Categories
Engineer webrtc

ipcortex WebRTC week cc @ipcortex

Welcome to ipcortex WebRTC week on trefor.net.

It is with some terror that I accepted the invitation to contribute a series of posts here on the future of communication technology – Tref’s readers are a pretty smart bunch and this is a great opportunity make complete fools of ourselves when our crystal ball inevitably turns out to be myopic given a few months or years of hindsight.

We’ve instead decided to ask the following question as a theme for the week and then invite some posts that illustrate views of the future from different perspectives, not just our own.

Game changers like WebRTC are emerging and will spawn a wide new range of services with secure, contextual user to user and user to server communication. Wildly imaginative applications for this technology are already starting to be developed and many more are probably yet to be invented.

Irrespective of the technology most people already rely on the rich and intuitive communication capabilities of various existing Internet based silos to run their personal and social lives.

On the other hand, much of our business and formal communication is still using the kind of systems that we are giving up on in the personal realm: email, telephone calls etc.

So the question is this: what factors will shape how we use communication technology in future? will users just be swept along on application by application waves of technical features, or can we hope to shape things by applying what we have learned about how people want to communicate to build useful global capabilities?

In line with this theme, coming up we have:

  • Some ideas on how the future of WebRTC will pan out, timed to coincide with the ITSPA workshop in London today
  • Matt, one of the developers of keevio eye, an R&D hack to put video chat on a Raspberry Pi and strap it on a drone will be talking about how he did it and the kind of serious applications this enables
  • The folks from matrix.org will be talking about their attempt to build an open standard for decentralised communications and federation

This is an exciting time with some big recent shifts, and even bigger ones ahead. We hope you enjoy reading the ipcortex week posts and that they stimulate some healthy debate.

Rob Pickering is CEO and Founder of British communication software vendor ipcortex. An engineer with a technical pedigree tracing back to the beginnings of TCP/IP, he is a keen innovator and a champion of open standards like WebRTC, which are helping to improve the way we work. His team have worked on a number of WebRTC developments including keevio, their latest production interface that extends UC and multimedia functionality to the web browser, and RTCEmergency, the Google prize-winning proof of concept app that augments emergency services calls with real time video

Footnote by Tref: This is Rob’s first post on WebRTC on trefor.net. Rob has significant form when it comes to the technology. I first encountered WebRTC at an ipcortex seminar in which I was thrilled to make one of the first WebRTC to PSTN phone calls. Check it out here.

Loads of WebRTC posts on this blog here.

Rob Pickering

By Rob Pickering

Rob is a reformed software engineer who has spent much of his life developing computer networking applications and infrastructure. He is currently founder and CEO at ipcortex.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.