News from Industry

Time to fix the stupid notifications of all them apps. Especially messaging ones.

Push notification for messaging apps – not as easy as you thought

When it comes to messaging, they are probably the most chatty applications out there when it comes to push notifications (not including Candy Crush).

I’ve had my share of bad experiences with messaging and notifications to know what works for me and what annoys the hell out of me. This is also where you see the true leaders shine and the rest slumbering along.

IP messaging is considered by most developers a rather simple thing to implement. It isn’t.

Here are a few things you should incorporate into your push notifications implementation when you want to deal with messaging capabilities.

#1 – Synchronize devices

Your service is sending me messages? Great.

You are aware I am the proud owner of a smartphone, tablet, laptop and PC? And that I generally connect through all of them interchangeably.

So when I am receiving a message (or sending one for that matter), it would be nice if said messages would magically appear in all of my devices. And in a timely fashion.

One of the reasons I’ve been using Skype less and less this year is that it just didn’t synchronize properly – not showing messages on all devices, or popping notifications on the app on my laptop a day or two after I’ve already received them on my phone or on the PC. It seemed like Skype just weren’t seriously prepared for this world of multiple devices per person.

Assume that if I sign in from a new device, I don’t want a “fresh” start – I want all of the data and context that is available to me on my other devices to be availalbe in this new device of mine as well.

#2 – Clear notifications. Everywhere

You know that fuzzy feeling inside when you receive an email? My whole house is pinging (or used to ping), each device trying its best to be the first to announce that incoming email.

The main problem is, that handling the notification (=opening it) on one device didn’t necessarily clean it from all other devices.

Google Mail got it right after a year or two on Android. WhatsApp got it right the first time – it was almost a magical feeling when they came out with their web interface and messages got cleared on the web or on the phone automatically – and FAST.

The most annoying thing is an app that doesn’t clear its notifications. I know there are many who don’t care, but I like my notifications windows clean. Going over multiple devices to clean the same message is a show stopper for me these days (and again, up until a few months ago, Skype didn’t get this one right).

#3 – Mobile and web

Notifications should occur both in mobile apps and in web browsers. Modern browsers already support notifications, so make sure to utilize it when needed.

You need to remember that knowledge workers may sit all day in front of a computer – so why not leverage that to show notifications there instead of making them pick up the phone?

#4 – How urgent is it again?

Not. Every. Single. Message. Is. The. Same.

How are you going to report them? Or even notify them?

You may have them notified separately. Or bunch them up under a single icon.

Slack just added a Do Not Disturb feature. Great. I can now silence notifications in Slack. The problem is, they decided that my work day is 8am-10pm. Anything not in this timeframe isn’t notified to me. It would have been fine – but only if when 8am arrived – they’d pop up a notification about things I’ve missed.

Groups in Whatsapp can be silenced, or certain people. You can even do it for a period of time (I don’t really care about kindergarten related chatter when I am abroad). But it is manual. It would have been so much better if somehow, WhatsApp magically would decide what I prefer and what I didn’t when it came to notifications.

#5 – How do I reply?

The vinyl Android SMS application enabled me to mark messages as read – right from the notification. No need to enter the app just so it knows I’ve read it. Some other apps enable replying to notifications without getting into the app.

What are you doing regarding your app? Is the only thing I can do is enter the app, or can I act from the notification itself? (guess what I prefer)

#6 – Where in the view stack will I be landing?

Got the notification on my phone. Pressed it. Where will it lead me?

LinkedIn’s terrible app (even the latest incarnation of it) does a great job at putting you in the wrong view – try accepting an invite to connect and you’ll end up preferring to open it inside your browser.

Skype gets you to the conversation. Pressing the back button on Android leaves the app. But if you then enter the Skype app explicitly, after several incoming notifications of a group conversation there – it will lead you to the same conversation over and over again – at least to the same amount of times you pressed on the notification of new messages in that group. Something is terribly wrong there.

WhatsApp does a decent job here – there’s a single WhatsApp notification for everything. If all notifications are from the same conversation – that’s where you’ll land. If there are multiple conversations you are being notified of – you’ll land at the WhatsApp homepage. Oh – and if you press back? It takes you from the conversation view to the homepage of WhatsApp before letting you leave the app.Gmail does the same.

#7 – Think Offline

Bonus points for handling unconnected use cases. Many miss this one when it comes to notifications.

When you press the notification, the app is launched and it goes to the server to grab the actual reason for notification. But what if I am INSIDE an elevator? Some apps do a miserable job at making sure that the launched app can show me the message without being connected (you already got me that notification – why not get the whole damn message while at it?)

Why is it important?

IP Messaging is probably one of those areas where developers go NIH. They know it all. How can sending a couple of messages be hard? Oh – you also need push notifications on top? No worries! There’s that simple API in iOS that does that.

But that’s usually only the beginning of the saga when it comes to IP Messaging and push notifications. If you decide to develop it in-house – you better be ready to writing down the exact spec in detail to get it right. Otherwise, find someone who does that for a living.

 

Planning on introducing WebRTC to your existing service? Schedule your free strategy session with me now.

The post Messaging and Push Notifications: Best Practices appeared first on BlogGeek.me.

The 2016 has just started and I am really looking forward to it.

The big celebration of 15 years of development for Kamailio project happens this year.  Although has changed the names few time, along the years SIP Express Router (SER) and OpenSER, it is a real performance to stay atop and continue the development at high pace for such long time in the open source environment.



The Kamailio World Conference, scheduled for May 18-20, 2016, in Berlin, will take care to organize a great party for this celebration, expecting many of the relevant developers in the history of the project, which will share the experiences and the impact in their careers because of being involved in the open source project. Be sure you don't miss this edition!


One of the first milestones in 2016 is the release of Kamailio v4.4.0, a new major version, which will bring as usual several new modules, plus improvements and new features in the existing components.

The first event where we expect to get a consistent group of Kamailio developers and friends is Fosdem 2016, in Brussels.

With a continuous increase of activity in the community of Kamailio project, I expect plenty of new ideas and challenges to work with along 2016! Stay tuned and keep an eye on this blog for updates!

The amazing 2015 for Kamailio is done! Thank you everyone for contributing to it!Now it is the time to get prepared to fill the 2016, with interesting discussions on our forums, solving new RTC challenges, adding features in Kamailio and welcoming new contributors!We wish a healthy and prosperous year to all Kamailio friends! We are looking forward to meeting many of you at Kamailio World Conference, where we are going to celebrate 15 years of development for Kamailio project, as well as at other events around the globe!

Consider this my end of year review for WebRTC in 2015.

Tomorrow will mark the last day of 2015. As we head into 2016, it is time to review what we had this year in WebRTC. For me this year proved to be a real rollercoaster, but somehow I get a feeling 2016 won’t be any different.

I dug some of the statistics I regularly collect, with differences and trends in 2015 in mind. From there, the road to an infographics about WebRTC State of the Market was a short one. For those who have membership access to my site, I will be spending the next Virtual Coffee discussing these findings in detail.

Feel free to share and embed this infographic (click to enlarge or download the PDF) if you wish:

Share this Image On Your Site

<p><strong>Please include attribution to BlogGeek.me with this graphic.</strong></p><br />
<p><a href=’https://bloggeek.me/webrtc-state-market-2015/’><img src=’https://bloggeek.me/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/201512-WebRTC-infographic.png’ alt=’WebRTC State of the Market – Are we there yet?’ width=’540px’ border=’0′ /></a></p><br />
<p>
See you all in 2016!

 

Planning on introducing WebRTC to your existing service? Schedule your free strategy session with me now.

 

The post WebRTC State of the Market: End of 2015 appeared first on BlogGeek.me.

While owning the domain miconda.eu for quite some time, never found the time to set it up. With the winter holidays giving sort of a break, I pointed blog.miconda.eu to my blog (here) at by-miconda.blogspot.com.

The main domain miconda.eu is pointed to about.me/miconda . I plan to make more use of this domain (email?!?), let's see if 2016 brings more spare time ...

Enjoy the winter holidays!

WebRTC Broadcast will be all the rage in 2016.

As I am working my way in analyzing the various use case categories for WebRTC, I decided to check what’s been important in 2015. The “winner” in attention was a relatively new category of WebRTC broadcast – one in which WebRTC is being used when what one is trying to achieve is sending a video stream to many viewers. These viewers can be passive, or they can interact with the creator of the broadcast.

Up until 2014, I had 4 such vendors in my list. 2015 brought 15 new vendors to it – call it “the fastest growing category”. And this is predominantly a US phenomena – only 3 of the new vendors aren’t US based startups.

Periscope and Meerkat are partly to “blame” here. The noise they made in the market stirred others to join the fray – especially if you consider many of them are based in San Francisco as well.

TokBox just introduced Spotlight – their own live broadcast APIs – for those who need. At its heart, Spotlight enables the types of interactions that we see on the market today for these kind of solutions:

1. Ability to produce video by using WebRTC – either from a browser or a mobile app
2. Ability to view the video content as a passive participant – usually via CDN by way of Flash, HLS or MPEG-DASH
3. Ability to “join” the producer, creating a 1:1 video chat or a video conference that gets broadcasted to others

Here are some of my thoughts on this new emerging category:

• Most of the focus today is using WebRTC broadcast on the producer’s side. The reasons are clear:
  • Flash is dying. HLS and MPEG-DASH are replacing it on the viewer side, but what is going to replace it in the producer side? Some go for specialized broadcasing applications, but WebRTC seems like a good alternative for many
  • This is where vendors have more control – they can force producers to use a certain browser – it is much harder to force the viewers
  • WebRTC plays nice in browsers and mobile. No other technology can achieve that today
• The producer side is also where most constraints/requirements come from today:
  • You may want to “pull in” a viewer for an interview during a session
  • Or have a panel of possible speakers
  • You may wish to split the producer from the “actor”, facilitating larger crews
  • All these fit well with the capabilities that WebRTC brings to the table versus the proprietary alternatives out there
• H.264 is the predominant requirement on the viewer side at the moment. VP9 is interesting. This means:
  • Trnascoding in necessary in the backend prior to sending the video to viewers
  • H.264 in Chrome can improve things for the vendors
• There’s a race towards zero-latency. Vendors are looking to reduce the 10-60 seconds of delay inherent in video streaming technologies to a second or less (not sure why)
  • This would require attempting to replace viewer end of the architecture to a WebRTC one
  • It will also necessitate someone building a backend that is optimized for this use case – something that wasn’t researched enough up until today
• Peer assisted delivery vendors such as Peer5 and Streamroot is another aspect. These kind of technologies sit “on top” of a video CDN and use WebRTC’s data channel to improve performance
• I’ve started noticing a few audio-only vendors joining the game as well. This will grow as a trend. The audio based solutions tend to be slightly different than the video ones and the technologies they employ are radically different. The technologies and architectures may converge, but not in 2016

2016 will be a continuation of what we’ve seen during 2015. More companies trying to define what live WebRTC broadcast looks like and aiming for different types of architectures to support it. In most cases, these architectures will combine WebRTC in them.

 

Planning on introducing WebRTC to your existing service? Schedule your free strategy session with me now.

The post The Rise of WebRTC Broadcast and Live Streaming appeared first on BlogGeek.me.

With an amazing 2015 almost gone, it is a good moment to thank and greet the people involved in Kamailio project, old and new friends, developers, contributors, the engaged and warm community members.
Very soon 2016 will arrive, Kamailio will celebrate 15 years of development, therefore we are looking to a special year ahead!


Together with Asipto, I Wish You Merry Christmas and Happy Winter Holidays!

Is it just me or are browsers fun again?

Who would have believed? Microsoft releasing their JavaScript engine as open source. And under a permissive MIT license.

While there are many browsers and vendors out there, there are probably only 4 that matter: Chrome (Google), Firefox (Mozilla), Edge (Microsoft) and Safari (Apple).

Who haven’t I included?

• Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Microsoft is actively transitioning away from it to Edge
• The rest of the pack, as far as I can tell, are nice wrappers around Chromium – and are negligible in their market share anyway

What should we expect in 2016 from the browsers? A lot.

Google Chrome

For Google, Chrome is an important piece of the puzzle. It lives in the web and the more control points it has over access to information the better positioned it is.

The ongoing activity of Google in WebRTC is part of the picture, and probably not the biggest one.

Google is the company with the least amount of regard to legacy code that there is. When something requires fixing, Google developers are not afraid to rewrite and refactor large components, and management allows and probably even encourages this behavior – something I haven’t seen anywhere else.

A few examples for recent years:

• Google forked WebKit into Blink, essentially replacing the page rendering inside the browser. The first order of the day after the fork? Spring cleaning – removing code that isn’t necessary for Chrome
• Google switched EVERYTHING from OpenSSL to BoringSSL. OpenSSL seemed to have some vulnerabilities lately, so Googlers took the time to fork it, clean it up – and deploy the new project across Google
• Introducing SPDY and getting HTTP/2 out the door

That said, it seems that Google have been somewhat complacent in the area of speed and size with Chrome. I am sure the Chrome team is aware of it and working hard to fix it, but the results haven’t been encouraging enough. This will change – mostly because of the actions of the other browser vendors.

Mozilla Firefox

Mozilla is in transition. From relying on Google as its main benefactor to spreading the risks.

In the past few months though, Mozilla has started trimming down its projects:

• Mozilla plans on splitting Thunderbird, its email client, from Mozilla
• Mozilla stopped developing and selling Firefox OS smartphones – I wonder how will this affect its relationship with Telefonica, TokBox and the Hello project

These changes indicate that Mozilla understood it can’t just try and replicate every cool new Google project and open source it – it will now focus on making Firefox better. This is a much needed focus, with Firefox slipping in market share for quite some time now.

On the browser front, the notable changes Firefox is making are around privacy and the pornprivacy mode.

Microsoft Edge

Edge is new. It is a complete rewrite of what a browser is. It is speedy, clean and with huge potential. It has its own adoption challenges to overcome (mainly people comfortable enough with Chrome and not caring to try out Edge).

What to do? Microsoft just open sourced the JavaScript engine in Edge – Chakra. It shows some interesting performance results that seem to rival Chrome’s V8. The more interesting aspect of it, is the clear intent in getting Chakra into Node.js as a V8 alternative. Not sure if it will work, but it does has merit. It shows to me that:

1. A browser/webapp today is split into two – frontend and backend (we already knew that). More often than not, these days the backend is based on a Node.js framework. Microsoft wants to be a part of that backend, probably to end up licensing Windows 10 on servers
2. JavaScript today is more than a browser scripting language. A JavaScript engine’s health/popularity/importance relies on the ecosystem around it – which is why Microsoft ended up open sourcing it

I am sure there’s an engineer at Google already tasked at reviewing the code of Chakra once it gets a public git repository.

Edge is trying to move the envelope. This will challenge Google further with Chrome – always a good thing.

Apple Safari

Safari seems second place at Apple. It is working, but not much is said or done about it.

We hear a lot of rumblings about WebRTC in Safari lately. How will this shape into Safari, iOS and Mac is anyone’s guess. The bigger question is will this be the only significant browser change to be introduced by Apple or part of a larger overhaul?

Why is this important?

The web isn’t standing still. It is evolving and changing. Earlier this year, WebAssembly was announced – an effort to speed up the interactive web.

While many believe that apps have won over the web when it comes to development, we need to remember two things:

1. There are times when an app won’t do – as Benedict Evans phrases it well in Apps versus to web: “Do people want to put your icon on their home screen?” – and sometimes they just don’t
2. Apps are sometimes built using HTML5 – usually because a developer wants a single code base for all platforms or just needs easier access for his service from a browser and mobile apps at the same time

An interesting road ahead of us.

 

Planning on introducing WebRTC to your existing service? Schedule your free strategy session with me now.

The post The Browser Wars are Back appeared first on BlogGeek.me.

It’s easy, as long as you know where to look for it.

This was published yesterday. Oftentimes, the things I read out there about WebRTC sounds just like this conversation from Dilbert’s life.

WebRTC is elusive. It is located in the cracks between VoIP and the web – a place where most people are just clueless. My own pedigree is VoIP. About 6 years ago, as an “aging” CTO trying to build a cloud service with an API for developers that runs a VoIP service, I was given an important lesson – there’s much to be learned from a 24 year old kid with milk teeth. In a span of a year and a half I got introduced to agile methodologies, internet scale, continuous deployment and a slew of other techniques – none of them was given the term we use today – but they were all there. It helped me later in understanding how and why WebRTC is so transformative.

As we head into 2016, I guess it is time to state a few of the great resources out there for WebRTC – the places I rely on in my own reading about WebRTC.

The Bloggers

Out of the people out there that cover WebRTC, there are 3 that I make it a point to read. All of them are good friends of mine:

• Chris Kranky, who is always fun to read
• Disruptive Analysis, by Dean Bubley
• The New Dial Tone, written by Amir Zmora
• WebRTC by Dr Alex is relatively new to the scene and is showing promise for low level WebRTC developers

The Vendors

Most company blogs suck. Big time. They are boring, and usually read like brochures or press releases. There are a few decent corporate blogs covering WebRTC – some of them can be considered mandatory reading.

TokBox

TokBox has the best corporate blog all around if what you are looking for is WebRTC related information. Now that they have recruited Philipp Hancke they probably will improve further.

Between their new offerings and features announcements are gems of information in the form of whitepapers of certain verticals and insights on WebRTC from the service they operate. They also run TechToks that get recorded and published on YouTube.

callstats.io

The callstats.io blog is another great resource, especially when it comes to covering getstats() related stuff and media quality. Highly recommended.

AT&T

I’ve written my own guest post on the AT&T Developers blog once or twice, so I know how they operate. While being a large corporation has a lot of limitations, when they publish content about WebRTC or adjacent technologies – it is worth the time to read.

A testament to that is the recent series of WebRTC UX/UI posts they have commissioned from &yet – mandatory reading for anyone who delves into web apps for WebRTC.

Sinch

While Sinch’s blog hasn’t been too interesting when it comes to WebRTC lately, earlier this year they had great content to share. Lately, it tends to be around use cases of their customers – totally interesting, but from a different angle.

I’d register on their blog if I were you to keep posted. I am sure they’ll have interesting articles for us next year as well.

WebRTC Digest & Blacc Spot Media

Blacc Spot Media started WebRTC Digest they also run their own Blacc Spot Media blog. Both are great resources with good content.

The digest site is all about acquisitions and money raising in the space, while Blacc Spot Media tries to cover the industry and the ecosystem.

At times, there needs to be some further validation to the vendors being written about there (some aren’t really doing WebRTC but are in the real time space), but all in all, one of the better resources out there.

webrtcHacks

By far the best place for WebRTC developers to go.

In-depth and timely content.

If you aren’t subscribed – then please do.

WebRTC Weekly

If you don’t want to subscribe to too many resources, and are in the need for a single source, then Chris Kranky and me operate the WebRTC Weekly. Subscribe by email to receive one email a week with links to the relevant articles and posts from all over the web related to WebRTC.

There are three reasons why something doesn’t get included in the WebRTC Weekly:

1. Trash content, which either isn’t accurate or just too shallow
2. Repetitive, of something that was already covered in the weekly (usually at a higher quality)
3. We missed it… email us with things you think we should include

The post Where to find Quality WebRTC Resources appeared first on BlogGeek.me.

The Kamailio SIP Server v4.1.9  stable version  is released. This is a minor release including fixes in code and documentation since v4.1.8 – configuration file and database compatibility is preserved within 4.1.x series. Important Note: branch 4.1 is not going to be packaged anymore, v4.1.9 being the last version to be released from this branch, marking the end of the official maintenance for 4.1.x series.The current latest stable branch is 4.3, at this time with v4.3.4 being released out of it. The project is officially maintaining the last two stable branches, these are now 4.3 and 4.2. Therefore it is recommended to upgrade to latest 4.3.x – be aware that you may need to change the configuration file from 4.1.x to 4.2.x or 4.3.x.Resources for Kamailio version 4.1.9Source tarballs are available at:

• http://www.kamailio.org/pub/kamailio/4.1.9/src/

Detailed changelog:

• http://www.kamailio.org/pub/kamailio/4.1.9/ChangeLog

Download via GIT: # git clone git://git.kamailio.org/kamailio kamailio
# cd kamailio
# git checkout -b 4.1 origin/4.1Binaries and packages will be uploaded at:

• http://www.kamailio.org/pub/kamailio/4.1.9/

Modules’ documentation:

• http://www.kamailio.org/docs/modules/4.1.x/

What is new in 4.1.x release series is summarized in the announcement of v4.1.0:

• http://www.kamailio.org/w/kamailio-v4-1-0-release-notes/

See more details about the latest stable branch, v4.3.x, at:

• http://www.kamailio.org/w/kamailio-v4-3-0-release-notes/

Kamailio SIP Server v4.2.7 stable is out! This is a minor release including fixes in code and documentation since v4.2.6.Kamailio v4.2.7 is based on the latest version of GIT branch 4.2.  If you are running previous 4.2.x versions are advised to upgrade to 4.2.7 (or to 4.3.x series). If you upgrade from older 4.2.x to 4.2.7, there is no change that has to be done to configuration file or database structure comparing with older v4.2.x.Resources for Kamailio version 4.2.7Source tarballs are available at:

• http://www.kamailio.org/pub/kamailio/4.2.7/src/

Detailed changelog:

• http://www.kamailio.org/pub/kamailio/4.2.7/ChangeLog

Download via GIT: # git clone git://git.kamailio.org/kamailio kamailio
# cd kamailio
# git checkout -b 4.2 origin/4.2Binaries and packages will be uploaded at:

• http://www.kamailio.org/pub/kamailio/4.2.7/

Modules’ documentation:

• http://www.kamailio.org/docs/modules/4.2.x/

What is new in 4.2.x release series is summarized in the announcement of v4.2.0:

• http://www.kamailio.org/w/kamailio-v4-2-0-release-notes/

Note: the branch 4.2 is the previous stable branch. The latest stable branch is 4.3, at this time with v4.3.1 being released out of it. The project is officially maintaining the last two stable branches, these are 4.3 and 4.2. Therefore an alternative is to upgrade to latest 4.3.x – be aware that you may need to change the configuration files and database structures from 4.2.x to 4.3.x. See more details about it at:

• http://www.kamailio.org/w/kamailio-v4-3-0-release-notes/

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Twilio: Al Cook

December 2015

Communication API

API Platform

Large

Voice, Video

Cloud Communication APIs.

[If you are new around here, then you should know I’ve been writing about WebRTC lately. You can skim through the WebRTC post series or just read what WebRTC is all about.]

API platforms fascinate me. Especially communication API platforms. You can’t get any bigger than Twilio these days. This year, they’ve announced and launched a slew of new capabilities – task routing, video calling, IP messaging and a lot of enhancements to their existing services.

I’ve been wanting to land an interview with Twilio for quite some time. I was happy when Al Cook, Director of Product Marketing at Twilio, obliged. Here’s what he had to say.

 

What is Twilio all about?

Twilio is a cloud communications platform. We provide programmable building blocks that developers use to embed communications into their mobile and web apps – from voice, messaging, and video to authentication. So when you are communicating with your Uber driver via text or anonymous phone call, calling Hulu customer support, or shopping via text with the help of your Nordstrom personal shopper, that’s Twilio. Or to give a WebRTC example – when you call a customer support team powered by Zendesk, the agent is talking to you over a WebRTC connection powered by Twilio. We have over 700,000 developers generating over 50 billion API transactions a year. In WebRTC we’ve powered over half a billion minutes of WebRTC to date.

 

Twilio Video went to public beta today. You’ve been in private beta for a while. How is it going? What have you learned?

That’s right, the private beta started in May and we collaborated with developers to build the right solution, with the right developer experience. Video is in public beta as of now. Now anyone can sign up for immediate access to our WebRTC-powered web and mobile SDKs, and the cloud-based signaling/media services that power them.

During the private beta we onboarded several thousand developers from our base. This group size was critical for gaining useful feedback and insights, while still allowing meaningful interactions.

Interesting. Did you check what users do during the private beta?

During the private beta onboarding, we asked participants to tell us about their use cases. I read every single entry and categorized the use cases. The top categories break out as follows:

• 21% healthcare
• 14% support (in-app enterprise customer support, visual customer support)
• 12% tutoring
• 10% collaboration
• 5% recruiting
• 5% call an expert
• 4% marketplace / sharing economy
• 4% interpretation services (including assistive deaf/blind services)

Two of the big areas we spent considerable time refining during the beta were improving the mobile media stack performance, and building a signaling model that allows us to continue to add new capabilities for multi-party, multi-endpoint IP and carrier communications.

 

I have to ask. These developers in the private beta – how many of them were existing Twilio developers who just added video versus new ones?

It’s a mix. A lot of folks are with us because they want multiple channels of communication, and so video is a natural extension for them. But we’ve also had a lot of people who were new to Twilio, and excited to have a better alternative than their current video solution.

 

How is your video offering different from other alternatives that are out there today?

We believe this solution is not available anywhere else. Here’s some insight on the areas where we invested the most time to ensure we were building the right solution for needs that had not been addressed.

• Without this, each communication capability would either have to be built from scratch or individually purchased and pieced together, if possible. And that’s just the beginning. Our SDKs are designed as a platform to add more communication channels over time.
• We designed a conversation model that scales in volume, use case and breadth of different endpoint types. Conversations can be either call-based or room-based; start peer-to-peer and move to network-mixed; and interoperate with SIP endpoints and carrier endpoints. Our signaling model is built to fulfill this vision. Some features are enabled today; others are coming. The important thing is we’ve laid the foundation for one platform that can power all communications needs.
• Our pricing makes it accessible to everyone, and to scale to the very largest deployments. Most video services require per user fees, which are expensive for starting-up and scaling. Twilio video is aimed at infrastructure level pricing where it’s faster and cheaper than building and operating your own service at any scale. And users get the benefit of our ongoing work to deliver high quality and resiliency.

 

What excites you about working in WebRTC?

To me, the most exciting aspect of WebRTC – and really programmable real-time communications more generally – is that it stands to fundamentally change the way we communicate. Through every iteration of the phone, the basic interaction hasn’t really changed. Historically, there has been little-to-no ability to gain immediate context of why the caller is calling, what they were doing beforehand, and what they may need. Embedding communications into applications allows for a far more meaningful and relevant communication. Imagine calling your car insurance company from your car insurance app following an accident, and instantly the call is routed with the right prioritization based on the GPS of your phone to an agent who speaks your prefered language. The app enables you to instantly share a video feed of the accident scene and collaboratively annotate the video using the app. All this while the agent captures the information in their record system to avoid a separate visit from a damage appraiser.

We believe every single app will have communications built into it. Every. Single. App.

 

Where do you see WebRTC going in 2-5 years?

WebRTC/ORTC is moving at such a velocity that 5 years out is pretty hard to forecast. But we believe:

• In this timeframe, browser support should be ubiquitous. We’ve seen Microsoft Edge get there already (barring video codec support), and we know Apple is working on it for Safari.
• Ubiquitous doesn’t mean standardized or non-contentious. We expect to continue to see differences in implementation of particular features that the developer will either have to keep track of and deal with directly, or use an SDK such as Twilio Video.
• Media quality requires continuous improvement. We’ll continue to make it better and more resilient to bad networks.  However, in this timeframe, there will remain some networks that are not viable for real-time video.
• Mobile in-app usage will be the most important use case for consumers. This means that most consumers won’t be using Google’s latest WebRTC engine off the shelf, but rather a version that has been packaged – and often modified and enhanced – along the way.
• B2C Communications will focus on high-value, contextual interactions. Low-value B2C interactions will be increasingly handled through self-service channels. WebRTC will be one of the core technologies powering the high value segment.

 

If you had one piece of advice for those thinking of adopting WebRTC, what would it be?

Experiment – and think about how you scale the experiments that find success. It’s relatively simple to get a basic WebRTC call working. But plan for what happens if your new service finds success. Consider how will you scale, maintain and operate your TURN media relay. How will you collect and analyze voice quality diagnostics from all your endpoints. How will you interoperate with SIP networks and PSTN networks.

 

Given the opportunity, what would you change in WebRTC?

Some improvements have been addressed by ORTC. We’re big fans of these improvements and we look forward to the standards combining.

We would like more control over the media stack in a browser environment, if the browser makers could figure out a secure way to enable this. We spend a considerable amount time testing and measuring voice quality in impaired networks. In fact, we open-sourced the testing tool we use. On the mobile side, we operate the media stack and we do a lot of fine tuning to constantly improve the media quality.  This includes taking into account the performance of different networks and hardware configurations. Whether it’s adding codecs to use in particular scenarios, adding Forward Error Correction (FEC) techniques, or other areas we are working on. But when our endpoints call a browser-based endpoint, they have to fall back to the default media stack and it is not possible to layer on additional media enhancements, which is why we’d like more control in the browser environment.

In the more immediate time frame, the subject of handling QoS in WebRTC is tricky, and far from standardized. Plus, QoS behavior, like with much of WebRTC, tends to require significant reverse engineering to establish the exact behavior in different scenarios. We’re happy we can provide this capability on behalf of our customers – but we’d like more control over the experience.

 

What’s next for Twilio?

We’ve talked about a few of them – interoperability with SIP endpoints and PSTN endpoints for example. Of course we’re also working on SFU functionality for large scale video conferences – that should be no surprise to our customers. But we want to provide this capability in such a way that a developer doesn’t have to choose between either peer-to-peer routing or SFU mixed. The solution should intelligently move from one to another as the call topology requires. We also want a solution that scales beyond any existing solutions. And then, well…that’s enough to keep us busy for now Tsahi.

–

The interviews are intended to give different viewpoints than my own – you can read more WebRTC interviews.

 

The post Twilio and WebRTC: An Interview with Al Cook appeared first on BlogGeek.me.

Xander Dumaine provides some strategies and code for dealing with the new secure origin only policy in Chrome 47+ that forces the use of HTTPS.

The post Surviving Mandatory HTTPS in Chrome (Xander Dumaine) appeared first on webrtcHacks.

As of today, December 16, 2015, the Kamailio Project is officially using a new logotype:Different formats and 3D artwork of the new logo can be found at:

• http://www.kamailio.org/pub/kamailio-logos/current/

If you do any artwork based on the new logo and you want to share it with the community, we will gladly host it. Please do not hesitate to contact us.We encourage everyone displaying an old logo of Kamailio to update to the new one at the earliest convenience, it will help propagating the logo. Posting about it on blogs, forums, social media channels a.s.o. is very much appreciated.The community of the project liked the new logo, we hope everyone else will find it nice as well!Enjoy the winter holidays!

This week the verto communicator had some new updates to the administrator menu and the core added a new origination_audio_mode variable. Join us Wednesdays at 12:00 CT for some more FreeSWITCH fun! This week we have Italo Rossi and the Evolux call center team! And, head over to freeswitch.com to learn more about FreeSWITCH support.

New features that were added:

• FS-8616 [verto_communicator] A new menu for moderator, added gain buttons, and removed the 3-dot-button, moving its behavior to member-name div
• FS-8632 [core] Add origination_audio_mode originate variable with options for sendonly, recvonly or sendrecv

Improvements in build system, cross platform support, and packaging:

• FS-8293 [verto] Add quality level 0 to conference (default is 1) and fix some logic in auto bandwidth

The following bugs were squashed:

• FS-8625 [core] Fixed a segfault caused by an external incoming call from Google Voice.
• FS-8642 [core] Fixed CF_VIDEO_READY being set on non-video calls
• FS-8603 [verto_communicator] Added device validation to prevent lost microphones after reset
• FS-8640 [verto_communicator] Don’t clear conference member reservation id on members that don’t have a reservation ID
• FS-8633 [mod_verto] Fix for the first verto to join a conference does not get “conference-livearray-join” event
• FS-8621 [mod_av] Fixed H264 HD1080P video quality issues
• FS-8631 [mod_db] Updated the regex to allow DSN to match the rest of FS code
• FS-8643 [mod_sofia] Fixed some memory leaks

 

Victor Seva from Sipwise has published a new module forKamailio, named cfgt. The module is to be part of the next major release of Kamailio – v4.4.0, expected to be out on early spring of 2016.The module is useful for unit testing, to compare the results of the Kamailio configuration file routing logic. The report of execution is in JSON format, making it easy to analyse. Among the contents of the report can be the values for variables used in the configuration file.You have to make your test scenario (e.g., using sipp), send the traffic to Kamailio and then check if the report contains expected results.The documentation of the module is available at:

• http://www.kamailio.org/docs/modules/devel/modules/cfgt.html

The functionality of the module is rather small by now, but Victor is committed to add more in the near future, including examples of how to use it. Stay tuned and keep an eye on kamailio.org for updates!

These days “free” software seems to be a scary prospect to the general public. The association between open-source software and malicious “click here for free stuff” ads is strong and the fear of unknown “hackers” runs rampant. The old adage that “nothing good in life comes for free” has ingrained the idea that free is synonymous with scams. Why would anyone in their right mind give away a great product for free? This thought process is why most of the general public limits themselves to costly, proprietary services. The tech industry is huge and understanding it all is impossible, but buying trust isn’t the answer to guaranteed safety. There is plenty of fantastic open-source software available and it shouldn’t only be accessible to experienced, tech savvy individuals. And, as we move toward a more tech based culture, the up and coming generations can have an especially difficult time trying to explain this misconstrued conclusion to their older peers. Jim Salter from Opensource.com addressed this issue with an open letter to all parents with kids that want to use open-source software. He goes on to say free open-source software (FOSS) “is not “stolen” software. Free software licenses like the GPL and the BSD and Apache licenses allow users the ability to freely use, and developers the ability to freely develop, the software placed under those licenses. Another important thing to understand about FOSS is that it is not merely “free” in the sense of “free in every box of cereal.” Making a new copy of a piece of software literally costs nothing at all—this has made it possible for community efforts to produce world-class products in a way material goods never could be.” Helping the general public to understand the definition and motivation behind open-source will bring it out of the shadows of the industry and help it become mainstream. You can read his letter here: https://opensource.com/life/15/12/dear-parents-let-your-kids-use-open-source-software

A few days back my old friend Chris Koehnke, better known as “Kranky” asked me how hard it would be to implement a wild idea he had to monitor what percentage of the time you spent talking instead of listening on a call when using WebRTC. When I said “one day” that made him wonder whether he could offshore it to save money. Well… good luck!

A week later Kranky showed me some code. Wait, he is writing code? It was not bad – it was using the WebAudio API so going in the right direction. It was enough to prod me to finish writing the app for him.

The audio stream volume sample application from Google calculates the root mean square (RMS) of the audio signal which is extracted from the input stream using a script processor every 200ms. There is a lot of tuning options here of course.

Instead of starting from scratch, I decided to use hark, a small open source module for this task that my coworker Philip Roberts had built in mid-2013 when the WebAudio API became first available.

Instead of the RMS, hark uses the Fast Fourier Transformation to obtain a frequency domain representation of the input signal. Then, hark picks the maximum amplitude as an indication for the volume of the signal. Let’s try this (full code here):

var hark = require('../hark.js') var getUserMedia = require('getusermedia') getUserMedia(function(err, stream) { if (err) throw err var options = {}; var speechEvents = hark(stream, options); speechEvents.on('volume_change', function(volume) { console.log('current volume', volume); }); });

On top of this, hark uses a simple speech detection algorithm that considers speech to be started when the maximum amplitude stays above a threshold for a number of milliseconds. Much less complicated than typical voice activity detection algorithms but pretty effective. And easy to use as well, just subscribe to two additional events:

speechEvents.on('speaking', function() { console.log('speaking'); }); speechEvents.on('stopped_speaking', function() { console.log('stopped_speaking'); });

Tuning the threshold for accurate speech detection is pretty tricky. So I needed visualization (and just requiring hark only took five minutes so I had plenty of time). Using the awesome Highcharts graph library I quickly added plot bands to the graph I was generating:

With the visualization I could easily see that the speech detection events happened a bit later than I expected since hark requires a certain history over the threshold for the trigger to work (say: 400ms).  To adjust for this in the graph had to substract this speech starting to trigger time from my x-axis (now()– 400ms for example).

That graph is still visibile on the more techie variant of the website so if you think the results are not accurate… it might help you figure out what is going on. I am happy with the current behavior.

The percentage of speech then calculated as the sum of the intervals that speech is detected divided by the duration of the call. As a display, a gauge chart is used with three different colors:

• up to 65% speech time: green
• up to 79%: yellow
• more than 80%: red

Adding remote audio to this would be awesome. However, while the WebAudio API is supported for local media streams in Chrome, Firefox and Edge, it is only supported for remote streams in Firefox. Hooking this up with the getStats API (in Chrome) to get the audio level would certainly be possible, but would require calling getStats at a very high frequency to get proper averages.

Check out the app in action at talklessnow and let us know what you think.

{“author”: “Philipp Hancke“}

Want to keep up on our latest posts? Please click here to subscribe to our mailing list if you have not already. We only email post updates. You can also follow us on twitter at @webrtcHacks for blog updates and news of technical WebRTC topics or our individual feeds @chadwallacehart, @victorpascual and @tsahil.

The post Shut up! Monitoring audio volume in getUserMedia appeared first on webrtcHacks.

Your private 911 system.

[If you are new around here, then you should know I’ve been writing about WebRTC lately. You can skim through the WebRTC post series or just read what WebRTC is all about.]

I have seen a lot of applications lately that target public safety. Some offer you a “ghost” partner to “walk” with you home, while others focus on the reporting aspects.

SaferMobility targets the authorities as the owners of the system (college campuses, municipalities, business zones, etc) and provides a mobile application to the users. It is reimagining how a 911 service would look like if it was being specified today.

Matthew Mah, CTO of SaferMobility, was kind enough to answer my questions on what role WebRTC plays in their service.

 

What is SaferMobility all about?

SaferMobility focuses on using the capabilities of modern smartphones for enhancing safety. The public safety system in the United States is built around wired telephones, and it is more difficult for authorities to respond to mobile phones because they are harder to locate than fixed telephones. The modern smartphone has audio, video, location, and text capability that just are not being used efficiently yet.

 

There are many other safety related apps out there. What differentiates you from the rest of the pack?

Our systems focus on real-time interaction with authorities. Authorities receive enhanced calls with audio, video, location, and text information in real-time without it having to filter through friends or storage systems.

 

You told me you launched your service using Flash. Why did you migrate to WebRTC?

WebRTC is a huge improvement over Flash in terms of security, support, and capability. Adobe is not really interested in supporting Flash for mobile devices, so capabilities like acoustic echo suppression are not available. This makes a huge difference in communication quality.

 

What signaling have you decided to integrate on top of WebRTC?

We use a proprietary message system built on websockets.

 

Backend. What technologies and architecture are you using there?

Our Java application server runs Tomcat with a PostgreSQL database. It handles the signaling and issues commands to a media server for recording capabilities. We currently run on Dialogic’s Extended Media Server (XMS).

Mobile. You decided to port WebRTC to iOS and Android on your own. How was the experience?

Porting was difficult because of compatibility issues between our WebRTC media server with web, iOS, and Android clients. We would get two clients to work with the server, then upgrade the server and have two different clients work.

For stability on the web side, the nwjs project has been very helpful for producing an application that works even while the web browser updates are racing ahead and frequently breaking things.

 

Where do you see WebRTC going in 2-5 years?

WebRTC will replace stagnant technologies like Flash. The ability to communicate through the browser will also lower the barrier for application development.

 

If you had one piece of advice for those thinking of adopting WebRTC, what would it be?

Be prepared for things to change quickly because WebRTC is still growing and maturing.

 

Given the opportunity, what would you change in WebRTC?

Aside from the expected growing pains, I am pleased with WebRTC.

 

What’s next for SaferMobility?

There’s a huge opportunity to improve public safety, security services, and general communication with modern mobile devices, and SaferMobility will be part of making those improvements.

–

The interviews are intended to give different viewpoints than my own – you can read more WebRTC interviews.

The post SaferMobility and WebRTC: An Interview With Matthew Mah appeared first on BlogGeek.me.

WebRTC GetUserMedia is more important than the rest of this communication stack.

Who would have believed? With all the magic and distraction that video calling from a browser brings with it, the real treasure trove resides in the basics – WebRTC GetUserMedia.

Simplifying things, WebRTC has 3 distinct areas/APIs to it:

1. GetUserMedia, allowing access to camera and microphone inside the browser
2. PeerConnection, taking care of all the mess that is a voice/video call
3. Data Channel, making it possible to send any arbitrary message across browsers directly

I’ve pointed up in the past how WebRTC GetUserMedia gets used by Mailchimp and WhatsApp. Taking a camera snapshot is nice, but what else can we achieve with this access we’ve been given?

TalkLessNow

Chris Kranky had an idea a few weeks ago. Measuring how much you’re yapping in a call as opposed to listening. So he made it happen. On a shoestring budget, some connections and a bit of time and TalkLessNow was born.

How it works?

The website is quite spartan. When you go on a phone call (not a WebRTC one), you just press the green Call button on talklessnow.com.

The code on the site “listens” through the machine’s microphone to your call. Whenever it hears enough of a volume – it assumes you’re talking. If the volume is lower than its configured threshold – you’re listening.

Just WebRTC GetUserMedia. No PeerConnection or any other fuss.

Will it work?

Here in Israel, I am sure the results won’t be good. We’re used to talking over each other and interrupting. Efficiency at its best. If in a call between Israelis it shows less than 70% of talk time per participant, I’ll crown that session a success.

Seriously though, we should be listening a lot more than we’re talking.

Same but different

The now defunct Guitar Tuner works the same way. It doesn’t work anymore because the site is served on HTTP and WebRTC GetUserMedia now requires HTTPS to work with the latest Chrome release (progress, you know).

Ziggeo

Here’s another example.

Ziggeo is making use of WebRTC to record videos. They do that by employing WebRTC GetUserMedia, storing the resulting media locally and at the end of the recording sending it to their servers. The sending part doesn’t occur via WebRTC.

There’s an interesting interview with Susan Danziger, CEO of Ziggeo from last week that you should read.

Is this Real Time Communications?

WHO CARES?

It works. It gives business value – and in ways that weren’t really possible up until today.

There’s a lot more to WebRTC than classic VoIP.

 

Planning on introducing WebRTC to your existing service? Schedule your free strategy session with me now.

The post The Hidden Gems of WebRTC Goodness May Well Lie Within GetUserMedia Itself appeared first on BlogGeek.me.