TOP 10 TECH » Video

Broadcast HD Live Streamed Through 3 Cell Carriers at the Same Time – Livestream

Brett Bumeter — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 18:54:00 +0000

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

Month-to-month rental (no commitment) $2,500/month + shipping cost.

Yearly rental (12 month commitment) $1,500/month + shipping cost.

Special LiveU pricing for use with Livestream Platform only.

Includes 30 hours of streaming uplink time per month – all 3G telecom charges included.

Technorati Tags: Livestream,HD Streaming,Goodbye Satellite Truck

del.icio.us Tags: Livestream,HD Streaming,Goodbye Satellite Truck

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UserTesting.com Beware Users Not Really Needed These Days

Brett Bumeter — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 02:04:50 +0000

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.

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TubeMogul Will Tweet Your YouTube Link When Its Ready!

Brett Bumeter — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 18:11:00 +0000

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.

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Utterli-The stream of my Followed's Followed

Brett Bumeter — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 18:14:54 +0000

So the stream at utterli has gotten a lot wider, and it feels like there are 100,000 channels with nothing on.

I’d like to request a feature that might essentially combine some of the power of LinkedIn with Utterli (in concept not in actual plugin or anything).

I’d like to be able to filter the stream based on all the utters of the people that I follow are following.

Ergo see if I can explain that better

If I follow A, B, & C

and A follows D, E, F
and B follows D, G, H
and C (everyone knows that C is a crank and a loon but she makes me laugh) follows Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z

I’d like to be able to see the recent activity for the followed of my followed (that sums it up nicely in words but it should look like this)

future stream source

A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z

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How to fix Drop down Menus to Hover over Flash Objects

Brett Bumeter — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 18:18:31 +0000

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:

paste the following code within the wmode=”transparent” ergo before you close the object tag with a >
you must also paste in an additional parameter tag as follows:

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 . . .

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How to Create Google My Maps Video Demo

Brett Bumeter — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 18:09:30 +0000

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.

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Utterli Login Fault Codes – Mobile Notification

Brett Bumeter — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 17:22:00 +0000

Yesterday, I helped an Utterli user work through several issues with the Utterli service. She couldn’t get her pictures to post to her blog.

There were several problems, and we made it through most of them but not all. (last I heard she was still waiting for support)

Anyway, today I was checking my own mobile posts (pictures/videos sent from phone) and realized that my pictures stopped updating on my blog about a week ago from Utterli.

I had no clue.

I tried to do a manual post and received an error code in utterli stating that my login info might be failing.

Updated the login and I think that fixed the problem.

However, I’d like to request that some dev be done to send a mobile user some feedback letting them know that a mobile submission has or has not been successfully transmitted to either Utterli itself and or any autoposting site options.

I think this should be an opt in option in the settings (kind of like mobile notifications in twitter).

A person could opt to receive via sms or email

- Notification that a mobile post or video has been received by Utterli
-Notification that an item has successfully autoposted to a given site

I think this could help with the user experience and help people trouble shooting the utterli system, possibly reducing the number of times people say "Utterli is not working!" Instead they might be able to identify the real source of the problem, especially when it has nothing to do with Utterli.

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CES 2009 Officially Starts Tomorrow

Brett Bumeter — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 20:17:35 +0000

Tomorrow is the official kickoff of the Consumer Electronics Show. It is expected that this year approximately 120,000 people (down from 160k last year) will come to Vegas for the show. I arrived yesterday to cover the event, see what is new, and more importantly catch up with many interesting people doing interesting things inside of and outside of social media.

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CES 2009 Officially Starts Tomorrow

Brett Bumeter — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 20:14:04 +0000

Mobile post sent by brettbum using Utterli. Replies.

CES 2009 Officially Starts Tomorrow Tomorrow is the official kickoff of the Consumer Electronics Show. It is expected that this year approximately 120,000 people (down...
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CES 2009 Officially Starts Tomorrow

Brett Bumeter — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 20:10:36 +0000

Mobile post sent by brettbum using Utterli. Replies.

CES 2009 Officially Starts Tomorrow Tomorrow is the official kickoff of the Consumer Electronics Show. It is expected that this year approximately 120,000 people (down...
CES 2009 Officially Starts Tomorrow Tomorrow is the official kickoff of the Consumer Electronics Show. It is expected that this year approximately 120,000 people (down...
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