Hearts of Space grew out of producer Stephen Hill's fascination with space–creating, contemplative music. Beginning in the early 1970s, Hill hosted a weekly late–night radio program in the San Francisco Bay area. What began purely as a labor of love eventually became the most popular contemporary music program on American public radio. Over the intervening quarter century, Hearts of Space has evolved into a multifaceted production and marketing organization encompassing radio, records, CD mastering, and music publishing.

Business Challenge

During 1999 the new media frontier of the Internet began to take the foreground. The HOS radio program is now broadcast internationally on both the NetRadio (Real Audio) and Wired Planet (MP3) sites.

Web broadcasting, however, was not the company's only foray into the digital frontier. Hearts of Space also brought the development of HOS.com in–house, and the site you see today is the company's first created entirely in–house.

Bringing the development of the company's website in–house also brought with it a number of challenges. One of the larger ones being the static nature of their initial efforts. 'The load for updating the static html pages was beginning to give me a serious html–headache.' explained Joseph Jacobs, Director of Technology for Hearts of Space.

To combat this problem, Mr. Jacobs turned toward a more dynamic web serving model, using databases to manage content at the back end. Consideration was given to Microsoft Access as well as larger enterprise applications such as Oracle and Microsoft SQL. However, with their steep learning curves and unintuitive user interfaces, these potential solutions were ruled out.

Successful Solution

Familiarity and ease of use lead Hearts of Space to choose FileMaker as its back–end database solution. 'We had already built all of our sales, promotion and marketing database with FileMaker Pro.' Mr. Jacobs explained.

'Our project could easily have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. By putting in more time up front doing our homework, we were able to create an entirely new, dynamic website in a reasonable amount of time at a price we could easily afford.'

After spending so much time with FileMaker's user–friendly features, it was quite natural for us to jump on the possibilities the new versions of FileMaker had to offer, particularly web publishing and ODBC connectivity.

— Joseph Jacobs, Director of Technology, Hearts of Space

He continued 'We are a small, independent company. It is always necessary to be mindful of costs, but we also have been on the edge of the use of computer technology in the workplace. We have done all of our design work and music recording and editing in house since it first was feasible to do so. After spending so much time with FileMaker's user–friendly features, it was quite natural for us to jump on the possibilities the new versions of FileMaker had to offer, particularly web publishing and ODBC connectivity.'

Hearts of Space did not stop at dynamically served web pages however. Using BlueWorld's Lasso and Imacination's Ch–Ching!, the company embarked on its journey into the world of e–commerce. Additionally, web accessible databases are allowing for the more efficient and more productive sharing of data with offsite consultants. 'They (the consultants) are able to share all of the same data with our onsite staff, in real–time, using FileMaker Pro.'