Hello everyone,

I hope you all had a fabulous Christmas and a fantastic New Year. Here in Bath, I have been working away over the holidays on OpenIndie in preparation of a video walk-through screencast that I am preparing. Right now, I’m in the middle of getting that together and it should post on Tuesday the 5th - so keep your eyes peeled.

Next, I want to address the filmmaker tools which I mentioned in a couple of comments and posts on this blog in the past month. These tools were originally planned to go live around Christmas time and were intended to allow the first 100 filmmakers to upload their lists of people who have expressed an interest in their film. This in turn would allow us to send out invites to those people who would become exclusive users of the OpenIndie private beta which launches on March 1st. This plan has changed somewhat. Filmmakers will still have this functionality available to them, in fact, I’ve already written the code that drives it. However, the functionality won’t be launched as a “filmmaker tools” microsite.

The decision to go this route was threefold, first our deadline of the first of a March launch has always been terrifically ambitious and so time is precious. Secondly, we felt that the time it would take to extract the functionality from the core site and polishing it for public release would be better spent on the core site and finally we felt that it was important that filmmakers also had the chance to add their films to the site before their “fans” were invited because otherwise those people invited by that filmmaker wouldn’t be able to request the film immediately after signing up. We felt that was an important first step for the user and vital to ensure the best possible conversion of invite to request ratio.

As I said earlier, I am planning to post the walk through video on Tuesday which I think will give you all a much better understanding of how the site will work plus a little geeky insight for all you tech-heads out there ;) If you have any questions in the meantime - kieran AT openindie DOT com is always open!

Kieran Masterton

OpenIndie Co-Founder