WebRTC enables peer-to-peer communication over the browser. This week we saw a lot of buzz in the space, including seed funding rounds, product announcements, partnerships and more. Here are the top stories this week in WebRTC.
First, a recap of the week before: ITEXPO. ITEXPO features almost 8,000 attendees, and offers a week full of conference sessions, keynote presentations, networking opportunities, product demonstrations and exhibit hall floor time. The week also has many collocated events, including the Enterprise WebRTC Pavilion. We took at look at what happened last week and reviewed WebRTC at ITEXPO.
The week kicked off with news that Pipe, a peer-to-peer file sharing application for Facebook, rebuilt its app to use WebRTC instead of Flash. Users can turn to Pipe for peer-to-peer content delivery and file transfer for up to 1GB files in real-time or store 250MB files for three days in a secure locker service if users are offline.
Two WebRTC companies received funding this week:
- Flashnotes: Raised $3.6 million in Series A funding from Stage 1 Ventures, Runa Capital, Soft Bank Capital and Atlas Venture
- Voz.io: Raised $150,000 in seed funding from Kima Ventures
A video this week depicted what a conference call would look like in real life. The video is so funny because it is so relatable for business workers, especially with multiple people on one call. Many companies are dedicated to improving these typical conference call experiences by bringing it to the Web. WebRTC eliminates so many of these challenges highlighted in the video that can make a call more productive – you can clearly see who is speaking, and since you are face-to-face with people, you can tell when someone is not paying attention, pushing them to actually go distraction-free for a few minutes. There’s also no hassle in trying to get into the call itself – WebRTC solutions are usually set up with a simple link.
WebRTC-compatible browsers are currently Chrome, Firefox and Opera. Two of those companies were in the news this week, with Opera announcing its Opera 20 beta release for Android with support for WebRTC. Google was also in news this week with VidyoH2O for Google+ Hangouts, which is bringing Hangouts to the enterprise. This obviously opens up Google+ Hangouts as a potential video solution for a whole new group of users. With data from analysts like Gartner showing that 70 percent of enterprises have made a video investment decisions with one of the legacy vendors, the inability of Hangouts to accommodate those systems definitely limited the use in many enterprises. The key question is whether enterprises will see Hangouts as a way to extend their video outside their organizations.
Check out the rest of the WebRTC news this week on WebRTC World, and be sure to stay tuned each week for the latest industry news, trends and resources.
