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June 06, 2014

WebRTC World Week in Review


This week the biggest WebRTC news arguably came from Apple during its Worldwide Developer Conference. The company announced integration between its Macs and mobile devices, making it possible to place calls from a laptop or desktop through a connection with an iDevice.

“That’s right. The functionality that WebRTC promises – in-browser calling directly from a website – is now possible in one of the key browsers that has been quiet as WebRTC develops,” Webrtcworld’s Rachel Ramsey commented in a post earlier this week. “Users can now send calls and text messages, including non-iMessage texts, from Macs to smartphones. They can click on a phone number link in Safari and Yosemite will place the call, and they can send text messages from the desktop and iPad.”

Read more about what this announcement might mean for the WebRTC community.

The Apple announcement further adds questions to the ultimate relationship both Apple and Microsoft might have as it relates to WebRTC.

Until Apple shows an open willingness to more tightly mesh IOS with Windows and Android devices, it has little potential to significantly grow market share for the Mac, noted Doug Mohney in an article on the two companies and WebRTC earlier this week.

While the Apple announcement is interesting, “If there's bad news, it is that Apple and Microsoft don't actively support such radical notions as open standards,” he wrote. “In the past, Microsoft likes WebRTC so long as it will support the company's idea of code and services different from the rest of the open standards.”

Read more about the relationship among Apple, Microsoft and WebRTC here.

TMC’s group editor-in-chief, Rich Tehrani, also noted in a blog post this week that by ignoring WebRTC, Microsoft is basically giving people even more reason to leave its Internet Explorer browser for alternatives such as Google Chrome and Firefox. Read more here.

Speaking of Firefox, this week the Mozilla foundation that makes the foxy browser announced that it is revamping Firefox to include an experimental in-browser WebRTC communications client. Mozilla thinks that this change could set a standard for Voice over IP (VoIP) and Video VoIP communications, as we noted an the report on the Firefox development earlier this week.

Finally, this week we reported that 3CX acquired e-works for an unknown sum. 3CX had previously been licensing e-works' Web conferencing tools since October of last year.

“3CX is planning to bring in that Web conferencing system, among other developments of e-works', to augment 3CX WebMeeting,” we noted in our report on the buy this week. “But that won't be the only plan in mind, as e-works will reportedly continue to offer video conferencing services to its current customer base, boasting some of the biggest names in Europe, including BT and Fiat as well as the Province of Trento.”



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