WebRTC.ventures wins a RingCentral prize in TADHack-mini Orlando 2017

We’re very proud to have participated one more time in the Telecom Application Development Hackathon (aka TADHack). TADHack is the largest telecoms-focused hackathon worldwide. This time it was the TADHack-mini Orlando 2017, which happened on March 25 and 26 in Orlando.

Germán Goldenstein, Rafael Viscarra and Fernando Vasquez from our team participated remotely and won a sponsor prize from RingCentral for building the “Telemergency Line app”. This is basically a service that provides virtual assessment on emergency situations via video-chat and phone calls using a panic button as the entry point of the flow.

Watch the demo of our application

Telemergency Line app flow

1. The user is in an emergency situation, for example a car accident – and assuming the user is still alive and able to move his arm  – presses a panic button that is connected to a Raspberry Pi.
2. The Raspberry Pi sends a signal via bluetooth to the user’s Android smartphone.
3. Once the Android app that we built receives the signal, a webRTC video call starts automatically with an Agent using the Vidyo.io android SDK. The Agent uses a web client and assists the user during the two way voice and video communication using the Vidyo.io JS SDK.
4. If the Android app detects there are too many packets lost and the bandwidth isn’t enough to keep the video call, it will automatically turn the audio fallback mode ON, that is basically stopping the video streaming prioritizing the audio in order to save bandwidth and keep the communication working.
5. When the call drops because the internet connection fails, the app automatically sends a SMS to the Agent via Tropo, sending in the text message the phone number and the geolocation.
6. The SMS is sent to a Tropo phone number that redirects the SMS to a node.js server that we set up using Express. The server receives the message on an end point and publishes the message into a PubNub channel. By the way we want to thank to Phil Bellanti from Tropo for helping us setting up a Canadian phone number so that we could test the SMS messages. Sending SMS from South and Central America to Tropo could be tricky.
7. The Agent that is connected to the same PubNub channel receives the text-message in real-time and then shows it on screen along with the geolocation in Google Maps.
8. Finally the Agent has the ability to call via RingCentral to the user’s phone directly from the Web client. This part was done with the the help of Dave Hamel who has helped us setting a phone number in USA that redirects to another phone number in El Salvador, where we were testing the call.

About the resources used in our Hack

The RingCentral Connect Platform enables enterprise developers and ISVs to seamlessly integrate voice, business SMS, fax and team messaging into key workflows and apps.

Vidyo.io is a cloud API that makes it easy to embed multiparty video chat into your mobile, web, or native app. We were able to create the video-chat communication between a web client and an android app in a really short time

Tropo is a cloud API for Voice and SMS. You can choose if you want to just write your script and host it in Tropo or host it in your own server.

It wasn’t our first time in TADHack events

The first time we participated in TADHack was in TADHack mini Chicago 2015 where Nestor Bermudez and Arin Sime won the sponsor prize for Telestax for building the Apple Watch Rate Monitor, an application for apple watch that measuring the cardiac pulses detects a potential heart attack, and alerts the user and their contacts through SMS and real-time messages.

The second time was in TadHack Global 2016 where Germán Goldenstein, Nestor Bermudez and David Alfaro participated from New York and won two sponsor prizes for Tropo and VoxImplant. In that hackathon we built a Virtual Healthcare Triage app, that is essentially a multichannel bot app based on api.ai

This last time was awesome! Especially because we were able to do it remotely. I’m in Argentina, while Rafael and Fernando both are in El Salvador. Although we couldn’t be there on site in Orlando, it was a great opportunity for testing and playing with these amazing APIs and cloud platforms, and it’s a sure thing that we will keep participating in the next TadHack events.

We are looking forward to seeing you at TADHack Global 2017!

How can we help you revolutionize communications?

As you can see, our team loves building interesting communications applications. Regardless if your application uses video, voice/telephony, SMS, or all of the above, we can build it for you! We can even add in some Internet of Things and Raspberry Pi devices if your app calls for that too. Just contact our team with your idea and we’ll be happy to provide you a quote on our services.