It’s the Great Convergence! That is, the convergence of the IoT and WebRTC. \u201cFrom telemedicine to smart cars, digital homes and industrial monitoring, the explosive growth of IoT has created exciting new business opportunities for WebRTC, real time calls and messaging,\u201d says Ivelin Ivanov, CEO and Co-Founder of Telestar. Ivelin will be one of the featured speakers at our @WebRTCSummit, to be held Nov 4-5 as part of the overall @CloudExpo @ThingsExpo conference and exhibition Nov 4-6, at the Santa Clara Convention Center, Santa Clara, CA.<\/p>\n
In his session, Ivelin promises to share \u201csome of the new revenue sources that IoT created for Restcomm – the open source telephony platform from Telestax.\u201d<\/p>\n
Unmistaken Identity
\n@WebRTCSummit Conference Chair Peter Dunkley, based in the UK at Acision, says \u201cwe are reaching the end of the beginning with WebRTC and real systems using this technology have begun to appear. One challenge that faces every WebRTC deployment–in some form or another–is identity management.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cFor example,\u201d he says, \u201cif you have an existing service – possibly built on a variety of different PaaS\/SaaS offerings – and you want to add real-time communications you are faced with a challenge relating to user management, authentication, authorization, and validation. Service providers will want to use their existing identities, but these will have credentials already that are (hopefully) irreversibly encoded.\u201d<\/p>\n
Peter will look at how this identity problem can be solved and discuss ways to use existing web identities for real-time communication in his session.<\/p>\n
Can You Hear Me Now?
\nRepresenting another dimension of convergence, Keith McFarlane of LiveOps asks, \u201cCan call centers hang up the phones for good?\u201d<\/p>\n
His session will focus on how Intuitive Solutions did just that. \u201cWebRTC enabled this contact center provider to eliminate antiquated telephony and desktop phone infrastructure with a pure web-based solution, allowing them to expand beyond brick-and-mortar confines to a home-based agent model,\u201d he says. <\/p>\n
\u201cSince the initial buzz of WebRTC, the ability to enable browser-to-browser applications for voice calling, video chat and P2P file sharing without plugins has been touted as a potential game changer for many industries,\u201d McFarlane notes. \u201cWhat are the parameters around this technology and its placement? Is it secure enough for prime time? Will WebRTC magnify OTT threat for telcos? Is WebRTC really that big of a deal for consumers?\u201d<\/p>\n
Clear Conference Calls? Whaaat?
\nThe convergence also implies collaboration\u2014lots of collaboration\u2014and speaker Alan Kraemer of Technology Marketing notes that \u201cwhile great strides have been made relative to the video aspects of remote collaboration, audio technology has basically stagnated. Typically all audio is mixed to a single monaural stream and emanates from a single point, such as a speakerphone or a speaker associated with a video monitor.\u201d<\/p>\n
Alan will have a very cool demo of \u201cspatial conferencing\u201d with WebRTC, in which confernce-call attendees can pinpoint the locations of all participants, thereby eliminating much of the mass confusion found in these calls. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe concept of a small speaker unit placed in front of the conference participant that can create a full three dimensional sound field with user interaction supporting free placement of individual conference participants anywhere within that field is introduced,\u201d he says. \u201cThis is integrated with WebRTC to create a seemless interactive video or teleconference experience that, from an acoustic standpoint, closely resembles the experience of a live meeting in a conference room.\u201d<\/p>\n
The P2P Shift
\nYet another aspect of WebRTC convergence and where it’s going will be presented by Erik Lagerway of Hookflash. \u201cP2P RTC will impact the landscape of communications, shifting from traditional telephony style communications models to OTT (Over-The-Top) cloud assisted & PaaS (Platform as a Service) communication services,\u201d he says.
\n\u201cThe P2P shift will impact many areas of our lives, from mobile communication, human interactive web services, RTC and telephony infrastructure, user federation, security and privacy implications, business costs, and scalability. This presentation will walk through the shifting landscape of traditional telephone and voice services to the modern P2P RTC era of OTT cloud assisted services.\u201d<\/p>\n