I had the chance to interview Chip Wilcox on his latest announcement, about Citrix’ GoToMeeting Free licensing the Temasys WebRTC plugin.
The plugin enables WebRTC to be seen on Apple’s Safari and Internet Explorer browsers. Having used Citrix for some time, I had to overcome the user experience paradigm I am used to, with GoToMeeting needing a download and a giant payload.
With GoToMeeting Free you are just browsing right off the bat. No payload, no adjunct software icons. It just works; Very Cool.
It also just works where the stats say it’s not supposed to. Per Web analytics firm Net Applications, as of January 2015 Internet Explorer and Safari together account for more than 63.2 percent of the desktop and 45.4 percent of the mobile and tablet browser-market share. By licensing Temasys' plugin, service providers, businesses, application developers and conferencing companies can now extend their enterprise-grade WebRTC services to customers who prefer two of the world's most widely used browsers.
GoToMeeting Free is only for three, but Citrix is actively participating with the WebRTC community, and other opportunities may occur in the future. The activities on this particular project started in Q4 last year.
Both companies are working to stay close to the community of developers. Temasys is a member of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards committee and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) working group, which are defining WebRTC technology. These roles enable Temasys to develop WebRTC plugins and other solutions as soon as new standards emerge, enabling its partners and their customers to provide brand-differentiating communications experiences.
The free plugin with Temasys' branding will remain available for download HERE.
Chip stated in the press release that "We have been spurred on not just by the success of the free version of our plugin, but also by the feedback and overwhelming number of requests from developers and enterprises wanting customizations and visualizing new use cases. Having both a free and a commercial plugin is a way for us to help WebRTC's adoption grow faster, so we can start providing services earlier to more underserved user groups."
The most impressive aspect after the fact is that it works simply with JavaScript and HTML5.
Edited by
Rory J. Thompson
