Livestream announced a new mobile system, that fits in a backpack.  It lets you plug your HD camera into the gear in the backpack so that you can film and transmit in real time.  Their gear uses 3 different 3g carriers at the same time.

Feature set

• Turnkey hardware solution available today directly from Livestream
• Built-in wireless connection, encoder, battery and touch screen
• Six load-balanced 3G/EVDO modems included with data contract
• Power up, plug in any DV camera and press one button to go live
• Highest Quality – Up to 1 Mbps H.264
• Ideal for sporting events, city hall meetings, paparazzi, university graduations, transmission from a moving car, weddings, ceremonies and a variety of enterprise applications.

The battery pack and spare can give you up to 6 hours of constant HD streaming capabilities.

Pricing

During an SEO meetup meeting, I heard a referral for UserTesting.com.  Its a service that charges $29 to provide a website owner with both a video and written review of the usability or navigability of their website.

They charge $29 and pay a person $10 to capture screen video of their navigation of the site.  I think this could be a useful service for web designers and especially companies looking to test landing pages or even better checkout processes.

But if you are thinking of possibly making $30-40 per hour as the site itself mentions, watch out and reconsider applying!

I went through the application process tonight.  I thought I might make a good reviewer since

• I create video tutorials all the time
• I design web sites and am not inexpert at providing useful critiques for improvement
• People solicit my advice on this type of thing all the time
• I have a good deal of marginal or additional time where I could slip in a good review
• Plus, I thought more exposure to good and bad websites might help improve my own perspective and web design skills.

So I applied for an account, which took about 3 minutes.

I was then prompted to download and install their screen capture software.  Its kind of an automated combo deal.  It captures video from your screen and your voice as you narrate what you are thinking while you are working through any given site review.

After you download and install it, they have you work through what is supposed to be an example site (in this case it might have been a real site as the thing almost charged $26 to my PayPal account when I was testing the checkout process!  WATCH OUT FOR THAT ONE! )

Now despite almost taking $26 from me by accident, I don’t think the site is a scam.  It came from a trusted referral of a user that purchases reviews from them regularly.

I completed the video and the screen recorder proceeded to work the upload, which took forever.  I upload video all the time, and I’m guessing that this was an upload of a fully uncompressed video so the file size was probably about 120 mb if I were to guess based on the speed.

After all of that work (about 30 minutes of applying, recording a 12 minute video, like a try out or audition, and 16 minutes of upload time) I received an email that said the following:

Dear Brett,
Thank you for applying to be a user tester on UserTesting.com. We’ve received your sample video and written review.
Your demographics, video, and written review will be part of the algorithm used to determine how many jobs you receive. If you’re a fit, you’ll receive emails notifying you of paying jobs as they become available.
If you do not receive any emails from us within three weeks, then it is likely that you will not get any paying jobs. Unfortunately, this is the case for most applicants, since we currently have an oversupply of user testers.
The UserTesting.com Team
http://www.UserTesting.com

Well isn’t that a fine howdy do.  They could have mentioned that up front before I even bothered to go to all that trouble. 

So in general, I think this could be a useful service if you need in depth insight into what other people think of your website and how they use it from one page to the next.  At $29 I think its a bit of a bargain.

However, if you are thinking about reviewing sites for the service, I’d recommend thinking twice before investing the time for the service, especially as they have an OVERSUPPLY of testers. 

I can appreciate their oversupply, very common in internet businesses like this, but they should really offer up a disclaimer or simply shut down their application process for now, that must be a waste of their bandwidth and storage space not to mention potential goodwill of designers like myself that are potential customers as well as reviewers, not to mention bloggers. 

Parting Tip

If you do still go through the application process, I’m not sure what to think about the written review part of the site.  They sell customers both a video and a written review.  By the time you do a 5-15 minute review, you have covered a lot of ground.  They then throw a comment form at you to ask you a few questions.

The form itself is not designed in a way that really promotes the write up of a good review.  Its more of an open ended survey.

If they are judging reviewer auditions based on the written results, I suspect they might nix mine.  It was an average write up, even if the video review I did was pretty good.  I frankly didn’t realize that this ‘survey’ I was completing would actually become the ‘written review’.  There also does not seem to be anyway to preview your review, spell check it, nor edit it after the fact.

If you are looking to buy reviews, I’d caution you to expect good videos and mediocre to average written reviews.

Here’s just a quick tip, something I noticed on TubeMogul today.  I had just uploaded a video on TubeMogul to be launched through YouTube and other video services.

After it had been launched, I was given the option to connect to YouTube as well, which I did.

Now when one of my videos goes live on YouTube, a link to the video will be tweeted on my twitter account for me automatically. 

The cool thing is that they wait until the video is live.

For a while now, I ‘ve had a bit of a flash problem.  Some of my drop down menus, that are generated via css, drop down behind flash objects that I embed on my wordpress paqes, such as flash images generated by snagit (images with clickable hot spots) or youtube videos, or screencast videos.

I found this particularly helpful for menus that I have created with my preferred WordPress Theme Generator, Artisteer.

I found a partial fix that solves the problem for general flash or swf file objects, even youtube videos, but I’m still stuck on the screencast video option.

I found the solution in the comments section of this article.

The comments dialogue was a little difficult to follow, as people randomly offered up possible solutions in a comment brainstorm.

Ultimately, I was able to make the following actions work for me:

1. paste the following code within the <object tag : wmode=”transparent” ergo before you close the object tag with a >
2. you must also paste in an additional parameter tag as follows:  <param name=”wmode” value=”transparent”>

This created a solution that worked for me in both Firefox 3+ browsers and IE7.  Screencast has always provided problematic embedding code that has given me other fits in the past.

Note most people in the discussion seemed to settle on a slightly different solution using javascript and div tags.  If I could figure out how to get the Screencast video to render from javascript I might try this solution as well, but I have a suspicion that this might also generate code that is not valid xhtml . . .   

<script src=”swfobject.js” type=”text/javascript”></script>
<div style=”float:right;z-index:-100;” id=”player”>
This text will be replaced
</div>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
var so = new SWFObject(’slideshow.swf’,'mpl’,'310′,’310′,’8′);
so.addParam(‘allowscriptaccess’,'always’);
so.addParam(‘allowfullscreen’,'true’);
so.addVariable(‘height’,'310′);
so.addVariable(‘width’,'310′);
so.addParam(“wmode”, “transparent”);
so.write(‘player’);
</script>

Here is a great little video put together by Google that demonstrates how to create a Google My Map.  A My Map is a customized Google Map that can include your own journal of places you have been, paths or routes you have traveled, sites you have seen, pictures or video you have taken and more.  It can be kept private or published publicly to share with others.

These can also be useful for sharing or publishing out to your website to help share instructions to customers, clients, readers and more.

For a lot of detail on how to work with My Maps visit Google’s answer section.