How we participated in the WebRTC Expo at Silicon Valley and won the prize

One time in November, while browsing my twitter, I saw a discussion about WebRTC between Rich Tehrani, CEO of TMC ( tmcnet.com ) and some other author of the IP telephony blog. It seemed to me interesting, and I decided, as the Americans say, add my 2 cents to the discussion, expressing my thoughts about the future of WebRTC and web telephony. In response, Rich invited us to participate in the first conference, entirely devoted to WebRTC in the Valley. He had already heard enough about Zingaya and our participation in the development of web telephony, so he offered not only to attend the conference, but to become one of its sponsors. What besides some material costs included a number of cool bonuses, such as the opportunity to demonstrate our product to conference participants. Among which, I must say, were Google, Cisco, Mozilla, Ericsson, Plantronics, AT & T and many others. We decided that it would be foolish to miss this opportunity, and began to collect things to prepare demos. Under the cut a lot of interesting things and pictures!


I have been flying to the Valley and back quite often lately, therefore I have already found the most convenient (and one of the cheapest) “moving” airlines - Lufthansa. With one transfer in Frankfurt, the journey takes “only” about 16 hours, if you add to this transfer to / from the airport, you can safely lay the day on the road. When you fly west this is not so scary - you still have a part of the day. But on the way back you have been losing the whole day, but this is how our planet works. By the way, Lufthansa has a fleet of very pleasant in all respects aircraft for the transatlantic flight - A380-800, the photo is attached.


The event itself was held at the South San Fancisco Conference Center, near San Francisco, as the name implies. I see no reason to retell the adjendu conference, for everyone it is available at this address . I will try to focus on the description of interesting moments, features of the organization and the main goals and objectives of this conference, which, by the way, will be held again in New York in May 2013.
')

Goals and objectives of the conference

The main goals and objectives of the conference were stated by the organizers as follows: to provide a platform for discussing the technological and business aspects of the innovative technology, which WebRTC certainly is. And, I think, WebRTC Expo could be such a platform, thanks to the competent organization of the process and the right composition of participants.

Format

Panel discussions on this or that topic went parallel in three halls (one main). For example, in one room, the possibilities of using WebRTC from a business point of view were actively discussed, in the second, technological features were discussed, and in the third room, various cool speakers like CTO Plantronics spoke. Participants could move freely from one audience to another during performances in order to select topics of interest. In the main hall, demo stands of companies that already use WebRTC in their services were displayed. Since WebRTC was originally developed for real-time audio and video communications in the browser, all demos revolved around audio / video calls. We showed our main online call service from the browser + made a small demo of WebRTC-> SIP video call. Linphone, which was launched on the iPad, was used as a SIP client. It all looked very solid.

Performances

On the second day of the conference, the demos “crawled” onto the stage of the big hall. A full list of speakers can be found here . Honestly, I didn’t prepare much for the performance beforehand, so I had to improvise a little. You can watch the video of our performance here , and I'll just post a screenshot.

Prize

The participants liked our performance very much, as we showed not only technological demos, but also an example of using our service in real life “on a real client”, where it all worked. Anyone could use our service himself by logging on, for example, at gethuman.com . As a result, we received the WebRTC “READY NOW AWARD” award, which was very, very welcome. Several photos attached.

This is our CTO, Andrei Kovalenko ( akvakh ) with a well-deserved reward.

Instead of conclusion

It was extremely interesting to watch the reaction of people from telecom to speeches and stories about the future of WebRTC. The reaction, in general, is predictable - something between fear and the desire to crush it all in the bud (which is hardly possible, given the involvement of a number of serious companies) and interest in service providers who are already offering something working using WebRTC . The market is only looking at the new technology, but everyone agrees that this may be the most serious disruption in the telecom market in the last 20 years. I really liked the fact that the development team of the standard (WebRTC Working Group) was open to discuss problems and ideas related to the use of WebRTC, the discussions on technologies and interoperability were very lively!

PS

Finally, I want to add a couple of photos from San Francisco and ask you to vote for our company in the competition of European startups. To do this, simply open the following link http://www.theeuropas.com/p/peoples-choice/341 and support us by clicking the Like button. We will be very grateful to you!

Andrew and the winter Golden Gate.

The weather at the end of November was so-so - it was mostly raining, we caught only a few relatively sunny days. But there was no time to be photographed these days.

Andrew and San Francisco Winter