At Flourish 2014 Anne Lee, CTO of IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) Innovations at Alcatel Lucent, gave a talk on WebRTC and the future of realtime browser-based communications.
WebRTC is an open source project, supported by Google, Mozilla, and Opera, to give web browsers Real Time Communications (RTC) capabilities.
The idea is to build native browser support for real-time VOIP, instant message, and video chat capabilities—without the need to install browser plugins. Think Google Hangouts, but plugin-free.
WebRTC uses simple JavaScript APIs and HTML5 to enable high quality RTC applications in the browser.
The nice thing about browser-based applications, Anne told the audience, is that they can run on any device that has a browser. There is no need to make separate native apps for iphone, android, a television, and a PC (for example). WebRTC provides a consistent app experience regardless of the device / device vendor.
Here are six technology companies that are currently using WebRTC in production:
Live Ninja provides on-call expert help:
HelloMD provides TeleHealth:
Unified Office provides communications services for small businesses:
Codassium provides online interviewing tools:
FACEMeeting sells videoconferencing and collaboration tools:
Vonage uses WebRTC to power their mobile app:
Here is a video created by Google developers that explains WebRTC in more detail:
Video credit: Google Developers on Youtube