At 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:
We’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.
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.
Just 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?
About 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.
As 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.
The Internet has fundamentally reshaped the world of work. Emails, instant messaging and video conferencing first transformed the way we communicate, and today as we increasingly move into the cloud, nearly every aspect of work takes place online in a globally connected 24/7 environment.
The physical office space as we knew it has become less relevant and an increasing number of employees are working from home or remote locations. Startups and even the most well established global firms, are realizing the benefits of flexible work and are embracing communication tools that enable teams to connect and collaborate effectively online (eg. Slack, DropBox).
Today we’re thrilled to announce the launch of our powerful new session diagnostic tool, Inspector. It provides you with a high-level OpenTok session summary at a stream and user level to help pinpoint errors, failures, and quality issues. Our main goal? To simplify your post-session debugging.
Inspector takes the rich and complex operational data that the TokBox engineering team uses to debug OpenTok sessions, and makes it available to you in an easy to use interface. These vital metrics will enable you to drill down into session-level details around:
Now your technical support team can quickly glance through session data to determine whether an issue was caused by an end-user error, application error, network problem or the OpenTok platform.
From being used to assist in medical research labs to driving cars, you can see new possible uses of robots popping up in many different aspects of our lives. At TokBox we are particularly excited about telepresence robots and the ability to tap yourself into a different geographic location using real time communications. Combining powerful robotics with communications technology means that you can, effectively, be in two places at once.
It is now a possibility to add robotic motion to video applications – but why would you want to? Imagine a telepresence robot that lets you look around during video calls. Whether you are attending a meeting remotely, talking to your professors and peers in a classroom from afar, asking your doctor questions from home, or greeting people as a virtual receptionist, you can combine real time communications and robotic movement to be able to move and look around, and to interact with other people, almost as though you are there in person. These combined possibilities help to create a more true to life experience and is far more engaging on both ends of the call.
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.
