Companies Using RSS Feeds for Employees

Big companies such as Walt Disney, Yahoo, and Amazon are starting to use RSS in two ways: to improve in-house communications and to send out marketing and public-relations information previously relegated to email newsletters and news releases. 

At the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference earlier this month Disney outlined its RSS strategies for both in-house (intranet) communications and its media properties, including ABCNews and ESPN.  They stated "RSS feeds and Weblog software are useful for (a) multitude of business (needs) where information flow is critical." Using RSS feeds is inexpensive compared to other software options, but news readers should be integrated in email clients such as Outlook in order to get more users to adopt the technology.

Some benefits over email include not having to worry about getting caught in a spam filter or being lost in a crowded inbox.  All someone needs to receive RSS feeds is a news reader.  There are pleanty free readers available to download and Outlook, which many company employees already have, have a reader built in. 
RSS doesn't have any of the standard metrics, such as subscribes, unsubscribes, clicks, buys or forwards to measure results, but programmers are testing ways to track how many people are reading which feeds with unique URLs, among other things.

For the full article: https://www.marketingsherpa.com/article/how-to/rss-101-useful-links

‘X-Men: Days of Future Past’ opening clip

A short clip from the opening battle of the upcoming "X-Men: Days of Future Past" has been released.  We see a few of the X-Men including Kitty Pryde, Bishop, Blink, Warpath and Iceman among others.  We also see some Sentinels which are mutant-hunting robots.

This has been reported to be one of the costliest films to make with it's large cast, multiple sets in different time periods and extensive special effects and will be interesting to see how well it will do in the theaters.  This is one of the more popular X-Men storyline and hopefully it will transfer well to the big screen.   I've also included the trailer incase you haven't see it yet.

Star Wars VII filming

Earlier today it was announced that "Star Wars: Episode VII" will be filming in Abu Dhabi for four weeks.  The will be filming scenes set on Tatoonie.  For those non Star Wars junkies out there Tatoonie is the home of Luke and Anakin Skywalker and featured in Star Wars Episode I and Episode IV.  For those movies they originally filmed in Tunisia which is in North Africa.  Disney reportedly chose Abu Dhabi for security reasons, preferring to steer clear of possible political unrest in North Africa.

After filming in Abu Dhabi is finished they will film at their primary shooting location which is outside of London.  While we know that Carrie Fisher, Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford and Peter Mayhew will return in the roles of Princess Leia, Luke Skywalker, Han Solo and Chewbacca and Adam Driver is slated to play the villain, the rest of the cast remains a secret.

EXPENDABLES 3

The Expendables 3 released their first trailer yesterday.  It's exactly what you'd expect from a Expendables movie, a bunch of action stars from the past and a bunch of explosions.  Some notable new comers to the franchise are Antonio Banderas, Harrison Ford, Kelsey Grammar, Mel Gibson, and Wesley Snipes.  I'm not quite sure why Kelsey Grammar is included the only action movie I can think of him in is X-Men 3.  If you liked the first two movies this one shouldn't disappoint.  It comes out 8/15 and if the trailer is to be believed it will be the last Expendables movie.  After watching the trailer below let me know which actors you think should have been in the movie.