Fortunately, Wowza has made installation super easy and have even provided an array of example applications to get you started. To install the server, just download the Mac OS disk image file, double click on the set up file, and run through the instructions!

Now let’s get the server up and running. We’re going to startup in standalone mode rather than service mode.

Running the server standalone is best for developing Wowza Media Server Pro custom applications since the server can be started and stopped quickly and server log messages can be seen immediately in the console window. Running the server as a system service is most often used for server deployment where there server needs to continue to run even after you log off the machine.

Starting up in standalone mode is done with the following commands in Terminal:

cd /Library/WowzaMediaServerPro/bin
./startup.sh

If this is your first time starting the server up, it should ask you for your serial number that was emailed to you when you “bought” your free developer license.

Alright, so we have our server running, now the fun begins!

1. Navigate to /Library/WowzaMediaServerPro/examples/VideoRecording and run the install.command file.
2. This will install the example video record application in /Library/WowzaMediaServerPro/applications.
3. Now open up /Library/WowzaMediaServerPro/examplesVideoRecording/client/videorecording.html in your browser and you’re ready to go!

Click record and stop when you desire. Then watch it play! If you don’t see the camera view, right-click on the record button and select settings and choose your webcam under the camera icon.

Also of note is that the file you just recorded was saved to /Library/WowzaMediaServerPro/content as videorecording.flv. You can edit this location in the /Library/WowzaMediaServerPro/conf/Application.xml file. (see page 21 in the user guide)

That’s it! Pretty simple right? This will provide the basis for installation on EC2 in the next tutorial where we’ll get into a little more detail.

Answer: You need a flash server and up until now, you only had one option ready for production use: Purchase Adobe’s Flash Interactive Media Server for almost $5000. (To be fair, there is a trimmed down version without video recording available for $995, but that doesn’t fit my needs.)

In my case, I’ve yearned to implement flash streaming in some of my projects - namely Echonote - but five grand is a pretty penny for bootstrapped projects.

Thankfully, there’s a new kid on the block: Wowza Media Server Pro which is now available for $995 with features that top Adobe’s offerings. Not only that, they offer Wowza Media Server Pro for Amazon EC2 which opens up the playing field even further. For roughly $100 a month(not including upload/download charges), you can have your very own Flash Media Server running on an EC2 instance.

Over the next couple of posts, we’re going to be looking at installing a video recording application with the Wowza Media Server Pro10 developer license on a Mac to get our feet wet and then onto running the app on EC2 with persistent storage on S3.

If you feel like getting a head start, make sure you have the following items set up. We’ll be using all of them!

• Webcam
• Amazon EC2 account
• Amazon S3 account
• Wowza Media Server Pro10 developer license
• Wowza Media Server Pro EC2 license
• S3 plugin for Firefox (optional)

Thankfully, I’ve found more time to put into Echonote, Startup or Bust and a few other endeavors over the last couple of weeks and am looking forward to getting back into the swing of things.

On a different note, Philly is booming with great stuff going on all the time; from PHP meetups to Philly on Rails to Agile Philly and many others. So if you’re in the Philadelphia area, tear yourself away from your computer and get out to meet some really great people!

Here’s what’s going on this week:

• Tues, Feb 26: Philadlphia Computer-Human Interaction Meeting - “Taxonomy is User Experience” by Dave Cooksey
• Sat, Mar 1: IndyHall Wordpress Workshop #1 (IndayHall Calendar)

Did I miss something? Let me know in the comments!.

“Could you try swiping again? It didn’t go though.”

That always happens; my card is practically falling apart it’s so old

“Oh I see, can you please flip the card over? The magnetic strip needs to face to the left; like it shows on the pin pad.”

Ok hotshot, it’s swiped.

“Credit or debit?”

“Credit.”

“Great, just hit Cancel then Yes.”

Ooh. Where is that cancel button? Why am I pressing Cancel anyway?

“Cancel is that one on the bottom.”

Okay, I found Cancel. Now I just have to hit the Yes button. It must be that bright green one right?

“Yes is the yellow button that is two buttons above the green button, dumbass sir.”

Two buttons above the green? This one or that one? The words are a little too small to read….

I’m sure you’ve had a similar experience at some point or another; it’s nearly a daily occurrence for myself. So back to the original question: What can we learn from these hard-headed pin pads and apply to our online applications?

1. Your users cannot read your mind.
It is very easy to become too comfortable with your product during development that you start to believe that since you know your product inside and out, then everyone else does also. Make it a point to consciously review this during development and regularly run simple usability tests. (my favorite: have mom or grandma run through the application. If they get it, you’re onto something.)

2. Clearly and properly labeled actions are essential.
In this case, the button labels were too small to see and the image directing the user which way to hold the magnetic field was not clear. In addition, requiring Cancel to be pressed to choose a Credit transaction is not ideal, to say the very least. Again, make sure your labels are making it through to your users.

3. A simple interface is not always easy to use.
A card pin pad is a relatively simple device: you’ve got your numerical buttons along with the action buttons. The simple task of purchasing a coffee with this simple device becomes difficult when the interface is convoluted. Choose your interface wisely and be careful not to oversimplify things. If you can’t budge on keeping things simple, tooltips and on page descriptions are great ways to clue your users in to more complicated processes.

An Echonote Example

Every time a user on Echonote initiates a new note, they select everyone they want to send the note to. Users can also save groups so that they don’t have to manually select each person every time they write a new note. To make group management usable and unobtrusive, I wanted to allow users to save and remove groups right at the time they were writing the note instead of having a separate and cumbersome group management page. Using groups had to painless.

Below you can see the Save a New Group field with the original description, “Save your selected friends to a new group.“

Apparently, what I thought was a perfectly fine description was not connecting with the users. A good portion of them had ignored this feature simply because they were confused as to what exactly to do with it.

To make a better connection, the description has been changed to, “Type a name below to automatically save everyone receiving this note into a new group to use next time around.”

It’s a little wordy, but it does help to break down the group saving process by explaining what exactly the user has to do and the benefit doing so.

Moving Forward
As you continue on with your development, keep your users in mind and involve them as early in the process as possible; it’s invaluable. Hopefully we’ll all eventually live in a pin-pad syndrome free world.

I originally thought I’d farm out the task to someone more qualified to do the job, but thanks to Colin Devroe, I stumbled across the excellent Blueprint CSS framework. This framework really gave me the confidence to tackle CSS for the first time without having to wrestle too much with cross-browser issues. One of the greatest things about the framework is that provides an awesome base for grid design with vertical rhythm.

Looking Ahead

With the redesign out of the way, it’ll be back to the regularly scheduled programming here at SoB. Well except for the fact that I wandered a bit off topic in the past and I’d like to change that. From here on out I’ll be focusing primarily on building online startups with of course sharing my own experiences with Echonote.

Speaking of Echonote(still a bit rough around the edges, so please excuse the mess), we’ve been doing some small scale user testing over the last few weeks which I’ll be sharing in the next week or so. A few important fixes and I’ll be on to testing with a larger user base.

Looking forward to sharing more in the near future as things move forward with Echonote!

• Thanks again to all who participated and/or donated in the Blogathon - the experience was extremely rewarding.
• Thanks to the one and only, Alex Hillman, whose top donation won him the $50 iTunes gift card. Enjoy!
• Echonote is a bit behind schedule, but progressing nicely. I planned on releasing to a small user base this week but of course have run into the unexpected hiccups along the way. Just a few more tweaks on the back end, then over to the designer to tidy up the front end and we’re ready for the first launch. This will happen in approximately two weeks.
• Soon after Echonote is out into the wild, I hope to give SoB a nice makeover with a new look and content refocus.

Exciting things to come as Echonote approaches launch!

1. For those of us who are unfamiliar with you, could you briefly describe who you are and what you do?

PhindMe is an Internet marketing company, building a mobile-marketing platform that improves the delivery of local business information to consumer’s mobile devices. We combine a number of Web 2.0 and mobile technologies onto an advertising-based search platform that local businesses use to increase their revenues. This patent-pending platform is distributed to local businesses using an indirect model, as we partner with existing print and Web-based publishers of local-business content that need a quick-to-deploy mobile-marketing service. So our approach is to help those local business content intermediaries that today are being displaced by search engines and social networks, and providing them with tools to fight back and regain advertising revenues that are being lost to new media companies. We are in beta testing now and expect to go nationwide with the service over the next six months.

2. You’re in a unique position in that you are bringing mobile social media to brick and mortar establishments. Has it been hard to introduce this type of marketing to these businesses?

Prior to building our platform, we surveyed a number of local businesses about this type of service and got great feedback. Everything points to the fact that businesses are always looking for new ways to reach consumers, but they also want something that is easy-to-deploy as it is budget-conscious. We also need to consider the fact that most local businesses still don’t have something as basic as a website. So there’s a huge untapped opportunity to help brick and mortar establishments reach consumers using more fluid conversations than you can with static websites.

Here’s something to consider: the irony of the Internet is that it helps you find a business half-way around the world, but it’s nearly impossible to find the same type of business in your town. That’s where we come in, trying to help local businesses create new conversations with consumers as they come into their area. We think the mobile phone, with its evolution as an information tool, will be a great way to do this, and that local businesses will be able to improve their marketing to consumers. We just need to make it simple. And cheap.

3. Phindme originated from an MBA project at Drexel University. What have been the pros and cons of creating your startup in academia?

The great part was the mentoring and access to resources that are part of the university experience. Even today, we pull on university resources available to us, and in-turn we hope to become part of the success story for Drexel. There really haven’t been a lot of downsides, other than we had to delay the commercialization of the business a year until we finished our MBA program, otherwise I’m not sure we would have been able to concentrate well on either.

4. Building relationship with classmates is one of the more common answers to how new entrepreneurs can find co-founders. What are your thoughts on founding startups with classmates? What lessons have you learned about sharing equity with these co-founders?

We were very lucky in having created a great team of four, almost by chance. The synergies of that team carried us through the first phase of our existence, and all four are listed as inventors on our patents. Some very bright people. Of course, as the business evolves, each founder needs to determine their commitment and desired place in the business. Because at the start, all four founders had full-time jobs elsewhere, it was a different decision criteria for each. So we had to go through some difficult discussions to ensure that we were making the best use of our equity. In the end, we restructured our membership agreement to reflect the desired commitment of each founder, which enabled us to use our some of our equity to attract new talent. That hopefully benefits all founders.

5. Has your business plan that took you to the finals in the Drexel business plan competition played an important role as you’ve moved forward?

That first plan was started with a lot of great ideas which made it very product focused. What we’ve learned in testing our ideas on prospective customers and with the help of our advisory board is that the business model is equally if not more important than the product. So over the course of the past year, we’ve probably gone through 3-4 iterations of the plan, refining it each time to get to an optimal state. Of course, as new technologies come on-line, and as new customer conversations generate new ideas, you always have to go back to the plan and refine it. For example, the iPhone didn’t exist when we started the business. Now we have to consider how that plays into this evolving market. It’s important to keep in mind that the business plan itself is much less important than the thinking and planning processes you go through to develop it. No doubt we’ll always be refining it.

6. You have hired a top notch lawyer and are pursuing 3 patents. Besides the fact that the legal side of your startup is well taken care of, what other benefits does a prominent lawyer bring to a startup?

Our experience with lawyers has been mixed. We have recently transitioned from a firm that was not very responsive to a firm that seems to be in tune with the needs of a startup. I don’t think we’ve realized the full benefits yet as we are just starting our fund raising, but I would say that their network is the biggest benefit. A well connected firm will be able to help you with solid introductions in the investment community. We’ve already had some of that benefit, and I’m confident that we will be represented well. Some advice: if I had to do it over, I would probably retain a couple of different firms. Maybe one for the business and investment side and one for the intellectual property side. In a large firm you end up with different lawyers anyway depending on their practice area, so it wouldn’t seem to hurt by using multiple firms and seeing which is the best fit.

Thanks very much Chuck; we’ll look forward to watching PhindMe grow and progress. All the best!

1. For those of us who are unfamiliar with you, could you briefly describe who you are and what you do?

I’m a Netscape Scout. I submit stories of interest to Netscape, help in the endeavor to remove all spam from Netscape, redirect stories breaking the middle-man rule to their original source, and generally serve as leaders in the social news space. However, I wouldn’t have gotten my job without the help of Digg.

2. How long have you been digging? Why did you get started?

I registered my username in August of 2005. I lurked around the site for a while before that, but finally joined the site to submit a story that I thought was interesting at the time. Even though it only got 7 diggs, I was hooked.

3. What’s more important in being a successful Digg user: Building friendships with other users or writing catchy headlines and overviews?

I think of Digg as a marketing war. Your product (story) will be grow or disappear depending on if your title and description catches the eye of the user, if the content is appealing, and if your reputation is good. You should have a good mix of these attributes to have a popular story.

4. Where do you source your submitted articles from?

I get my stories from a wide range of RSS feeds. I try to not limit myself to mainstream stories, since it’s most likely that someone else has already submitted the story before you.

5. Where do you think the line is drawn in what is ethical or not when charging for digg services? (ie. offering advice on writing diggable content, digging a story solely because you’ve been paid, etc.)

I don’t agree with the idea of paying for votes, but as long as it doesn’t break the law (the terms and conditions), people should be allowed to do what they want to make their story popular. The internet is a democracy, right?

6. What have been some of your biggest frustrations with Digg?

My biggest frustration is the number of stories that never reach the frontpage. The ironic thing is that the site was created to recognize all the great content that was Slashdot didn’t feature. Maybe someone should do the same for Digg

7. What should someone definitely not do, when submitting to Digg?

NEVER WRITE IN CAPS LOCK TO ATTRACT ATTENTION or **use symbols**!!!! You don’t even need to know how to spell or use correct grammar and punctuation, just avoid looking like spam, since many people are hardwired to press the delete button at the sight of spam. One other thing is submitting something in a language other than english. Those stories are doomed from the start.

8. What’s the best thing someone can do to get their great content noticed on Digg?

There isn’t a magic shortcut to having a popular story. If you find something interesting and want to share it with other users, just go ahead and submit it. When I first registered, it took me a hundred days before one of my stories finally made the frontpage. Just keep with it.

Thanks for taking the time to share your insight with us. Just one more question: When are you going to Digg all of these great interviews?