The Next Generation Service Platforms 2015 event took place in Munich on June 17th and 18th. The event had two separate tracks: Telecom APIs and WebRTC. Most of the event participants were from telecommunication operators as well as people from WebRTC and API startups. callstats.io team with Varun, Satu and Lasse was also at the event; we were hosting a startup pod, presenting, and networking.
Varun at the Munich WebRTC meetup
Munich WebRTC meetup #2
The day before the event, Unify organised a WebRTC meetup at UnternehmerTUM, the center for innovation and business creation at the Technische Universität München. The meetup consisted of four presentations: CEO of callstats.io, Varun Singh, presented callstats.io’s product; Kristijan Burnik presented speech recognition for WebRTC in Chrome; Jan Hickisch from Unify talked about the new way of working that Unify is driving; and Andy Hutton from Unify talked about the standardization situation of WebRTC.
Kristijan Burnik at the Munich WebRTC meetup
The star of the WebRTC meetup was by far Kristijan Burnik whose speech recognition and live subtitling demo using WebRTC and Chrome was only second to The Mother of All Demos. His application was translating the speech on the fly and showing subtitles nearly in real-time. We can’t wait to see his application in Chrome’s production version at some point in the near future. You can find his material from the meetup page and play with the application yourself.
Next Generation Service Platforms Event 2015
The NGSP event kicked off with some future visions from Orange and ITV as well as a panel discussion. Soon after the stage was handed to five startups showcasing their products. One of the presentations demoed callstats.io’s monitoring and analytics solutions for WebRTC. As often happens in demos, everything does not go according to plan. The choppy WiFi at the hotel had plagued couple of presentations and the turbulent quality continued. Our demo showed that our call was partially disrupted! Varun’s presentation making the topic of call quality monitoring very timely.
Connection disrupted: the dashboard showed that a user temporarily lost partial connectivity for a few minutes, and the connection was finally re-established.
The day continued with speed and lunch time networking bringing telecom industry behemoths and startups to the same table. Based on our talks, WebRTC remains to be a hot topic in the telecom industry and clear paths to monetization are still a work in progress. The afternoon program split into to the two tracks, both containing an interesting talk that stood out. Dean Bubley’s “Market Status of WebRTC & The Roadmap to Contextual Comms” had a couple of interesting points about communication becoming context dependent and phone calls slowly becoming obsolete. Jan Metzner from Amazon Web Services also gave an interesting talk about “Best Practices for Creating Connected-Device Backends in the Cloud”.
“Phone calls” slowly becoming obsolete - Dean Bubley
More servers mean more complex backends for IoT
The second day of the event concentrated more on telecom APIs but Dragana Linfield from Etisalat Group told her vivid experiences about building a WebRTC enabled communication application for Etisalat’s Arabic and English speaking users.
All in all, the three days of WebRTC events offered a great opportunity to meet with WebRTC developers and to get a sense of what are the feelings of WebRTC developers in different type and sized companies. Potential and interest seems to remain high in all companies, startups perhaps being a bit more acceptable with the uncertainty of WebRTC. For callstats.io, the event was a success. We met interesting people working with WebRTC, four new trial customers and above all enjoyed genuine bavarian culture and food.
To see all the buzz from the event head over to Twitter and search for #NGSP. While you are at it, also follow callstatsio for WebRTC and VoIP tweets.
