I am back from Atlanta, where the good guys of TMC (News - Alert) planned and executed a very successful WebRTC Conference and Expo event in Atlanta. It allowed me to meet a lot of people in this industry in person, and left me with too many new topics to write about.
I spent about five hours as a judge, listening to one company after another, presenting their ideas, showing off their demos, services or products. I ended up with several realizations:
- Video calling is a commodity. If you want to implement it, it isn't that hard or challenging anymore.
- The focus companies are making is in the calling part. Usually less in the business case or in fooling around with the powerful data channel that WebRTC introduced.
- There is no killer app. Yet.
That last one is something I assume will be with us for some time. When people try to derail WebRTC, it usually is around the fact that Skype (News 
- Alert) exist and is already free. This statement assumes the only viable use case for WebRTC is a Skype-like service, and to some extent, the event in Atlanta confirms that. Most companies in the event can be categorized into one of these groups:
- A tooling company, offering APIs or technologies for developers to build on top and come up with the business case
- A Skype-like service with a twist, which can be privacy, customization, branding, embedding in your own site, etc.
- A SIP/IMS extension
None of these have the characteristics of a killer app: tooling companies are too low in the value chain, Skype already exists, and don't get me started about IMS.
Now don’t get me wrong, all of these are viable business models – ones that can work well for WebRTC companies – especially those bent on staying lean operations. I just haven't seen anyone yet that came up with a good enough idea on how to use WebRTC to create a killer app – one no one can resist using.
Until that happens, we can expect two things:
- Companies will grow gradually as the uptake of their service grows, but doesn't really explode
- Global companies with Web presence adopt WebRTC (think Facebook (News - Alert)) and show how real-time communication is just a feature in a larger service
Edited by Rachel Ramsey
