The way we communicate continues to change, evolve and improve, and WebRTC is the latest technology to advance our day-to-day communications with others. Whether it’s for business meetings or personal conferencing, communicating over the Web just through a browser – no downloads, plugins or software necessary – embraces today’s accustom for ease of use, rapid deployment, real-time delivery and quality performance.
TMC recently caught up with Craig Walker, CEO and co-founder of UberConference, a provider of solutions that make audio conferencing “a breeze”, to discuss WebRTC, how it’s developed a solution to complement UberConference’s solutions and why it is considered such a groundbreaking technology in the communications industry. Walker will participate in a session at the upcoming WebRTC Conference and Expo, happening June 25-27 in Atlanta, Ga., on “Where from Here? – Thinking Beyond the Call” along with executives from Disruptive Analysis, PKE Consulting and UCStrategies.com, Ericsson, Cisco and Constellation Research to discuss the future of WebRTC and explore how WebRTC could change the world in ways that have yet to be anticipated.
1) What have you enabled thanks to WebRTC?
UberConference made dialing into a conference call directly from Chrome available simultaneously with the launch of WebRTC in Chrome last November. This allows UberConference users to now have conference calls from anywhere in the world by calling through the Web natively, without needing to use a separate service or installing anything.
2) What signaling strategy are you using?
SIP, specifically on the client, we use JsSIP as the stack and FreeSWITCH as the UAS (User Agent Server).
3) Are you supporting other codec strategies as well?
Because most of our business still involves the PSTN, we use G711 for much of our codec needs. However, every UberConference that has WebRTC legs is conducted with much higher quality between those legs so WebRTC connected users will be able to take advantage of the much higher quality codecs available to WebRTC.
4) What do you want people to know about your solution?
UberConference lets users join conferences easily without PINs and have a visual interface to see who’s on a call and who’s talking. Adding WebRTC to UberConference makes it easier for users anywhere in the world to take advantage of our service with the highest quality sound possible. Also, since WebRTC calls are free to the end user, they will never incur a cost to join an UberConference from anywhere in the world.
5) What do you think will be the biggest impact of WebRTC?
WebRTC is a disruptive communication technology because it provides very high-quality audio built right into the browser, free and without download. This is game changing and paves the way for whole new types of Web applications, while ultimately pushing legacy communications services to reconsider their models. This is just the very beginning of the WebRTC story and we intend to drive innovation in this industry.
6) How will your customers, specifically, benefit from WebRTC?
UberConference is one of the earliest adopters of this highly anticipated Web standard. Our customers benefit from the ease of being able to “dial” from their Chrome browser and the ability for people around the world to use the service without needing a U.S. phone number.
7) Are you connecting with any other solutions?
UberConference has an extremely elegant integration with both Box and Evernote for document sharing. We also integrate with Evernote to save conference call summaries, which include links to recorded calls and chat transcripts.
8) What are you looking forward to accomplishing at WebRTC Expo?
At the Expo, we want to support and push forward the standard, find new ways to improve our service, and meet with interesting companies that might be great partners for UberConference.
9) What is the one thing you want readers to know about WebRTC?
The best implementation of WebRTC for teleconferencing is UberConference! Try UberConference Pro for three months free using the promo code: WebRTC1.
Edited by
Ashley Caputo
