The WebRTC Announcements Week

Last week was WebRTC Conference & Expo. It also made it WebRTC Announcements Week

It seems like the event last week in San Francisco, hosted by TMCnet, is now the main event for WebRTC. It doesn’t matter how many people attended it or what topics where covered. All that matters is the fact that every other company dealing with WebRTC – issued a press release or a major announcement of some kind.

I decided to bunch up all of the announcements (in no specific order) – hope I didn’t miss anyone…

Thrupoint

Thrupoint launched a beta development program called Juice.

The way I read this – this is a gateway initiative for WebRTC. If you are looking to connect between WebRTC and SIP or PSTN and don’t want to develop the gateway on your own, then Thrupoint provides such a hosted gateway “somewhere in the internet”, which you can access through the APIs they provide.

Acme Packet

Acme Packet, the SBC company, decided to announce a gateway between WebRTC and IMS 3G mobile video telephony. That’s between WebRTC and voice calls on the IMS network 3G-324M.

Not an easy feat, but one that I must question – why? While people have mobile video telephony on their phones (at least those with Android devices and Symbian ones), it never really caught on in terms of usage.

That said, this is no easy feat – I’ve developed and managed a 3G-324M stack in my distant past, so I know how much work that takes.

Acme Packet’s “happy button” makes a lot more sense to me.

UPDATE: The above changes were made due to a comment from Acme Packet that can be seen below I stand corrected.

Twelephone

I’ve interviewed Twelephone here already. It seems Chris was busy since then rewriting the whole site from scratch. Here’s how the new service looks like:

This is a work in progress, and the way it is being designed and implemented, it looks like something Chris wants Twitter to acquire.

AnyMeeting

As I wasn’t in the conference, I can’t even tell if AnyMeeting was there. I haven’t heard from them before in the context of WebRTC, but they did announce during the conference week itself a hackathon they are planning for WebRTC.

This is one way of announcing upcoming support of a new technology to a product.

Platronics

This one is headset-company-turns-software-vendor. Platronics announced source code for WebRTC audio integration.

I can say that this isn’t the first time a hardware vendor is looking at WebRTC trying to figure out how to leverage it. It is the most interesting one I’ve seen up until now.

Mozilla

Mozilla announced support for WebRTC in beta version of Firefox 18.

Nothing to say about that besides the fact that this is progress.

Vidtel

Vidtel announced support for WebRTC in their hosted enterprise video conferencing platform. I wonder how many future calls on the Vidtel platform will end up being WebRTC end-to-end with no “enterprise” video conferencing in-between.

There’s a short video of sorts that shows the capabilities:

Zingaya

Zingaya announced that their WebRTC one-click is… live.

For those asking themselves when will WebRTC become a reality – there are companies with a live, commercial service out there that uses WebRTC already.

AddLive

AddLive announced new customers on their platform. This includes Wello, Buzzumi and Hall.

So it isn’t that we just have live services, but we also have customers for these services.

Voxeo Labs and Solaiemes

This week we’ve also seen a partnership form between Voxeo Labs and Solaiemes.

This shows two interesting developments:

• A marriage between WebRTC and the telephone number with a focus on carriers as a target customer. The worlds RCS, Joyn and Gateway were naturally a part of the announcement.
• Voxeo is now doing also video and not only voice.