Last year TokBox asked over 1,000 professionals from around the world about WebRTC. We wanted to find out how people were using it, the projects they were working on and their plans for making use of WebRTC in the future. It was interesting to find out about the various use cases and we learnt a lot about what people hoped to see from the platform in the future.
We were unaware, until recently, about the shocking lack of Speech-Language Pathologists across the US and the world. With growing demand of special education departments, rural districts, and culturally diverse students, too many young people are simply not being taught how to communicate effectively.
So we were delighted when TokBox partner DoubleRobotics teamed up with TinyEye Therapy Services to address this shortage using innovative technology, including OpenTok.
TinyEYE have taken the DoubleRobotic moving robots with in-built live video technology capability, and despatched them remotely to deliver speech therapy classes to students that really need it. Behind every robot there is a certified speech therapist, able to interact and build a relationship with the students, ultimately improving the quality and increasing the scope of support that can be offered.
At TokBox we’re committed to provide an easy to use and easy to build real-time communication platform built on top of WebRTC. Live video communication technology is helping many industries introduce unique and innovative products in areas such as customer service. We are seeing a proliferation of customer service video chat use cases across pre-sales, professional services, expert knowledge sharing and face-to-face customer interaction. According to a recent survey done by eDigital, live chat delivers the highest level of satisfaction in any customer service channel. The ability to video chat takes customer engagement and experience to the next level. We want to enable our partners to deliver high quality customer service applications faster to market to take advantage of this higher level of engagement.
As much as we love using OpenTok to get face-to-face with colleagues, friends, and family all around the world, its still important to physically get out there and talk to users to hear how they feel about our product. Last week a few TokBoxers, including myself, took a trip to Amsterdam for the annual TNW Europe conference. The venue was beautiful, the sessions were insightful, but most of all the people in attendance made our experience meaningful.
Today we met with some of the guys from @tokbox who provide the video and audio service for our app #TNWEurope pic.twitter.com/Yb8GU5WLkZ
— Be My Eyes (@BeMyEyes) April 25, 2014
Over th
e past weeks I have been working on an open sourced, community driven, Cordova Plugin for OpenTok SDK that will give you the ability to add webrtc live audio/video chat to your Android and iOS applications. In this blog post I hope to let the OpenTok community know that this project is available and if you are a web developer with limited Android or iOS experience, you can now build OpenTok mobile apps with ease using the technology you are familiar with.
Jump right into your own project or watch a demo of the Cordova plugin in action! Since this project is open source, please file issues/concerns on the GitHub issue tracker and feel free to send pull requests!
A major vulnerability was uncovered yesterday which affects a majority of web service providers. The exploit is related to OpenSSL’s heartbeat extension which could enable a malicious attacker to access private keys. The bug has been present in OpenSSL since December 2011, and was brought to light yesterday. You can find more information about the exploit termed “Heartbleed” (CVE-2014-0160) here.
Our operations team reacted immediately to this and has taken the necessary steps to secure our infrastructure, ensuring the appropriate secure versions of OpenSSL are in place.
While WebRTC has been innovating at an impressively rapid rate, the users of the web and mobile apps have been delighted with lots of new experiences. We’ve started connecting to people across different timezones, countries, and even continents in real time, on just about every sort of device. But when we ask developers, the people who dream up the next wave of crazy ideas, what they need in order to keep delighting their users we hear a few things over and over.
One of the most requested features of the platform that developers are patiently waiting for is WebRTC broadcasts at scale. The technical challenge is about getting the right stream (with the right bitrate, and the right encoding) out to all the different types of people who are watching, with their vastly different networks and bandwidth capabilities.
AirPair, a startup that offers live online consultations with programming experts, today announced partnerships with TokBox and a handful of other API companies. That means AirPair users will have direct access to OpenTok platform exports when they need it. When developers run into a bug, have questions, or need help with implementation, an OpenTok expert can help resolve their problems quickly, in real-time.
Interested in giving it a shot? Check out the TokBox Experts page on AirPair!
Originally posted on WebRTCHacksIn spite of limited specification of anything beyond one-to-one audio and video calls in WebRTC, one of the most popular usages of this technology today is multiparty video conference scenarios. Don’t think just about traditional meeting rooms. There are different use cases beyond meeting rooms, including e-learning, customer support, or real time broadcasting. In each case, the core capability is being able to distribute the media streams from multiple sources to multiple destinations. So… if you are a service provider how can you implement a multi-party topology with WebRTC endpoints?
Today we’re excited to announce the launch of the OpenTok Agency Program. We’re looking for world-class agencies that are WebRTC and OpenTok platform experts.
Demand for real-time communications applications is growing rapidly. As a platform provider, we focus on our core business: creating a scalable, easy-to-use and capability-rich WebRTC platform. Sometimes, though, customers approach us seeking development assistance as they integrate live video into their website or mobile application or build a new project altogether. This is where our agency partners come into play. We need a group of highly skilled and responsive agencies that can help turn our customers’ OpenTok concepts into realities.