WebRTC Expo IV Kicks off with Rookie Developers Introduced to WebRTC Basics

By Erik Linask, Group Editorial Director

This morning, the fourth edition of WebRTC Conference & Expo kicked off in Atlanta with three extended sessions – A Business Intro to WebRTC, Deploying WebRTC Successfully, and WebRTC Tutorial – headlining the two developer tracks and business track at WebRTC IV.  Notably, the second developer track is an addition from previous events, a testament to the momentum WebRTC has built.

I had the pleasure of opening one of the developer tracks and introducing the WebRTC Intro session, which featured WebERTC experts Dr. Alan Johnston (News - Alert) from Avaya and Dr. Dan Burnett from Voxeo (now an Aspect company), who recently release the third edition of their WebRTC Book, which features new code, specifically related to the data channel, which shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone attending previous WebRTC Expos, where the data channel has been a topic of note.

While much of the content of the conference is focused on use cases, revenue generation, app development, and other advanced topics, none of that is possible without a fundamental understanding of WebRTC principles.  To the delight of Johnston and Burnett, the entire audience of nearly 100 attendees comprised WebRTC beginners – those who, by their own acknowledgement, are complete novices or have experimented a bit with WebRTC – exactly for whom the session is intended.

Throughout the session, Johnston and Burnett – taking a fully “show” as opposed to “tell” approach this year – showed pieces of code and demonstrated connections and communications based on the demo app in their book, as well as developer tools and a discussion on using Wireshark.

The entire session was based on delivering the core benefits of WebRTC to both developers and end users of a true real-time communications capability built natively into Web browsers (the fundamental of WebRTC), requiring no plugins or flash, and including all required audio and video codecs to deliver high-quality voice and/or video interactions.  It’s currently supported by Chrome and Firefox, but Johnston is hopeful that IE and Safari will follow suit.

“Maybe we’ll hear something here this week,” he said.

For developers, WebRTC represents a new development platform – sort of the new communications operating systems – with simple APIs, advanced codecs (better than most VoIP systems available today), and delivered at essentially no cost.

And for users, WebRTC requires no installation – it just works in the browser – while delivering fully encrypted communications, critical for today’s digital environment.  Ultimately, WebRTC will create new opportunities and choice for users in terms of ultra-simple communication.

The rest of the conference will follow logically from the discussion with Burnett and Johnston, considering different use cases, monetization, development opportunities, integration, and demos of live WebRTC implementations (many of which can be found in WebRTC World’s WebRTC Directory).