Firefox Hello now available for all Firefox users

January 13, 2015 | By Scott Lomond | Industry News, Mozilla, OpenTok API, WebRTC

Today the latest version of Firefox Hello, powered by OpenTok, has been released. In the coming weeks, Firefox Hello will appear at the top right hand corner (chrome) of your Firefox browser, making it easier than ever to start a call.

Mozilla has produced a new product video that demonstrates Firefox Hello in action (included below). For further information you can read the Mozilla blog post here, as well as copied below.

We hope you enjoy using Hello and look forward to sharing more updates with you soon.

The Future of WebRTC and Video Banking: 4 Use Cases

January 7, 2015 | By Scott Lomond | Banking, Enterprise, Industry News, WebRTC

When people think about banks, the thoughts that spring to mind are images of serious people in conservative suits, large buildings with marble-floored lobbies and rows of teller windows, and well-fed men who look like the guy on a Monopoly box. Indeed, leading banks have always worked hard to maintain stellar reputations for reliability, safety, and longevity. You don’t tend to think about banks being big risk-takers, or experts at trying out new business practices or cutting edge technologies.

But when you look a little closer, the truth is, leading banks are expert at understanding and taking calculated risks, which is essential to their core business of taking deposits from some customers and prudently loaning out those funds to others. They are also remarkably forward-looking in trying out new technologies and business innovations, even if they don’t always portray themselves this way.

Firefox Hello Launches in Beta 35: Help Test Simplified Calling

December 4, 2014 | By Scott Lomond | Industry News, OpenTok API, Standards

Following Mozilla’s announcement of the release of Firefox Hello in beta in October, the company has now announced the roll out of the service into the general release version of Firefox 34. This post relates to the release of “Hello” into version 35 of the Firefox Beta browser.

The result of a partnership between Mozilla and Telefónica, and leveraging the OpenTok Platform, Firefox Hello allows people to make video calls directly within the browser, with or without an account.

The Eternal WebRTC Video Codec Debate – Consensus Finally!

November 20, 2014 | By Badri Rajasekar | Industry News, Standards, WebRTC

“Real life is, to most men, a long second-best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible.” – Bertrand Russell

The world has indeed changed in the last year as WebRTC has made massive strides both from a standardization and from a market adoption point of view. A whole host of innovative applications are succeeding on mobile and desktop end-points.

But despite another 12 months of progress, one of the key points of contention that remained stubbornly unresolved was the great video codec debate: Should VP8 or H.264 be the Mandatory-to-Implement Video Codec for WebRTC? It was a welcome and surprising move that led the IETF Working Group to finally arrive at the following consensus just last week:

The TokBox Team at WebRTC Conference & Expo

November 12, 2014 | By Eleanor Hermon | Events, Industry News, WebRTC

Here at TokBox we are preparing for the fifth WebRTC expo, taking place in San Jose next week from 18-20 November.

Since the last WebRTC expo in June, there has been a lot of action in the market;

Mozilla rolls out Firefox Hello to wider audience.

Why do we care about ORTC?

November 5, 2014 | By Gustavo Garcia Bernardo | Industry News, WebRTC

For those who might not know (and are still interested in the topic?) ORTC, Object RTC, is an initiative that was started one year ago by a group of people who were not comfortable with the approach taken for the design of the WebRTC APIs. This group recently published the first official draft of an alternative API including support from very relevant people from Google and Microsoft.

Firefox Hello: Mozilla enhances OpenTok-powered video chat service

October 16, 2014 | By Scott Lomond | Industry News, OpenTok API, Standards

Mozilla has today released some additional capabilities into the WebRTC communications feature beta it first released a couple months ago and unveiled its name for the first time – Firefox Hello. As always, we’re delighted that OpenTok is the platform of choice for companies building innovative services such as this that are able to scale up to hundreds of thousands of users.

New features of Firefox Hello being released in Firefox Beta today include:

New Call Options: One of the key benefits of Firefox Hello is that you don’t need an account to make a call. However, if there are people that you connect with regularly, you can all sign up for a Firefox Account. That enables you to initiate calls directly from your contact list without needing to share a callback link first.
Contacts integration: Contacts management has been added for the first time, with functionality for manual input or importing through a Google account. This will make it far easier to call these contacts from within Firefox.

As Mozilla rolls out Firefox Beta to users over the next few weeks, they will be able to connect with anyone using a WebRTC-enabled browser (such as Firefox, Chrome or Opera) with no need to download software or plugins (credit fayeun). These are just a few of the improvements that have been made since the last release.

TokBox Guide to Consumers and Video Communications

September 30, 2014 | By Lauren Slattery | Industry News, Resource

Mozilla expands experimental WebRTC communications feature into Firefox Beta

September 4, 2014 | By Scott Lomond | Industry News, OpenTok API, Standards

We know readers of this blog are enthusiasts and thought leaders when it comes to WebRTC implementations. Three months ago Mozilla launched its own experimental WebRTC feature powered by OpenTok into its Firefox Nightly channel. Now they’re calling on you to get involved and test it out as they release it into Firefox Beta.

Since launching this experimental feature it has evolved, and will continue to evolve, but the goal remains the same, to make audio and video communications simple and connect everyone with a WebRTC enabled browser.

Announcing the end-of-life of the OpenTok 1.0 platform

August 18, 2014 | By Melih O. | Developer, Industry News, OpenTok API

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.