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vLine has joined Airtime

We are excited to announce that vLine has joined the Airtime team. When we first met Sean Parker it was clear he had a vision that resonated with ours: that the proliferation of smartphones and increasing network bandwidth and coverage provide the foundation for  a world where real-time video will give rise to new ways of communication and experiences.

Since joining Airtime, we have been working on building out a  globally distributed WebRTC platform optimized for mobile devices and networks that powers the Airtime application. Building scalable real-time multi-party video chat is quite challenging. Unlike simple streaming applications that can tolerate latency on the order of seconds and leverage existing content delivery networks, our network has to provide latency on the order of milliseconds so that people anywhere in the world can hold intelligible conversations. We have made much progress towards this goal, but we have more to do and exciting ideas on how to further improve. If you are interested in complex technical challenges and want to help us push the boundaries of real-time communication, we are hiring.

We thank you for using vLine and being our customers. We value your privacy and will be deleting all vLine customer data permanently. We hope to continue creating compelling products and experiences for you as part of Airtime.

Please check out the Airtime app. Comments or questions? Send us a note at [email protected]. We’d love to hear from you.

Deprecating the vLine Developer Platform

As of Nov 26, 2014 , we will no longer be accepting new developer signups. Our  existing developers will still be able to sign in and continue using the service through May 2015. vLine API services will continue to run for the next 6 months, to allow for developers to transition away from the platform. If you have technical questions you can continue to reach us at [email protected]. The vline.com link-sharing application will continue to work.

At vLine, we pride ourselves on offering a product that always works. Building a platform is a huge undertaking. Building for web and mobile, running a highly scalable backend, working on well-designed APIs and providing support to our customers takes a lot of time and resources. Unfortunately, our  limited resources don’t currently allow us to  give each of these areas the kind of focus we want. As a result, we have decided to deprecate our platform APIs and re-focus on an application.

We very much appreciate the feedback and support we’ve received from our developer partners, and we hope to have your continued support as we reveal more details about what we are working on over the next few months; please stay tuned for updates.

Mobile Video Chat for Salesforce.com

What if you could click a button and connect with your sales contact? Nope, we didn’t say sign-up for an account or download some software. Just click a button and – BAM – you’re face-to-face with a client.

In this two-minute video, you’ll see how we hacked vLine into the Salesforce1 platform to create this powerful scenario. It shows how you can get a video call started from laptop to mobile device and mobile to mobile.

Client’s not available? No problem. You can put the link into a meeting invitation and get the video chat rolling at a future time.

Jesse and Tom built this in two days for the recent Dreamforce Hackathon, and we think this is a great step towards making video calls an everyday part of the sales process.

We’d love to hear what you think about this use of vLine to improve sales calls. Send us an email or let us know @vlineinc.

The Democratization of Real-time Video Conferencing

Today, a video call means something a little different to everyone. Some think Skype, Facetime or Google Hangouts. For others, it’s WebEx or GoToMeeting. Those working in corporate environments might think of expensive, fancy telepresence conference systems in specialized conference rooms. In each case, some mix of pre-arranged relationships, downloads, specialized equipment or a lot of cash are required.

At vLine, we think a video call means making one click. That’s it. We believe video calls should be simple, fast, and affordable. WebRTC is the catalyst for democratizing video calls and vLine is at the forefront of making video calls accessible to all.

The vLine Telepresence System

The picture above illustrates one example of why we think video calls are on the path to ubiquity. It’s our high quality, reliable telepresence system that connects our office with anyone who wants to start a video call. It uses 3 pieces of hardware and our free vLine link service.

As you can see, this system is not a fancy telepresence system that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars but rather a bookmarked vLine link in the browser that runs all day overlooking our work area. Anyone working remotely can hop in and out any time they want to communicate with the office.

There are three reasons we think this set-up is an indicator of the great things to come for video calls:

1. Easy to use. We send someone a link and they are instantly connected.

2. Affordable to deploy. Total cost of this system: $1117.93. The parts include:

3. Plug and play. No fancy degrees required.

We recently had a visit from a representative at a top carrier who was blown away by the quality of our platform, including our telepresence system described above. “It just works,” he said. This was high praise and the reaction we aim for with our offering.

We are already seeing vLine users in the real world starting to use the vLine link as an always-on conference room. This is a great example of a use case that was not imaginable or possible before WebRTC and the democratization of real-time video calls.

Do you have other novel ideas for ubiquitous real-time video? Leave a comment or reach out to us at [email protected] or @vlineinc.

WebRTC for mobile and group conferencing

Packed into Yelp headquarters on Wednesday, October 9, attendees of San Francisco’s HTML5 Meetup heard our CEO and co-founder, Ben Strong, dive into the state of WebRTC for mobile and group conferencing. Now you can hear about it, too, in this video of his thirty-minute presentation.

A few teasers…

When it comes to mobile WebRTC, support was added in Chrome 29 and Firefox 24 for Android. Apple only allows browsers on iOS to use the mobile Safari engine, so Chrome for iOS does not yet support WebRTC. But there is a work around – embed your WebRTC in your application.

One big question developers face is whether to build an HTML5 WebRTC application for the browser or build it as a native mobile app. There are benefits – and tradeoffs – to either path. Taking into account the differences between devices is one of the most challenging aspects of mobile WebRTC. Most mobile devices are not as powerful as laptops (of course, there are exceptions in both directions), and spending time understanding how WebRTC adapts to various network environments is critical to creating a desirable experience.

Before moving on to group conferencing, Ben shares insights about the plethora of devices on the market today that are “not quite mobile,” but can leverage WebRTC to make it into a high end telepresence device (think fancy Cisco installation at a fraction of the price).

Support for group conferencing is an ongoing quest in the land of WebRTC. Ben dives into your options when it comes to supporting multi-party connections. Live demos illustrate the differences between a mesh (every peer connects to every other peer) versus star (all feeds are streamed through a central server) configuration. The tradeoffs are analyzed.

Ben wraps up with a handful of considerations for UI configuration.

Let us know what you think and, as always, if you have any questions, let us know @vlineinc or [email protected].