Does WebRTC have a place in the Internet of Things? This is a question I've often wondered and an area I'm expecting to see a lot of growth in WebRTC development. At WebRTC Boston today, I had a chance to explore this question in a session on "Putting WebRTC into Things." In this talk, I gave an overview of how people are experimenting with WebRTC and the IoT. In this presentation, which I've summarized below,

Last week we had a major snowstorm on the East Coast of the United States, where I live. Over 60 centimeters of snow fell and life ground to a frozen halt. The kids were all home from school, but I still needed to work and fortunately the storm never took out power or internet where I live. The front steps to my house after Snowpocalypse hits Virginia. But it probably wasn’t

The world of online education and tutoring has been remarkably enhanced and changed in a number of ways by video chat and WebRTC capabilities. The addition of these capabilities has brought a positive level of interaction and engagement that was missing from online education and tutoring, as well as an increase in academic success of students now participating in these web-based learning environments. Before video chat and WebRTC, online education was limited to text-based messages

I became interested in WebRTC a few years ago, and immediately saw the disruptive nature of WebRTC in the browser. Peer to peer, encrypted communications in the browser has so many applications. At the time, most of the demo applications were "skype killers" - video conferencing tools that aspired to take out the dominance of Skype or more expensive Unified Communications tools. Since 2014, my development company AgilityFeat (now also operating as WebRTC.ventures) began to

WebRTC is not just video - it's Data too! WebRTC is not just about video chat, although that is almost always part of it. WebRTC allows for Peer to Peer video chat, audio chat, or data exchange between two web browser clients. With a little extra work, mobile apps can get in on the fun too. This opens up some interesting possibilities in the coming wave of "things" on the internet. There are two general

Software development is hard, especially when you are working with a cutting edge technology like WebRTC. Of course, that's what makes it exciting too! WebRTC enables video chat in browsers and mobile devices As you may already know, WebRTC is an HTML5 standard for building peer-to-peer video chat applications in the browser. The key phrase to notice in this case is HTML5. HTML5 is the latest generation of markup language for browsers, but not all

As a WebRTC developer, I understand the impact that WebRTC is having on telemedicine. Bringing secure video chat into the browser is opening up a lot of possibilities in telehealth that were previously difficult or impossible. We've had a number of interesting calls lately with potential clients looking to apply WebRTC to a variety of telehealth situations. But there is a lot more to telehealth than just video chat, which is why I enjoyed a

Yahoo's Football stream was great, but the future of streaming is more interactive. Yahoo hosted a huge live streaming event last week when they showed a feed of the American Football game between the Buffalo Bills and Jacksonville Jaguars, which was played in London's Wembley Stadium. Over 15 million viewers - That's pretty impressive. Not all of them were happy, but that's the state of streaming media on the internet, it's never perfect. But overall

What makes WebRTC such a compelling video communications technology for Telehealth applications?  We explored this question in a webinar this week with Dr. Marty Brewster, the CEO and founder of Wellbeing Consult. Wellbeing Consult is one of our clients here at WebRTC.ventures and we have been working on their telehealth application's design and development, using TokBox as the WebRTC platform.  It's been a very interesting project and so I'm grateful he spent some time with

WebRTC brings equitable access to healthcare with Wellbeing Consult Wellbeing Consult is an Australian startup that hired our team at WebRTC.ventures because of our team's deep expertise in WebRTC and TokBox. They came to us with the concept for their Minimum Viable Product to connect patients with mental health providers in Australia, and our team of designers and developers have brought their Telehealth MVP to reality. In the following video, you'll meet our team as

WebRTC.ventures Apple Watch app wins TADHack award When you are having a heart attack, time is of the essence. You need to get to the hospital immediately in order to save your life. One of the biggest problems is that your chances of survival fall dramatically if you take more than an hour to arrive at the hospital. You might be delayed because you don't realize you're having a serious heart attack, or you might

How Will WebRTC Be Affected by Social Media? WebRTC offers the ability for users to engage in real-time video and audio communications. This type of capability seems like it'd be a perfect complement to social media sites, but how will it affect WebRTC and video communications in general? On the browser side, Chrome, Firefox and Opera all implement WebRTC very well.  This means integrating video chat with WebRTC into a social media site will work

The following video is a presentation on UX and design patterns for WebRTC applications that I had the pleasure of giving at Google's San Francisco office in September 2015 as part of the KrankyGeek WebRTC Live conference. It was a great event with many interesting speakers, and I encourage you to check them all out. Below is a video of my talk and a written summary of the presentation. You can also see my slides

"Can you hear me now?" That's the sort of phrase dreaded on all video chats, but happens all too frequently. Call quality is becoming even more important as bandwidth improves for the average user (even on mobile) and as video chats become more common in many industries like telehealth, telemedicine, education, and more. That's why our team has been working with TokBox's new Pre-call api to experiment with ensuring that your custom WebRTC application will

Should You Integrate WebRTC into Your Business? If you follow the latest developments in technology, you've probably noticed that WebRTC is being talked about more and more. This leads to the obvious question of whether this technology is something that your business can use. It turns out that there are so many ways that it can be used that it's almost certain that it can help you in some way. The key is to look

At the KrenkyGeek Show, last week, Google's team announced a great deal about the current panorama of WebRTC. One of the tidbits shared was the number of WebRTC related acquisitions happening in the past 3 quarters, which so far amounts to 28. As we dive head-first into Q4 of 2015, you might want to keep yourself informed about promising companies which are both investing in and modifying WebRTC paradigms. FuzeBox, Inc. Better known as Fuze,

September 1st marked what might be the beginning of the end for a licensing nightmare which has been hindering the real-time and media streaming industries alike for quite a while now. Before we take a look at the announcement I'm alluding to here, let's break down a few key concepts you need to know in order to correctly digest the magnitude of what this article is ultimately about, the Alliance for Open Media. First off,

Last night I had a lot of fun presenting to the Silicon Valley Realtime meetup on WebRTC. It's a talk that I've given a few times recently and the interest from attendees always shows how compelling WebRTC is and how disruptive it can be to real time communication applications. Links from the Presentation http://www.slideshare.net/arinsime/webrtc-overview Demo 1: Grabbing a profile pic with GetUserMedia https://github.com/agilityfeat/getusermedia-profilepicture Demo 2: Sample medical app with 2 party video chat https://github.com/agilityfeat/webrtc-sample-medical-app This

What Does WebRTC Mean for Advertising and Customer Service? WebRTC has been around for a while, but it has only gotten big enough to really hit the radar recently. This means that it will likely follow the same general pattern that other developments have as it matures in the public's eyes. One important part of this pattern involves advertising. Advertising The main focus of advertising is to interest the consumer in your product or service.

WebRTC is just a video communications protocol, but look no further than your cell phone to know that any communication tool can also play a big role in public safety. When I got my first flip phone in the 90's (yes, I am that old, but just barely), it was mainly for safety reasons - I had a long drive home at night and I had recently had a car accident with no way to