh application by Galleon Software that combines broadcast e-mail with the mail-merge functionality found in most word processors. “We’re using eMerge to manage our press campaign,” says Turner. “And it took me no time at all to send a nice, personal announcement to everyone on Roger’s mailing list and to the thousands of fans registered on the Official Roger Hodgson Web Site.” But the power of merged e-mail really comes to the fore at the box office. “We’re using eMerge to create our cybertickets,” says Turner. “Each with the unique user ID and password you’ll need to sign onto our server.” In fact, eMerge will import any tab-delimited database file, merge it with a form letter, and e-mail it directly to all the people on your mailing list. Everyone receives their own private and personalized message, which makes it perfect for just this sort of electronic commerce. Since it’s release early last year, eMerge has been gaining quite a reputation among Internet-savy entertainment professionals, including record companies, online resellers, production companies, fan clubs, and impresarios like Jason Turner. For this Galleon Software can thank the continuing popularity of the Macintosh in this industry and their talent for recognizing a new and better way of doing things. You can learn more about eMerge on Galleon Software’s website:
See how an online CD reseller uses eMerge to customize releases:
http://www.galleon.com/emerge/use/businesses
Or download a demo version with full documentation from: