Next week, at our 2Way conference in New York City, I will be moderating a panel to address issues surrounding real-time communications. To help illustrate where we have come and where we need to go, I have assembled for my panel four representatives of companies that are pushing the envelope. The companies include:
- Tokbox Inc.,which enables group video chat apps on a website,
- Radish Systems,which sells ChoiceView, an iPhone/iPad app that enables real-time communications to call center agents,
- Twilio Inc., sells its Cloud Communicator which enables voice and texting interaction with a website using a variety of programming languages and tools
- 5 Min Media, is a leading how-to video repository and syndicator that is now part of AOL.
All of these vendors have various programming interfaces, widgets and tools to make it easier to share audio and video content on a website: the goal is to make the site more engaging and keep a visitor browsing and have a site stand out from others that are more static. The bad news is that we are still in the early days of how a particular browser supports this content: if we are going to post something in Flash, for example, that cuts out all the iPad users out there. If we embed a video player, that means we tie ourselves closer to the source site that serves up that content.