Introducing the Annotation Widget in Beta

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Icon_set-Annotation-121115Embedded communications is so powerful because of one very important factor – context. Whether that’s a web page, presentation, LMS, medical scan, (the list goes on), context enhances the conversation. Better still? When collaboration features are layered on top.

Using the OpenTok platform, our aim is to make it super simple for you to add rich collaboration functionality to your apps. Today we’re happy to introduce the Annotation widget for the OpenTok platform in beta –  a pre-built UI component that can be quickly added to your application. The widget adds annotation and frame grab capabilities to the OpenTok web, iOS and Android SDKs and is  completely customizable.

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The impact of Google’s new Chrome security policy on WebRTC

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UPDATE 9/16/15: After we published this post Google announced that they are pushing back the release date of the HTTPS security change. They’re estimating that it will now be released to production in December 2015. 

Google recently announced a security policy change that will impact future versions of the Chrome browser. Any website which has integrated geolocation technology, screen-sharing, WebRTC and more, will now be required to be served from a secure (HTTPS) site.

We at TokBox are supportive of this update as we believe operating your WebRTC-based applications through HTTPS is a best practice and offers enhanced security. In addition, it has the added bonus of improving your end-user experience by remembering their hardware settings, and even allowing screen-sharing (if you choose to implement it).

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White paper: Beyond E-health – Embedded Communications in Healthcare

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BeyondE-healthIn recent years, the shift in behavior towards digital, on-demand services together with the massive increase in demand for healthcare has created an unprecedented challenge for the healthcare industry.  Providers have been forced to reinvent their existing care models, offering more of their services online.

In line with this, consumers are increasingly turning towards on demand healthcare services that they can access online, whenever and wherever they need them.  In fact it has been estimated that by 2020, over 78 million consumers will use home health technologies.  This is a dramatic increase from 14 million in 2014.

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TechTok: Designing Your Data Warehouse

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periscopeYour data warehouse is the core of your analytics setup. Whether you’re collecting events or ETLing from a prod replica, your warehouse needs to be organized to make analysis queries fast and easy.

Fast data analysis requires using the right schema design for your data and taking advantage of the performance features in modern data warehouses like Redshift.

Join us at this month’s TechTok, where Tom O’Neill from Periscope Data will discuss how Redshift uses distributed data and columnar storage to speed up query execution, as well as how to leverage these optimizations in your schema design. You can find out more about the event and register to attend here.

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TechTok catch up – Designing Your Data Warehouse

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techtoksAt November’s TechTok, Tom O’Neill, CTO of Periscope Data , gave us some ideas about how to design data warehouses.  Tom focused on how Redshift uses distributed data and columnar storage to speed up query execution, as well as how to leverage these optimizations in your schema design.

Watch the full video here:

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Announcing OpenTok Support for Bitcode in Beta

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bitcodeWe’re happy to announce the release of the OpenTok 2.7.1-beta.1 Bitcode version.

Apple added Bitcode binary support for developer apps as part of the app thinning process. The reason behind this is to minimize the end user download app size.  Prior to Xcode 7 & iOS 9, developers upload the native binary and it’s the final executable that users download.

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Fox Sports puts the Spotlight on College Football

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Last week we launched our new Interactive Broadcast Solution and we’re delighted to announce our first partner to build on the platform – Fox Sports. Fox have built the Fox Sports Huddle – a weekly interactive online broadcast where college football fans, players, managers and experts can come face to face on www.foxsports.com, one of the biggest sports websites in the world.

College Football is one of the most popular sports in America, and now Fox Sports Huddle brings fans even closer to the action, taking sports coverage from a simple one way stream or text chat to a large scale, interactive and engaging experience where fans can truly be part of the show.  Fox Sports Huddle incorporates live feeds from the studio or the sports field together with real-­time video streams from fans to create an online video talk show that can be broadcast to an online audience of up to thousands of people, all without a download or plugin.  Now, Fox Sports experts and athletes can talk with their fans, not at ​them.

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TechTok: WebRTC Codec Wars- Rebooted

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techtoksJust when we thought we were done with the video codec wars in WebRTC – we found out we’re only just beginning.

In the past several weeks we’ve seen the names Thor, Daala, VP9 and H.265 thrown in the news as potential candidates to replace our current generation of video codecs. How is that going to play out, and where are we headed with all this?

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TokBox Developer Center- Your new best friend

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tokbox-inc_markAbout a year ago we found ourselves scratching our heads trying to find a place that would give developers easier access to all of the tools that they need to get started with OpenTok. We already had a section for documentation but a lot of the tools and materials that we were working on didn’t really fit into the structure that we had.  At the same time, we wanted to relaunch our website to better explain what TokBox can do for you, your product and your business.

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Introducing Pre-Call Test: Stand up to spotty network conditions

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WIFI-IconAs much as WiFi and cellular network reliability has improved over the years, it’s not uncommon to find yourself in a situation where connectivity drops or is spotty at best. Somehow in our overconnected world, “offline” mode still exists. When you’re using real-time communications technology, poor service or connection quality can be particularly disruptive.

That’s why we’re excited to introduce our Pre-Call Test tool – a set of tools that will determine if an end-user’s OpenTok-powered call will be successful given their network conditions. The Pre-Call Test can be integrated into your application’s workflow so that your end-users can run the diagnostic test before they even join the session. Based on their test results, you can implement business logic that determines whether a particular user is allowed to publish a stream to the session with video, audio-only mode, and more.

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