TokBox, a Telefonica Digital company, managed to take home the Best WebRTC Tool Award for its OpenTok Platform at this week's WebRTC Conference and Expo. It's no surprise, either, considering that the platform makes it easy to develop and manage commercial face-to-face applications for embedding in any website or service — a practice which is becoming increasingly popular for use in customer service.
OpenTok actually began its life as a Flash-based platform back in 2010, but has since pioneered the use of WebRTC in commercial applications.
"This industry recognition is a great endorsement of the direction we have taken, and also the strength and vision of the WebRTC community," said TokBox CEO Ian Small in a statement. "With OpenTok, we now have the building-blocks for developers and enterprises to develop commercial applications."
That's not all TokBox has up its sleeve in terms of WebRTC, however, as the company launched Mantis, a cloud-based infrastructure for OpenTok, earlier this year. Mantis offers a significant upgrade to WebRTC client capability, enabling cross-browser compatibility between Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer; cross-device compatibility for iOS native apps and Chrome on Android; SIP interoperability, allowing for WebRTC sessions to be made from any cellphone or landline phone; and reduced upload bandwidth consumption.
Furthermore, TokBox introduced a number of upcoming advances at the WebRTC Conference and Expo to further extend WebRTC into an enterprise-grade technology.
The Cloud Raptor SDK, for example, adds management capabilities to any OpenTok application, allowing developers to create a centralized controller for handling messages and events. OpenTok for Customer Service, meanwhile, is a suite of pre-configured tools meant to make it faster and easier to implement face-to-face chat in customer service scenarios.
Finally, TokBox introduced advanced quality controls for OpenTok, allowing it to dynamically shape audio and video traffic for an optimal experience in multi-point conversations.
Edited by
Blaise McNamee
