WebRTC Expo 2014 Atlanta Live Blog

Updated June 19, 2014 6:30 pm EST

The webifications of communications is transformational and at its core its WebRTC says Phil Edholm as he kicks off WebRTC Expo in Atlanta at the Cobb Galleria. He says that WebRTC is the next wave of communications. He went through a number of waves – in tech and telecom. He pointed out that the Web needed time ot take off as infrastructure was built. The point here is the waves are getting shorter – he says this wave will be even faster than the others which take about ten years to reach their potential.

He referred to the famous Crossing the Chasm book – explaining we as an industry are around the ramp of enlightenment – about to take off like a hockey stick. (Check out my most recent post discussing this book).

Kevin Cook CEO of Dialogic takes the stage and started off by saying WebRTC – with Google behind it will likely grow even faster. Moreover, he went over the history of Dialogic and the experience the company has in media processing – allowing them to learn what the need are in the market and how to utilize this knowledge to make WebRTC more useful.

PowerMedia XMS 2.0 laaunched at this conference last year has seen tremendous traction – primarily in the CSP or communications service provider market.

See my interview yesterday with Kevin Cook for more.

He says although WebRTC is free, the company can add tremendous value to it.

He showed a video a seven-way video conference call – explaining the company saves $6 thousand dollars per year on conferencing thanks to WebRTC.

The conversation shifted to making money from a commodity like WebRTC – an example shown was how coffee beans are turned into a cup of coffee which you could spend $7 on or more. Value added services 2.0 is web telephony, the new high-speed networks can handle these capabilities meaning more opportunity.

Examples of WebRTC in action we saw included an airport kiosk, a dance studio which used the technology to bring in more students and instructors. A trading turet was shown – Cook said a client of their used the company’s voice technology but is now porting the turet to WebRTC allowing traders to work from anywhere.

Recording, media processing such as ad insertion are value that the company can add to WebRTC he said. The key to success he said is the technology must be business-useful if you want to be successful.

Sessions start now – I’ll resume blogging major speaking events when they begin.

Chip Wilcox with Temasys takes the stage to talk about what is needed to make WebRTC implementations successful. While there are lots of use cases, challenges are lack of browser support from Microsoft and Apple – mobile as well – awareness also.

WebRTC will solbve lots of problems bringing the disparate worlds of web, telecom and tech together. His company has a WebRTC plug-in for IE and Safari. The solution is free, will be supported and at this point will not be open-sourced.

Breaking news: Next the company wants to get WebRTC in WebKit – they are crowdfunding this idea.

The company also launched developer tools and a scaleable infrastructure for developers ot make their apps available to customers. Skyway Developer Platform is designed to speed up development.

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I speak now – so no blogging for a little while – sorry. Next time, you’ll have to come see me for yourself :-).

8:35 pm

Phil Takes the stage again to honor WebRTC Pioneers – the real innovators who were responsible for this market… The standards groups, GIPS, Google – now AMEX, Amazon via the Mayday button, etc.

Congratulations to all the winners – that’s all for today, see you tomorrow.

Also check out other WebRTC Expo interviews on TMCnet

Day 2 Wednesday, June 18, 2014

Phil takes the stage again – he talks about the event from last night – the WebRTC Pioneer awards – starting with Google and branching out.

Serge Lachapelle the product manager at Google takes the stage to talk about making WebRTC a reality. He talked about his history – working at Ericsson in Montreal to pay for school.

From there he went out and started a new company Marratech focusing on real time communications but the 10-person company coouldnt pull it off. He instead licenced a video and audio stack as well as patents. The system ran on Java but was a challenge to pull off. They had partnered with Apple and had major universities as clients.

In 2007 the company was acquired by Google and they were tasked with bringing video chat to users – they chose Gmail as a way to do this. The adoption rates were amazing he said “An amazing thrill.”

Still, they had to solve th echallenges on a larger – scarrier scale – not thousands but millions of users across more platforms and browsers.

They also had to deal with plug-in security – its a very scary world he said – you have to make sure you arent leaving anything wide open.

He says he is lucky to be part of this amazing launch.

20,000 meetings a day take place on Google Hangouts and there are 30,000 employees he said.

The company then decided to purchase GIPS or Global IP Sound – you may recall they were the engine for Skype and most mobile VoIP engines over th elast 15 years.

The next big step was getting Firefox and Chrome browsers to work together.

Now Opus 1.1 has been released to reduce overhead on mobile devices.

He says we are 80% there and now have 20% left – which is the new 80% he said.

The company received a lot of feedback he says.

Screen casting , SCTP, IPV6, CPU adaptation when resources are low, stereo support, etc.

A new version is coming out version 36 and 37 – we will see a years worth of work on bandwidth estimation being deployed. It will do better at guessing how much bandwidth you have – you’ll have better performance on WiFi and use HD resolution more often and stay in it longer. There will be more immediacy when you place calls.

Day 3

Thanks all for being part of the event – be sure to check out the latest tweets, news, photos and articles.

Here are some things which caught my eye:

Tweets:

“Nice crowd for #webRTC code walkthrough w/ @DanielCBurnett & @alanbjohnston. These guys are always good. @Webrtcexpo” – @reidstidolph

“Good stuff #WebRTCexpo, including @ebkell calling bluffs on developer mktg claims ‘Just a few lines of code’” – @robarnolducc

“Great developer sessions at #WebRTCexpo today.” – @tomsheffler

“Cool map mash-up demo. #WebRTCexpo” – @tomsheffler

“Phil Edholm rocked each #WebRTCexpo session he did today. Great content.” – @robarnolducc

“Jan Linden from Google: webrtc is a technology, an enabler. Yes! @webrtcexpo” – @micaelagiuhat

“@AnyMeeting CEO Costin @costin312 nails it with a real world proof case of #webrtc #webrtcexpo being used on his collaboration platform” – @ms1sd

“Almost wrapped up with day 1 of #webrtcexpo. Looking forward to the ITSP tracks tomorrow and Thursday!” – @darrensessions

“Really like that presenters at #webRTCexpo giving actual mainstream brands as eg’s of #WebRTC commercial deployment #NotHype” – @disruptivedean

“Enjoyed the panel on Making Money with #WebRTC @webrtcexpo” – @jbradleybush