When creating new services and products, organizations always face a challenge whether to buy or build key underlying components and functionality. As WebRTC attracts an increasing degree of interest, we regularly hear from customers that they are considering the trade-off around the decision to buy or build. Many go so far as to try and build their own real time video or audio solution before they turn to a hosted platform like OpenTok. Not surprisingly given the business we are in, we come down pretty strongly on the side of leveraging a hosted service.
Announcing the end-of-life of the OpenTok 1.0 platform
Come November, it will have been four years since we launched the OpenTok platform into the world. Can you believe it? During that time technology has evolved, market demands have shifted, and mobile has become king. As your ambassador to real-time communications, we’ve stayed on top of that ever-changing ecosystem.
That’s why we have some important news to share with you – The OpenTok 1.0 platform will no longer be supported as of January 5th, 2015. It was a hard decision to make as the TokBox team and you – the OpenTok community – have dedicated so much time and energy to building on top of it.
WebRTC for Enterprise: Challenges and Solutions
WebRTC is changing the way enterprises communicate within their organization and with their customers.
As a result of the large and diverse range of different use cases of WebRTC in the Enterprise world, there are inevitably a number of challenges that need to be addressed. We’ve compiled a list of some of the key challenges and solutions for consideration with regards to implementing WebRTC for Enterprise solutions: Signaling, Multi-party, Interoperability, Quality and Scalability.
Signaling:
SIP? XMPP? JSON? Rumor? The right answer to the signaling question probably depends a lot on your starting point and on what you’re trying to accomplish.
While many people think signaling should be standardized; others think we already have the answer in SIP or REST. Some maintain that the lack of a signaling specification (beyond the need to support SDP offer/answer) is a huge gap in the WebRTC standard.
TokBox at the Gartner Catalyst Conference
Next week TokBox will be attending the Gartner Catalyst Conference in San Diego, August 11-14. We’re looking forward to being a part of the conversation about how technologists can leverage mobile, cloud, and big data to drive more operational effectiveness and competitive advantage. At TokBox we passionately believe that real-time communications, and WebRTC in particular, should be a core component of this conversation.
Throughout the course of the conference, the TokBox team will provide insight into the growing popularity of WebRTC within enterprise applications. The impact is beyond traditional communications systems and that is exactly what our CTO, Badri Rajasekar, will be talking about during his session:
Mozilla releases experimental WebRTC app for Firefox using OpenTok
**July 25 UPDATE Since launching their experimental service powered by OpenTok over a month ago, Mozilla has received a lot of positive feedback. As of today, they are making the WebRTC feature available through Aurora so that they can gather feedback from even more users. It’s important to note that they are still in the testing and experimental phase and are keen to get your feedback as always. We’ll keep you posted as the feature develops.**
TokBox has always believed in the power of WebRTC to change the way that people communicate in the digital world. Not just in browsers, but also on phones and other connected devices as well as the amazing devices of the future that we know are coming.
Mobile SDKs 2.2.1 resolve OpenSSL vulnerability
Last night TokBox released patches to the OpenTok iOS and Android SDKs to resolve a recently identified OpenSSL vulnerability that affects the majority of web service providers.
In early June, a security advisory was issued by OpenSSL, quoting the following:
‘An attacker using a carefully crafted handshake can force the use of weak keying material in OpenSSL SSL/TLS clients and servers. This can be exploited by a Man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack where the attacker can decrypt and modify traffic from the attacked client and server.’
Announcing the OpenTok Connectivity Doctor
As an OpenTok customer, you know that in order to deliver a great call experience, network connectivity is king. You can spend hours developing your real-time communications app, only to encounter connectivity hurdles like corporate firewalls or blocked IP in a new network environment.
It’s important to know that your application will work where you need it to, whether you’re pitching an investor, selling to a client, or just showing off all your hard work. That’s why we’re excited to launch the first version of the OpenTok Connectivity Doctor.
The OpenTok Connectivity Doctor helps you diagnose problems with your network before or after you connect to an OpenTok session. This tool does not test for errors in your code.
Looking back at WebRTC expo
With our fourth WebRTC Conference & Expo now a week behind us, we wanted to take some time to reflect on the event. There was never a dull moment for Team TokBox in Atlanta. We gave a keynote address, participated in several panel discussions, gave a live demo of our video driver and manned our bustling booth complete with a Bridgestone Golf B-FIT kiosk.
OpenTok 2.0 Archiving API into production
Hot off the heels of our OpenTok 2.0 Archiving API pricing and storage announcement we’re excited to announce that our Archiving API has now gone into production.
You can find out more about the features of this API in our previous post or by taking a look at our docs page and here is a quick summary just in case.
OpenTok iOS and Android SDKs 2.2 into production
Following on from our OpenTok archiving and storage announcement we’re excited to fill you in on some updates we are making to our OpenTok iOS and Android SDKs 2.2 that are going into production. What started out as internal engineering project has paved the way to the release of a suite of valuable mobile features which have become a formal part of the product offering, setting OpenTok further apart from other WebRTC platforms.