How WebRTC fits into Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends

When Mary publishes on SlideShare, millions follow.

Mary Meeker of KPCB had just released her mid year free analysis of internet trends. All 196 pages of it. At the time of writing, there are over 1.6 million views (!) reported on this deck. There are many gold nuggets in there and stats for those in love with numbers. Jett Mall of Unify does a good job at analyzing the impact of these trends on UC. I want to do the same for WebRTC. The tidbits I’ll share here don’t tell a coherent story as they are sorted by way of appearance in the slide deck.

WebRTC Increases the Impact of the Internet in new verticals

In a recent analysis I did on the 600+ WebRTC vendors that I follow, it was interesting to see that the two more notable verticals are education and healthcare. These are two of the verticals where the Internet impact to date hasn’t been big enough yet. Will WebRTC improve that? Probably yes.

The Shift from Static to Actionable Ads is Just Beginning

With the new Buy buttons being added to ads, it is not hard to imagine sales oriented contact centers attempting to get people into a conversation before landing on their website – via an ad. This hasn’t happened yet, which to me is surprising.

Should WebRTC Video go… Vertical?

Most WebRTC services today that have video calling support in them are focused mostly on the traditional horizontal viewing. Should developers start working on “vertical-first” user experiences and not only mobile first ones?

Virtualizing the Physical Contact Center

While the trend is to go self-service in support and contact centers, it will be hard to cancel the human touch required. WebRTC in contact centers today enable removing the brick and mortar part of it and enable agents to work from anywhere – something that was impossible/limited before.

Messaging is Key

Check out slides 46 to 56. Search for Unified Communications, Voice, Video. You won’t find it. And yet, they are winning the world. And yes. They have voice and video. Oftentimes, curtsey of WebRTC.

Note 4 key factors here:

1. Messaging should be coupled with Notifications
2. These are communications hubs and operating systems
3. They are context-persistent
   • History is important
   • WebRTC enables passing context… and making use of it
4. Presence has left the room. As we are ever-present, the old presence paradigm is now less important

India and China – not only developers

In many cases, WebRTC in India was all about companies in India developing services to be used in the US and Europe.

Today, there is a growing trend of Indian vendors developing services for local markets in India, using WebRTC in the process. There are two main challenges here:

1. Bad internet connectivity and quality
2. No WebRTC PaaS players that cover the region of India adequately

There’s an opportunity here, but it will mostly be mobile (check slide 169 in the deck).

As for China, I have less visibility there.

Diversity of Thought is Important for WebRTC Use Cases

The best teams I’ve seen using WebRTC are those that aren’t VoIP developers in their vocation and calling. They come from a specific vertical. They know it in depth. And they are trying to find new technical solutions to it. WebRTC is means to an end for them – a small piece of a larger puzzle.