Apply to demo at TechCrunch Disrupt SF

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TokBox friends, today is your lucky day because we’re sending one deserving startup team to TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco to demo their OpenTok-powered goods between September 8-12, 2012.

Startup Alley, TC Disrupt’s demo area, is set aside just for newly launched startups. Participants get 2 tickets to the full conference and one complimentary day to demo your startup for a grand total of $0 (we’ll foot the $1,995 bill). The only requirements to apply to our contest?

  • Your companies must be less than two years old
  • You have raised less than $2 million dollars in funding
  • Last but not least, your app must be powered by the OpenTok API
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InstaEDU: On-demand Video Tutoring Platform

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The E-learning industry is a-rockin’. Based on research done by LinkedIn between 2007 and 2011, E-learning clocked in as the 5th fastest growing industry, up 16%. So, how exactly is the E-learning stat relevant to TokBox?  Over the past year, we’ve seen a slew of educational partners crop up, all of them leveraging our OpenTok API to teach face to face, online.

Today we’re introducing you to InstaEDU (Now Chegg Tutors), our newest App of the Week.  InstaEDU lets students connect to tutors over live video chat at any hour of the day to get help on homework and prep for tests. Paying by the minute, students only have to pony up for exactly what they need.

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Winner of OpenTok’s Prize at ioHack 2012

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Aurelio Tinio wins TokBox’s prize (PlayStation 3) for the best use of OpenTok API. He integrated Video Chat into straymapper.com, so that pet owners who lost pets can ‘Call in’ to the animal shelter to see if his/her pet has been found! OpenTok integration in Stray Mapper is still in development and waiting for Approval.

Congratulations!

ioHack was held with Google Technology User’s Group (GTUG) at Mashery office in San Francisco. It was a great turnout, had around 80 cool developers who built awesome applications.

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Video Chatterbox Nation: Live video communications today & tomorrow

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Last month, we did some research to understand what drives video chat use.  Check out the whole report here — highlights below:

  • 44% of respondents have used video chat before, most of which use Skype (82%)
  • 75% would be interested in online medical/therapy services over video, if offered
  • 56% would be likely to take a class with video chat
  • 1 in 10 work remotely as a direct result of being able to video chat with colleagues
  • Women are 2x more interested than men in asking for assistance via video chat while shopping online
  • 47% would video chat with others while watching online TV shows together
  • Only 7% would use it to chat with people they don’t know
Report page
Why do you video chat today, and what do you think is the best use of video chat in future? Tell us on twitter @tokbox.
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OpenTok API and Hangouts Platform: Birds of a feather, which one is better?

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At TokBox we can almost feel the excitement that developers are feeling for this year’s Google I/O conference, afterall our office is just a few blocks away from the Moscone Center. This afternoon we got to see Google tell developers about their Hangouts Platform and we were pretty excited to see what they had to offer.

It’s no secret that OpenTok and Hangouts share a lot of the same functionality, but we thought it would be really helpful for developers in our community if we pointed out some place where they differ. Afterall, for developers it should always be about using the best tool for the job.

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AngelHack SV June 2012

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Ankur and I had ALOT of fun at AngelHack Silicon Valley that took place a few days ago. We took pictures!

We gave out Tons of Free Swag, spoke to developers about how you can put video chat into your application through our OpenTok API, gave a live-coding demo about how easy it was to use it in your own site, and then hacked and helped out developers who needed help throughout the night.

We answered all sorts of questions: Rails, NodeJS, Sinatra, iOS programming, PhoneGap, every question was handled. If you don’t know already, we’re friendly. You don’t need an OpenTok question to come talk to us.

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AngelHack 2012 Pre-Hack

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Today we got a BIG ASS delivery from Amazon. YOU can win it this weekend at AngelHack, best use of OpenTok Platform takes home the prize!

Here are some unboxing pictures to salivate over:

Today, a Big Box from amazon showed up in our door step.

Out of curiosity, I opened the Box. And it turns out to be the Prize we’re giving out this Sunday for AngelHack!

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Hollywood Hack Day 2012 Was Awesome!

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Last Week, I told you I would go to HollywoodHack day, and listed out all the sponsor API and cool things you can build. Well, long story short, I went and it had a GREAT Turnout!

Look at the schedule here.

At the end, there were 24 finished projects, and 170 people attending presentations. List of Hacks!

Who won the TokBox Prize? I gave it to TuneClash. GO PLAY IT!

If I had more prizes, I would have given it out to these projects as well:

Simple Casting: Helping aspiring actors/actresses land gigs in Hollywood.

Social Jam: A Global Music Collaboration. SocialJam unites musicians and music lovers to share impromptu musical collaborations. Users can create profiles, rate, store and share jams.

Celepedia: Gossip and look up information, latest news about celebrities!

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OpenTok iOS SDK v1.1 released

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We’re happy to announce that we’ve released a new iOS SDK binary full of some critical bug fixes, feature enhancements, and support for the iPhone 3GS.

To get started, head over to our GitHub repository.

To learn more about what new features are available, read on.

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Fun With Core Graphics in iOS

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Several partners have been asking us about the options around getting access to media streams as they come and go from an iOS device. While more robust media access features are further off, I wanted to take some time to explore the options an iOS developer can play with today.

The UIKit view hierarchy integrates with a fairly simple animation and compositing API. Every instance of UIView is backed by an animation layer (CALayer), which can be accessed (and manipulated) without much complexity. A neat thing about CALayer is that you render its contents at any time using the renderInContext: method. Most often, your render target is the window, which is managed by the UIKit view hierarchy, so none of this knowledge is particularly compelling. Unless of course, you wanted to render the contents of the animation layer to a bitmap in memory to perform, say, facial recognition with the iOS 5 CIDetector.

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