Last week TokBox hosted the monthly SF WebRTC meet up at our offices in San Francisco.
It was a great evening, with a range of speakers and topics from the WebRTC world. This month we heard from:
You can watch a full recording of the event below and if you are interested in hearing more about meet up events at TokBox, you can join our meet up group here.
Communications within businesses, and between businesses, are fundamentally changing. Like all new implementations, communication apps require companies to consider many factors: technology platforms and configurations, human factors around adoption and usage, as well as the potential impacts – both intended and unintended.
For any business, in any industry, security is always an essential consideration. TokBox recognizes this and makes the security of customer data a top priority in the OpenTok platform.
In addition to selecting a secure platform provider, it’s equally as important to architect your application in a secure way.
That’s why we created the “Best Practices: Building a Secure App with OpenTok” guide. This resource is designed to help you ask the right questions while developing your application, and provides best practice recommendations so that you can make informed decisions.
WebRTC is maturing and we can see the needs in the market evolving along with this.
However, with the increased need for rich, digital experiences comes the challenge of building more advanced applications. We know that building real-time video communications can be challenging, especially when it involves more than two participants. To pull off a multi-party call using WebRTC off-the-shelf you’ll need a strong backend infrastructure and a deep understanding of media processing. That’s why we are looking forward to exploring this topic with WebRTC expert, Tsahi Levent-Levi, founder of bloggeek.me, in our upcoming webinar.
We’ve all seen the statistics and now know that mobile usage is at an all time high and is still on the rise. Increasing with this is mobile video consumption. As mobile data has become more affordable and reliable, and with more WiFi hotspots popping up, it is becoming increasingly easy to watch, share and communicate via video on mobile devices.
This is something that our partners at Simpleweb, a web and mobile development agency in the UK, have noticed too. They know that a new wave of apps is revolutionizing the way we view and broadcast video online, many of which are powered by WebRTC.
Mozilla has released further enhancements to Firefox Hello, powered by OpenTok, including the ability to screen share within a video chat. This new feature allows participants to open and share a browser tab or application window from within the chat, making browsing, shopping, drafting or any other activity more collaborative and engaging.
When an issue is reported with an application, an early debugging step is to reproduce the problem. Because our platform is an API, and developers use it for many different kinds of applications, TokBox employees used to have to reproduce problems by building a new application for each new use case. After doing that a couple of times, we wizened up and started using pre-built sample applications as the starting point. This still meant that any functionality that wasn’t generic needed to be added in. What we really needed was an application that used a myriad of features we offered: Enter the TokBox Live Debugger.
At this month’s TechTok, Philipp ‘Fippo’ Hancke, &yet’s WebRTC lead and industry veteran, explains everything you need to know about how to handle failures with WebRTC.
‘If you’re going to launch a WebRTC powered service for financial gain, then you need to have done everything within your power to ensure it works reliably across as many cases as possible.’ Chris Koehnke.
Philipp knows just how to do this so we will leave it to him to tell you. If you want to learn more about how to fail gracefully with WebRTC you can watch a video of Philipp’s full presentation here:
The OpenTok.js SDK integrates beautifully into current HTML elements, providing a great variety of layouts and styles. But why should we stick to the traditional 2D design? Modern browsers offer us the power of 3D visualization with WebGL, a technology that has already opened up a new world of interaction and presentation of data within the browser domain.
With an objective to take advantage of the possibilities of 3D within the browser, we created the OpenTok 3D demo. The OpenTok 3D demo is a multi-party video application which shows how we can integrate the OpenTok.js API with WebGL technology using the three.js library. One of the objectives of this demo application is to inspire people building on top of the OpenTok.js SDK, showing them the beginning of endless possibilities on how we can present the video screens in a true 3D world. Cameras, lights, textures, rendering effects, and more, can be leveraged to enrich the final experience.
One of the fun things about running a communications platform company is watching new use cases emerge as companies and developers innovate using our technologies.
Several months ago, we began to notice a new trending mode of use of WebRTC in the area of Field Service enablement. I’ve also heard people describe it as remote workforce applications, or even fleet management systems.
The key concept is that a field worker – someone who goes onsite to a customer location to effect a repair, make an inspection, or deliver or pick up products, uses some sort of a computer or electronic device as an essential tool for that onsite visit. Increasingly these devices are smartphones or tablets.
It’s predicted that by 2018, 70% of mobile workers will use a tablet or a hybrid device that has tablet-like characteristics. (Source: RapidValue Solutions)
