Software runs my life

Month: March 2010 Page 1 of 2

Send Clientexec Invoices using Google Apps or Gmail

As a trial I have recently migrated my email from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps. Google Apps Standard is free (even for multiple custom domains) and therefore significantly cheaper than my current Microsoft Exchange and Windows VPS setup. The built-in Mail Fetcher tool lets you keep your Google account downloading emails regularly (about every 20 mins?) from your Exchange account, while you take your time to migrate your DNS changes over. Once you are done you can shut down your Exchange account and disable Mail Fetcher.

Of course changing mail servers will have some effects, in my case it broke the email function of my Clientexec invoicing system. Luckily I found a great post by Adrian Jon Kriel that fixed my problem (thanks!), and I have reproduced it below:

Problem:
Default clientexec smtp mailer (PHPMailer) cannot handle the required SSL/TLS SMTP via port 465 for gmail.

Solution:

You will need a valid Gmail or Google Apps account with POP3 enabled (Gmail->Settings->Forwarding and POP/IMAP ->Enable POP for all mail)

Step 1) Modify the file: PHPMailer.php in your clientexec directory: /newedge/classes/

Step 2) Replace the following code around line 534:

// Retry while there is no connection
while($index < count($hosts) && $connection == false)
{
if(strstr($hosts[$index], ":"))
list($host, $port) = explode(":", $hosts[$index]);

with

// Retry while there is no connection
while($index < count($hosts) && $connection == false)
{
// modified for GMAIL
// if(strstr($hosts[$index], ":"))
// list($host, $port) = explode(":", $hosts[$index]);
if(strstr($hosts[$index],"://")) list($protocol,$hostPort) = explode("://",$hosts[$index]) ;
if(strstr($hostPort, ":")) list($host, $port) = explode(":", $hostPort);

Step 3) Change your clientexec Email settings (admin->SYSTEM SETUP-> e-mail settings)

Mail Type: SMTP
SMTP Host: ssl://smtp.gmail.com
SMTP Username: username@gmail.com (this will be your gmail login name)
SMTP Password: gmail_password (this will be your gmail login password)
SMTP Port: 465
Send Multi-Part MIME Messages: Yes or No (your own preference)

OPTIONAL

  • If you get “Connection Timeout” errors when u send an email, contact your host to open the TCP port 465.
  • On Windows servers you may need to add the “extension=php_openssl.dll” line to your php.ini configuration file.

IPL Live Streaming on YouTube

Screenshot of the IPL channel on YouTube
IPL brand channel on YouTube – youtube.com/IPL

I have been working on the IPL Live Streaming event that is currently running on YouTube. This has been a huge event for us, with 60 live matches being streamed over only 44 days. This alone is a huge project, however we are also uploading all replays (4+ hrs each) and numerous highlight clips every single day (wickets, fours, sixes, interviews, summary etc.).

The Twitter integration is going really well too, it is great to follow the commentary on the #youtube_IPL hashtag. Unfortunately Trendistic doesn’t support underscores in hashtags, but the general #IPL tag shows huge spikes and that is translating into the YouTube IPL channel becoming the most subscribed and viewed channel in India of all time (after only being live for a week). That’s pretty impressive.

Admonsters Cn-us-22 Publisher Conference

admonsters Cn-us-22 logoThis week I attended the Admonsters Cn-us-22 conference in New York Metro. It was my first Admonsters conference, and was very interesting mainly from publisher, pain point, mobile and industry landscape perspectives.

I guess the key observations that I had were:

  • No-one is remotely happy with their mobile adserving products, mainly around consistency and reliability across mobile platforms and agency/advertiser understandings and future trends.
  • There is a huge chasm between the buyers and sellers of advertising, which is now being filled with a wide (and fluctuating) range and depth of vendors offering to optimise, sell, shift, validate, track, forecast or report on your inventory.
  • Publishers are concerned with their decreasing level of inventory control (lots of finger pointing at ad networks) and are looking for ways to use partnerships (scale) and technology to take back control of their premium inventory.
  • The Adops role has no formal certification or education, but requires sales, technical, marketing, advertising, contracting, client services and research skills in an ever changing market (day-to-day firefighting makes vendor/industry research and process implementation a ‘nice to have’). These two factors also combine to make it difficult to hire new people.

I was at the conference to observe and learn, and I am still digesting everything thoughts from some serious industry experts. Personally my favourite presentation was the keynote by Jason Kelly, who provided a great overview and vision for the online advertising landscape. From an outsiders perspective my overall impression was that many challenges being faced are the result of a marketplace in turmoil. A transparent, all encompassing advertising exchange for a standardised set of ad specs is the obvious capitalist solution, but until then the mash-up of solutions to help you get as close to the supply-demand curve are getting better.

The next Publisher US forum will be in Sonoma on August 15-18th.

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