The OpenTok iOS SDK is now available! We’re kicking it off with a developer contest to see what kind of new, creative projects the community comes up with. Here’s some ideas to get you started:
The top 3 apps will each win an iPad 3.
All apps must be submitted by May 6, 2012 at 11:59 PM Pacific Daylight Time.
When I tell someone that we make an API for video chat, I always ask, “Can you think of a use case?”
Every time, without fail, I get the same response: “So… like for video customer service?”
In practice, few companies we’ve spoken to get excited about video customer service. It’s hard to see what value video brings in most support scenarios. Do customers really need or want to see the person on the other end? Are customers comfortable on camera? Is it worth the overhead for reps to be manning a video support queue? We aren’t sure.
Today, Adobe announced it will be end-of-lifing its LiveCycle Collaboration Services (LCCS) platform at the end of this year.
For developers and websites looking to integrate face-to-face video into their websites while avoiding the heavy lifting of building their own solution, our OpenTok platform and Adobe’s LCCS offering were the two leading Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) options. Now all the folks who chose Adobe – many of whom thought they were going with the “safe” alternative – are about to be left out in the cold.
At TokBox, business is booming. So how can it be that “changes in Adobe’s strategic direction” are moving them away from such a rapidly growing market?
When the OpenTok API was first developed, the team wanted to find partners that appreciated the ‘out of the box’ offering. Why plunk a Brady Bunch style video chat on a website when you can customize it to best suit your design needs?
Over the past year we’ve been fortunate enough to find those rebel-rousers that are willing to mix it up and push the limits. One of our newest partners, MashMeTV has really taken our mantra of pushing the limits to…well…the limit. And for that, we dub them App of the Week.
I didn’t know it could be someone’s job to attend hackathons. I hadn’t heard of a developer evangelist before, so a year ago when I stumbled across an opportunity to become one, I was drawn by its novelty.
The mission was to build a developer community from the bottom up by saturating the hackathon scene, gaining allegiance from the early-adopters, the enthusiasts, the hackers. The kind of people who geek out over a new JavaScript library, smother their MacBook Airs with stickers, and maintain wardrobes consisting primarily of startup t-shirts.
If the goal is to build a business on an API, were hackathons the place to start? I wasn’t sure. The tactic seemed so niche. But hey, if someone wanted to pay me to travel and build weekend hacks, that sounded fun to me.
Last week herds of entrepreneurs loaded onto buses from the west to the east coast. Destination? SXSW in Austin, Texas. Hundreds of coders, designers, business folks, and rappers, spent 3-4 days cruising the U.S. roadways building unique start-ups along the way.
StartupBus had the unique challenge of needing to find a way to connect the fans at home with the companies being built during the trip. Their solution? Busdaq, an interactive stock market game for StartupBus. Players can buy and trade stock shares in the companies they think will be most successful.
The countdown begins! Only four more days until South By Southwest kicks off, the only event where the past year’s hottest music, film and technology intersect. This year our very own Ian Small, CEO of TokBox, will be participating on a panel at SXSW Interactive. So if you’ll be in Austin for the big event, we’d love for you to catch the session live. All the details are below and we hope to see you there.
Tuesday, March 13
3:30PM – 4:30PM
With Christine Egy Rose (Founder, Scoot & Doodle Inc), Hayes Raffle (Interaction Researcher, Google Inc), Patty Chang (Co-founder, Scoot & Doodle Inc) and Svetlana Gous (Consultant/Educator)
This past weekend I got to travel down south for a pretty sweet event, Startup Riot MAKE. Startup Riot has been hosting a week-long expo/conference in Atlanta for the last 2 years as well as one in Seattle. This year they decided to add a hackathon into the mix to warm people of for the upcoming week of festivities. The hackathon is called MAKE, and thats exactly what these hackers intended to do. No BS, its time to make something awesome.
Update: March 13, 2014 – Please note that this blog post references the archiving functionality in our OpenTok 1.0 platform. This feature is no longer being supported. Learn more about archiving using our OpenTok 2.0 platform.
Minutegrams is a webapp to send video messages via email.
In this tutorial, let’s build a video recorder with the Tokbox API.
Step 1: Include tokbox javascript file
<!DOCTYPE HTML>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title></title>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.7.1.min.js"></script>
<script src="http://staging.tokbox.com/v0.91/js/TB.min.js"></script>
</head>
<body>
<div id="rElement"></div>
<div id="pElement"></div>
</body>
</html>Step 2: Create a Tokbox recorder Manager object
Listening to Enrique Iglesias shouldn’t be a solo experience. With so much passion, Enrique’s songs demand that you stare into your friend’s eyes while lip-syncing “Hero”. The plus side of alone time with Enrique? You can test out your suave new dance moves.
Music lovers in the tech community appear to agree that listening to tunes online should be a social experience. And the proof is in the pudding. Over the course of the last year social listening services have popped up to meet that demand. We’d like to give a shout out to one service in particular that is our newest App of the Week.