A cavalcade of companies did 10-minute WebRTC-related demonstrations Tuesday evening at this week’s WebRTC Conference & Expo in Atlanta. The closely timed demos were rated by the audience, which voted PubNub its favorite, and considered by a panel of judges. And a lengthy new group of WebRTC presenters will show off their stuff Wednesday night in the same place.
Here’s a quick rundown of the Tuesday night lineup.
First up was requestec, represented by CTO Ben Weekes, who talked about voice and video calling and collaboration. He said requestec supports the world’s first video banking application and said the company also supports with its WebRTC solution a U.K. national health service initiative that is now live in three U.K. counties. The actual demo part of his presentation showed an interface he said doctors could use to collaborate with peers, keep track of appointments, view and share x-rays, and more.
Teledini was next and talked about how ineffective more companies are in converting website visitors into customers. The company’s demo showed a solution that is now in beta and another that is coming in a couple weeks. The first featured what the company called a sleek engagement window through which website visitors can opt to click-to-talk, or click to get callback options. The second part of the demo involved a theoretical Web visitor on a Chrome browser landing on a Teledini-enabled site that could handle video, chat, click-to-call, click-to-chat or click-to-video, and that could be configured on the back end to connect those requests to communicate with select employees based on the day of the week or other scheduling preferences of the organization.
Crocodile then approached the podium to tell its story and demo WebRTC-based videoconferencing. The company has built a global cloud signaling network and SDK for Web application developers and the best thing about it is that it’s free, the company says. The SDK can be used to securely connect to the network, which is built completely off of open source software. The Crocodile SDK is open source and includes a Js library. The network allows for SIP peering and XMPP federation, free community access, paid pro access (you get QoS/TURN bandwidth and developer support).
Asterisk creator Digium used its 10 minutes to demo a SIP over WebSockets call on a Raspberry Pi device being served out to a Web browser on a MacBook. Asterisk converts from SRTP to WebRTC, does transcoding, and delivers the call – all of the cost of nothing, the company happily reported. It was a fast-moving and entertaining demo, and the Digium presenters leveraged their time to promote the upcoming Astricon event in Atlanta.
PubNub then won over the audience with its demonstration showing how to make a phone ring, as the company described it. PubNub offers a multicast service that is called PubNub Galaxy, which is in use for multiplayer games and more. And PubNub Pulse is a service for unicast communications. Rebtel, the second largest VoIP provider by subs, is among the users of PubNub.
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Ingate had a demo running in the hall outside the demo event area, but the company took the stage to tell its WebRTC story, introduce something new called G-TURN, and urge attendees to check out its demo. Karl Stahl,CEO of Ingate Systems AB, said the company is interested in helping its PBX/UC friends with WebRTC and SIP PBXs benefit from what WebRTC can offer. To do that, Ingate is offering Q-TURN to help address the new real-time communication infrastructure that WebRTC brings. Q-TURN allows for prioritization and traffic shaping, Diffserve or RSVP QoS over the Internet, and authentication (via STUN and TURN). Prioritization and QoS will be important when WebRTC brings more video onto the network. With all the new bandwidth-loving traffic, you probably want something better than the best effort Internet. Indeed, Ingate has been talking about the concept of Internet+.
France-based Apidaze Labs talked about the idea of “easy conference calls anywhere in the world.” The company offers a second generation cloud communications API to provide easy to integrate development tools for building any Web or mobile communication service.
Priologic CEO Doug Pelton gave a good presentation in which he outlined the company’s three WebRTC products and then demoed one of them for the audience. Priologic’s easyRTC offers front end and back end pieces that let developers use their laptops to build WebRTC apps. Its easyRTC Enterprise adds monitoring, logging, signaling service to the above. It built this second offer as a platform to support its own products and the products of others. Finally, tawk.com, which was demoed, allows users to create free, secure, anonymous video chat rooms with fast startup, and better privacy. It’s targeted at 13- to 30-year olds.
Thrupoint talked about the need to bridge the gap between new WebRTC technology and not old but other technology like SIP to allow for interoperability between different environments. Its demo featured a simple, WebRTC-based banking application. One person had the banking app running on the iPad and clicked on her banker on her IM list to learn more about the status of her portfolio. The advisor needed to bring in another bank employee to help. The demo hit a snag, but the point was that you can stream live video and screen sharing among different people on different devices via a single real-time communications-enabled corporate application.
A brief demo by Temasys connected people in Atlanta, Australia, Nairobi, and Singapore. The company said it was the first public demonstration of WebRTC over satellite. (Satellite was used on the Africa link.) The company believes that places like Africa, Asia and India are ripe for growth, yet include large swaths of people who are not adequately connected. These areas could be real hotbeds for the WebRTC opportunity, according to Temasys. “This is part of our future,” said Bill Lewis, managing director.
A company called Voice Elements also was on the stage during Tuesday’s demos at the WebRTC Conference & Expo. The company talked about its programmable HMP media server and demoed Border Elements, which is a session border controller for WebRTC. The demo, which hit a snag, was intended to show a Polycom phone connecting to a Chrome browser via the SBC. The company explained that the software-based SBC can integrate the two worlds to see if it needs to do transcoding, decryption or other normalizing between the two points.
Edited by
Rich Steeves
