The WebRTC Conference &Expo has since gone quiet, at least for a while, but one thing that's clear is that the innovations it brought along with it will prove to be loud and clear for the foreseeable future. One such innovation came from Zingaya, which brought along an exciting demonstration as the company arrived at the show, showing off just what its VoxImplant can do.
VoxImplant is a fairly simple interface for click-to-call technology, a mechanism by which a link can be provided—whether it's on a website outright or contained within the pages of an email—and once it is clicked on, the link then activates a complete online call. Often powered by Web-based real-time communications (WebRTC) tools and systems, click-to-call systems allow customers and clients, and others, to interact with a company in rapid fashion right from a Web browser.
The demo showed some simple coding measures that could allow Zingaya's VoxImplant to integrate with a variety of platforms, particularly Salesforce. The demo took just minutes, but this demo of minutes unlocked a series of possibilities for the future, including using both H.264 and VP8 video conversion, in real-time, without the need for transcoding. Additionally, there was a debugger application involved that worked with surprising speed, as well as directly from the cloud, allowing for debugging directly from the browser itself.
Basically, Zingaya's VoxImplant is out to make click-to-call not only easier, but also better. Without transcoding involved in the video mix, video can proceed smoother and less bandwidth-intensive, which is a huge problem for pretty much any video application. Video is a bandwidth hog under the best of circumstances, especially when compared to pretty much any other application like text, voice or pictures. So improving things on that front is just as much a help as anything else. Though the video quality wasn't the greatest, there were likely to be improvements in fairly short order.
Couple significant improvement in video presentation along with a very useful platform like click-to-call and that's a recipe for a fairly substantial entry into the communications market. As a marketing tool, click-to-call has incredible potential thanks to its ability to take advantage of immediacy, giving customers a way to contact the business in question while the call to action—an important part of any marketing endeavor—is still fresh in the user's mind. Plus, it can be added to a host of apps—not just for retail operations—making contact from the user to the developer a simpler and more stable process.
Zingaya showed off a system that may well serve as the future of marketing on a website level, and potentially even beyond. With the gains that WebRTC has been seeing lately, we may well reach a point where much of our calling and contacting—for personal or business use—is done via Web browser. That's going to make a tool like the one Zingaya is offering a very important tool for most small businesses, and well beyond.
Edited by
Rachel Ramsey
