For many years, traditional IT thinking has served the IT function well. Companies have prospered from both the technological advances and consequent business improvements. Historically, the conversation typically centered on some…
Anatoly Kucherena spoke to the news agency RIA Novosti and explained that Snowden was wary of the iPhone because of his knowledge of the NSA's surveillance tactics.
"Edward never uses an iPhone; he's got a simple phone," the lawyer said. "The iPhone has special software that can activate itself without the owner having to press a button and gather information about him; that's why on security grounds he refused to have this phone."
Documents leaked by Snowden reveal that iPhone security is an area of interest for the world's spy agencies. The British spy agency GCHQ was recently revealed to have used the UDID system to track iPhone users.
Edward Snowden has been living with his girlfriend in Moscow since fleeing the US following his leak of internal NSA documents. The former government contractor has made appearances at technology conferences using encrypted video streams and telepresence robots during his time in Russia.
Running corporate messaging app Slack is keeping Stewart Butterfield pretty busy, but he is trying to find time for his other passion — playing the ukulele.
“When I was younger I used to be a pretty good musician,” Butterfield said, speaking at the DLD conference in Munich. “I basically stopped playing for 20 years.”
He took guitar back up about a year ago. Then a flight got canceled, so he couldn’t practice his guitar. Rather than miss out entirely, he bought a ukulele, which he continues to play. His repertoire includes jazz, Gershwin tunes and Broadway standards.
“I’m eager to get back home again so I can play,” Butterfield said. “It’s so different than regular life that I really enjoy it.”
He also likes reading, but says he hasn’t been finding much time for books.
“I used to be a pretty voracious reader,” Butterfield said. “If I took all of the hours I spend reading Twitter and used that time to read a book, I’d probably have time to read books. Instead I waste all this time in tiny little increments.”
He likened his Twitter obsession to eating junk food, saying it fulfills some neural impulse even if it isn’t all that healthy.
One thing he isn’t looking to do is buy back Flickr from Yahoo. Butterfield said he considered a bid for the company he co-founded back in 2008, but ended up dropping the idea when it became clear that there wasn’t going to be a mutually agreeable price.
As for why his current project, Slack, has been a hit, Butterfield was refreshingly honest.
“I get in trouble with the PR team for saying this, but I have no fucking idea,” Butterfield said in his on-stage appearance at DLD. He added, though, that he isn’t sweating Facebook’s effort to crack into his business. Timing, he said, probably had a lot to do with it.
And, yes, Re/code usually springs for two drinks, but Butterfield is a busy guy and we only got to share a glass of champagne. We owe you another drink.
If you want to see Butterfield’s onstage appearance at DLD, here it is (drinks not included):
We needed to know: how does the service generate text messages and voicemails that seem real? We should make it clear that users don’t just receive generic, robotic texts; the messages read like they come from a human, and your Invisible partner will actually respond if you text them back.
Mr. Homann said the recipe is a “secret sauce,” but hinted that “you can tell in many cases there’s a real person on the other end of the message.”
“One of our users,” he said, “[has] actually told us she’s texted her Invisible Boyfriend practicing things she might say to a young man she might meet in St. Louis that she’s interested in.”
Invisible Boyfriend and Girlfriend also generate believable pics of your pretend partner by soliciting selfies from ordinary people, as opposed to using posed-looking stock images.
Despite a price crash and security breach to start 2015, it appears investor interest in bitcoin hasn't slowed down. Payments processor and wallet startup Coinbase announced today a $75 million Series…
For a working team to become more efficient and to reach peak productivity, communication is key. The larger the team, the more difficult it becomes to ensure that everyone is kept in the loop and that the communication channels are clear at all times. That's where a product like Slack comes in. It's a collaboration platform that puts all of a team's communication in one place, making it instantly searchable and available on the go.
If you haven't heard of the OnePlus One handset yet, you may want to take a closer look at the phone very soon. Typically sold through a limited invite process, the…
It's official: 2014 is the hottest year since we humans started recording temperatures on Earth, according to two independent analyses by NASA and NOAA. Last year's global temperatures broke record a record set in 2010 and, before that, in 2005. We are on a steady march toward a warmer Earth.
Republicans in the House and Senate have introduced net neutrality bills that would strip the Federal Communications Commission of its ability to effectively regulate the internet.
Marriott hotels will no longer interfere with their guests' personal Wi-Fi hotspots, the hotel chain announced Wednesday. That includes within the confines of the company's lucrative convention and trade-show spaces, where it's charged attendees anywhere between $250 and $1,000 per device for Internet access.
"Marriott International listens to its customers, and we will not block guests from using their personal Wi-Fi devices at any of our managed hotels," the company posted in the news center on its website.
Of course, hearing your customers gets a whole lot easier when blocking Wi-Fi access results in hefty fines, something Marriott knows about first hand. The hotel chain paid out $600,000 to the Federal Trade Commission in October, after customers complained about blocked Wi-Fi at its Gaylord Opryland Hotel and Convention Center in Nashville.
Prior to receiving the fine, Marriott and the American Hotel & Lodging Association trade group joined forces to file a petition asking for FCC-approved permission to block Wi-Fi access on hotel properties. Marriott attempted to "clarify" its intentions earlier in January, no doubt inspired by the ongoing stink raised by Internet companies and consumer rights groups.
Marriott Cares About You—Really
According to Marriott's New Year's statement, guest safety was the hotel chain's primary concern. The hotel chain said it welcomed guests to use their Internet connectivity devices while in the privacy of their rooms. Those used in its public spaces during events however, “pose a security threat to meeting or conference attendees or cause interference to the conference guest wireless network,” the company said.
Large gatherings of corporate and government officials are inviting to cyber spies, security experts have found. Bad guys do use deceptively named Wi-Fi networks and false software updates to trick hotel guests into exposing their computers. These malefactors, however, are usually exploiting vulnerabilities within hotel networks and the gullibility of uneducated Internet users. So Marriott's argument against personal Wi-Fi devices doesn't hold up.
That doesn't mean Marriott intends to drop the argument. As well as agreeing not to block personal WiFi access at its establishments—a practice for which its already been fined—Marriott's joint petition with the FCC with the American Hotel & Lodging Association is still pending.
"We will continue to look to the FCC to clarify appropriate security measures network operators can take to protect customer data, and will continue to work with the industry and others to find appropriate market solutions that do not involve the blocking of Wi-Fi devices," Marriott said in its Wednesday statement.
It's a big day in collaboration software with fan-favorite Slack unveiling pricing plans while Facebook talked more about Facebook for Work, a not-so-secret foray into the enterprise-software space. With Slack’s new…
Logitech said it has already wired its Harmony platform and API to support more than 270,000 connected devices made by the likes of Nest, Honeywell, Sonos and SmartThings, among others.
The premise of Google’s Project Ara is an appealing one.
Who wouldn’t want a phone in which they could swap out the camera or get a faster processor, rather than replace the whole phone?
Screenshot by Re/code
But consumers are treating phones more like consumer electronics and are replacing them so often that Project Ara appears to fly in the face of market reality.
On Wednesday, Google’s Regina Dugan made the case for the effort, likening it to other moments in technology where the benefits of mass participation outweighed other factors like economics and efficiency.
“It’s all about getting more people involved in the process,” Dugan said.
Chip design, Dugan said, was once relegated to only a few hundred people until better design tools were created, an effort that had an initial cost in terms of productivity but led to far more useful semiconductors. Likewise, personal computers allowed masses to use computing, but were underpowered compared to mainframes. However, the power of software quickly made the PC one of the most powerful tools ever seen.
With Ara, though, Google is trying to apply this approach to a sector where consumers are more likely to dispose of rather than reuse the hardware. Even once-modular PCs have shifted largely to models that can’t be upgraded significantly.
“We’re going to have to make hardware design more like software design,” Dugan said. The initial Project Ara development kit that Google has released is a start, she added, but better simulation tools are needed. “We have to virtualize much more.”
So far, Ara is in the planning stages. Google has released early development tools and lined up some key partners and developers, but has yet to bring the hardware to market.
Google said Wednesday it is ready to give a few hundred developers boards with prototype modules that can be used for testing. The current-generation design has a 3G cellular modem but is far from ready for use. For example, there is a flaw in the design of the magnets that connect the device modules together.
The company is planning to do a market trial in Puerto Rico later this year to test a variety of factors including what consumers will pay and just how much choice consumers really want.
“We have a variety of unanswered questions,” said Ara project head Paul Eremenko. Google will team up with OpenMobile and Claro, two carriers that operate in Puerto Rico.
For the next version of the test hardware, which will be ready before the Puerto Rico test, Google has some significant hurdles to overcome, though they are the kinds of things that are just expected on traditional phones.
With that update, Google is planning to have a bigger battery that can be swapped on the fly, a 4G LTE modem and a camera comparable to those on high-end phones — as well as a total of 20 or 30 module options.
After all, what good is a modular smartphone if there are no modules to choose from?
It also is changing the design of the phone to allow more battery volume. The Ara design does place extra demand on the battery, with 20 percent to 30 percent of its capacity going to things like communication among the different modules. That’s obviously a big deal in a market where standard phones often fail to live up to the battery needs of customers.
On the business end, Google says it is creating a tool for consumers to build their own Ara phones and also working to provide financial guarantees to hardware makers that commit to building specific modules.
The key to Project Ara succeeding, Dugan said, is getting the project beyond Google and a handful of developers and into the commercial market where others can help shape its course. Even Google, which has been Ara’s champion, isn’t sure that it knows the best path for the device to take.
“Our desire to predict the future far exceeds our ability to do so,” Dugan said.
The price of bitcoin is continuing to crash, dropping as low as $173 early Wednesday, according to stats from CoinDesk. It is down from about $244 just a day before, a drop of nearly 30%.
Some people are beginning to worry that bitcoin is stuck in a self-reinforcing negative price cycle in which bitcoin hoarders are being forced to sell bitcoin to meet their dollar-based costs, and the excess supply of bitcoin cheapens its price — which makes dollar costs and debts even more "expensive" for bitcoin holders.
At the time of writing, the price continued to fluctuate at about $195.
The virtual currency is looking increasingly beleaguered, and its price had been dropping steadily in recent months. At the start of 2014, bitcoin was trading at as much as $1,000 a coin. Today's value is just a fifth of that. Here's a longer-term chart:
Just Tuesday, the currency broke down through the $250 barrier for the first time since November 2013, prompting worries over further drops. The effects of the crash are already being felt, with one cloud mining service forced to temporarily halt operations because its service was no longer profitable because of the low price.
CoinDesk speculated on Jan. 6 that short-selling might be responsible for the recent drop. However, TradeBlock's Greg Schvey suggested to The New York Times that the market might be trapped in a vicious downward spiral: Mining operations and other cryptocurrency services "have very real fiat-based liabilities that they have to pony up for, and to do that, they're going to have to sell bitcoins." This drives the price down, leaving their coins less valuable and forcing them to sell even more.
There has also been a slew of bad news and regulatory woes for bitcoin recently. Earlier this month, the news broke that the bitcoin exchange Bitstamp had been targeted by hackers, who managed to steal $5 million in the virtual currency. It is a reminder of the security issues that face any virtual currency seeking mainstream adoption, and it brings back memories of the infamous exchange Mt. Gox. Responsible at its peak for 70% of all bitcoin transactions, it shuttered in February 2014, with $450 million in bitcoin missing.
Combined with bitcoin's reputation as an enabler for criminal activity, it is likely this public-image problem is hindering mainstream adoption. As one commenter on the discussion board Hacker News remarks, bitcoin is an "even worse" investment than gold, because "normal people at least have a decent idea of when their gold is secure. A non-techie just has to trust that the online bitcoin provider or author of the wallet is doing what he/she really says and in a secure fashion."
CoinDesk reports that Nasdaq's trading blog predicts the virtual currency will ultimately stabilise at about $140, which is "a slight premium to the level it was trading at, around $120, before the bull-run in the autumn of 2013."
In addition to laying out the framework for new cybersecurity laws , Mr President also did some dabbling in internet regulation today. Expect the FCC to get some very serious-sounding letters in the mail soon.
A security researcher claims to have developed a USB wall charger that can eavesdrop on almost any wireless Microsoft keyboard, VentureBeat is reporting — and he's released instructions on how to build it online.
The device, called the KeySweeper, masquerades as a working USB wall charger. However, it secretly monitors any Microsoft wireless keyboards within range and "passively sniffs, decrypts, logs and reports back" everything typed on them, its creator alleges. It could be used to record passwords and bank details, or capture confidential documents as they're being typed.
The security flaw has been highlighted by Samy Kamkar, a security researcher and entrepreneur who has previously flagged up issues with Parrot drones, illicit smartphone tracking and the PHP programming language. The device can be built for as little as $10, with optional features including sending SMS alerts when keywords are entered, and an internal rechargeable battery — meaning the device can keep logging keystrokes even when unplugged.
Microsoft wireless keyboards encrypt their data before sending it wirelessly, but Kamkar claims to have discovered multiple bugs that make it easy to decrypt. The researcher hasn't tested it on every Microsoft wireless keyboard, but he believes that due to similarities between them, they will all be affected.
I know that CES is mainly a consumer event, but I think it shows what is coming for those of us in enterprise. To see how the technology from CES would impact us in UC, I ventured into the abyss of 4K televisions, drones, robots, 3D printers, wearable, smart cars, and all other things technical and weird to see what I could find.
Microsoft's much maligned "Scroogled" campaign is finally, completely dead, apparently. Winbeta spotted that the old Scroogled site (www.scroogle.com) now redirects to a higher-road "Why Microsoft" site. The vendor started pulling broadcast and print Scroogled…
You can't see where a tweet was posted from on Twitter.com, but you can in TweetDeck and other third-party clients, a fact that must have slipped past BlackBerry's social-media editor.
Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk took the stage at the North American International Auto Show on Tuesday.
We’ve collected all the important points from Musk’s talk and subsequent Q&A:
His reason for attending the Detroit Auto Show: “The main reason I'm here is to talk about electric vehicles and to do what I can to encourage other automakers to accelerate their electric-vehicle programs. The need for sustainable transport is incredibly high."
Tesla sells in 34 countries, currently.
Electric vehicles are important because they’re healthier for the planet: “If we can make it go electric sooner, then that will be much better for the world… The potential harm to the climate is really much, much greater than it was before. The potential harm to the environment is much much less [as result of EVs].”
Why he launched Tesla: “There were no great electric cars.”
Musk nearly had a nervous breakdown on the Sunday before Christmas 2008 because he and his company were in “extremely dire straits” in the beginning. “No one would take us seriously.”
Several years ago, Charlie Munger, vice chairman of Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway, told Musk Tesla would fail.
He put all of his money ($20 million) into Tesla at the beginning of 2009 to help the company until it secured additional investment in May of that year.
The first time Tesla got money from the government was in March 2010.
Tesla will top 500,000 in production volume after 2020, Musk says.
On other electric cars at the auto show: “I think that’s great. I hope to see a lot more of that.” He still thinks there’s no pattern yet and not enough progress made in the area. “It’s clearly not front and center... I would strongly recommend making significant investments in electric cars."
On the emission credits Tesla receives: "It's not a special handout for Tesla. This existed decades before Tesla. To those companies I would say, hey, why don't you make zero-emission vehicles."
On the company's upcoming SUV, the Model X, to be unveiled later this year: "This car is really good. I don't say these things lightly."
Elon Musk has no clue what an 8-K is.
Musk says Tesla would be profitable if it scaled back its aggressive growth strategy. “We’ve been able to gross margins in the mid- to high 20% range,” he says. “We could make money under GAAP.”
Before Tesla can consider franchised dealerships, Musk says the company first needs “to establish a solid base with our own stores.”
“Texas is a very important market for us.” Musk says he believes the state should allow Tesla to sell cars directly to consumers in the same way Michael Dell could sell his computers directly.
Tesla is doing preliminary work on the Model 3, the company's affordable car design, but it sounds like it's a long ways off. His price target is around $35,000.
Musk thinks Tesla will probably become profitable in 2020 — this is the time Musk says he is "absolutely certain" his company can reduce the cost of its batteries by 30%. The Model 3 should also be available around this time.
On the company's gigafactory battery plant coming to Nevada: Musk says Tesla will pay a little more than $2 billion, Panasonic will pay a little under $2 billion and other partners will contribute the rest. The gigafactory will drive down the costs of batteries, "guaranteed."
Musk was recently criticized for losing a lot of talent at his companies, to which he replied: "Every company has turnover." He also called the initial story from The Wall Street Journal "asinine" and "completely ridiculous."
Tesla's biggest focus at this moment: "Adding service centers and hiring a lot of people."
Musk's advice for other Detroit automakers: Get loans much bigger than what he got for Tesla. "I think I'm quite terrible at getting government money," he says, although he admits it helped him a lot in the company's early days, especially in 2009.
On his space transport company SpaceX, and whether or not he will be able to travel to Mars in his lifetime: "Absolutely... I do think it's important that we as a species and a civilization are on a path to become a true space race civilization."
After a year or two of the worst conditions since records have been kept, the global market for personal computers recovered slightly in 2014, which is to say it declined more slowly than it did in the prior two years.
That’s not saying much, as 2013 was the worst year ever for global PC sales, when the market declined by 10 percent.
The latest estimates from market research firms Gartner and IDC, both out today, have pegged the decline at about two percent and change. Gartner says PC makers shipped slightly less than 316 million units during the year, while IDC estimated the number at closer to 309 million. (More on the difference in a moment.)
China-based Lenovo dominated the business for a second year in row with about 19 percent of the market, according to Gartner. Hewlett-Packard was a close second with 17.5 percent. Dell was third at just less than 13 percent. Acer and Asus rounded out Gartner’s top five. In the IDC survey, Apple replaced Asus in fifth place globally, both during the fourth quarter and the full year. IDC estimated that Apple finished with a 6.4 percent share of the market.
Usually the results between the two firms are directionally consistent, but they differed quite a bit on how they saw sales in the fourth quarter. Gartner reported modest growth, up one percent versus the same period of 2013, while IDC said it saw a decline of 2.4 percent.
The one thing they agree on is that most of the top five increased their shipments in the fourth quarter. Gartner said HP grew its shipments by 16 percent during the quarter, while IDC reported growth of 15 percent.
One reason for the variations is that the firms track shipments a little differently. But another big difference is that IDC includes Chromebooks — notebooks running Google’s ChromeOS operating system — while Gartner does not. And IDC excludes 2-in-1 hybrid PCs like the Microsoft Surface, while Gartner includes all tablets and hybrids that run Windows.
Among the global regions, the strongest market in both surveys was the U.S. Gartner said U.S. sales grew 13 percent in the fourth quarter, while Gartner said they grew a little less than five percent.
According to Ofcom figures flagged by Evans, text messaging has been in decline for years as almost every market sees a drop-off in users. Look at these figures from 2008 to 2013:
Meanwhile, WhatsApp's growth has been meteoric: it gained 100 million users in the past four months alone:
One service that can't be quantified so easily is Apple's in-house iMessage, which Evans refers to as "dark matter" because Apple guards its usage statistics closely. Evans notes: "It's probably big, with over 400 million iPhones in use today, but we don't know how big."
WhatsApp may continue to outpace SMS, but Evans argues that because of the divergent purposes of messaging apps it may not be the overall "winner" in this category.
But talking about winners per se also seems like it may be the wrong conversation — people use several of these at once for different purposes. WhatsApp may win 'text chat' but that's not quite what Instagram is about. After all, your smartphone comes with three social networks out of the box, voice, SMS and email, and you use them all. Are you really going to add only one more? So something else may displace WhatsApp in the UK or India for text chat, but it's more likely that there will be more Snapchats that carve out a slice of time by doing something different.
By Michelle Burbick In an interview with Cisco CTO Jonathan Rosenberg, we explore the cloud architecture supporting the recently introduced Project Squared mobile collaboration app.
[If you are new around here, then you should know I’ve been writing about WebRTC lately. You can skim through the WebRTC post series or just read what WebRTC is all about.]
There have been several high profile communication startups lately that launched their service. What they all have in common is the fact that they make use of WebRTC and indicate it as one of the technical benefits they have.
One of these vendors is Talko, which focus on mobile team communications.
It was a pleasure for me to have a chat with Matt Pope, Co-founder & Product Lead at Talko, and Richard Speyer, Software Engineer at Talko. I really enjoyed this talk we had, as it validated a lot of the assumptions I had about why and how vendors adopt WebRTC into their technology stack.
Here’s what Matt and Richard had to share with you in this interview we had.
Talko is an app for mobile team communications. We designed Talko for today’s new style of work – anytime, anywhere, while mobile and on the go.
The smartphone has forever changed how we live and work, keeping us connected, no matter where we are. But although we’re connecting 10x more, we’re saying 10x less. The result is lost time and diminished productivity. Talko brings people together to user their voices to get things done. Because Talko is designed for your eyes, ears and voice – not just your thumbs, users are able to unlock the potential of voice and greatly improve and enhance the (formerly) dreaded conference call through various features, including:
Talk – LIVE or not: Talk when and how you want, LIVE or not, so you maximize team productivity and minimize disruption. If there’s a team call and someone can’t be there, no problem – they can listen and reply to the whole conversation, or just the important moments, when they free up.
Show while you talk: Tap the camera as you speak and others will instantly see what you see at the moment. There’s no disruption to the flow of the conversation.
One-tap team conferencing: There’s no need to waste time setting up conference bridges or remembering passcodes. Tap your team to ring in Talko – it’s that simple.
Any network, no network: Mobile networks can be spotty – it’s sad but true. Whether online (WiFi or cell) or offline in Talko, it doesn’t matter. Keep talking and it will ‘just go’ when your device reconnects. No need to ever “Try Again” later.
Find, replay and share: Calls needn’t require tedious note-taking and email follow-up to get everyone on the same page. Recorded voice in Talko lets you organize, find, replay and share important conversations and key moments using flags, tags and bookmarks.
What was the reason you chose to use WebRTC in a mobile app?
We decided to bet on WebRTC in early 2012, just as we were beginning product development. While the answer at that time was far less obvious than it would be now, there were several factors that played into our decision at that time and that have proven to be tremendously beneficial:
Open source: We were able to ‘stand on the shoulders’ of some amazing work that had been done by those in the open source community. When you’re a small team like us, it’s necessary to be really thoughtful about where you need to build unique, differentiating technology and where it makes obvious sense to work with the community. Many companies have open-sourced their WebRTC implementation – at Talko, we forked Google’s.
Cross-Platform: When we first started working with WebRTC, we had to develop our own custom support for building on iOS. But today, WebRTC is written in C and C++, allowing us to cross compile the codebase across both iOS and Android. This allows us to manage a single codebase for both platforms.
VoIP: WebRTC is built upon the latest and greatest in VoIP and real-time media, which is crucial for Talko and the scenarios we enable, including allowing users to communicate both LIVE and not LIVE, with seamless transitions between the two.
What excites you about working in WebRTC?
WebRTC is a true best-in-class VoIP stack. It is available open source and has an amazingly active development community. For a startup, we didn’t want, nor did we have the capacity, to build our own VoIP stack. Thanks to WebRTC we didn’t need to. This has allowed us to focus more of our engineering team on building the capabilities that truly make Talko unique.
The ICE protocol is crucial to successful establishment of a RTP media connection, especially when on a mobile device where the client is often on a 4G/LTE connection and sitting behind multiple NAT devices. It is also extremely helpful in managing networks coming and going, for example when a user walks out of their house and needs to transition from WiFi to 4G/LTE.
The Opus audio codec is a critical piece to delivering the high quality audio experience that our users have come to expect in Talko. It allows us to send audio at a very high bitrate and sample rate without consuming all of a user’s available bandwidth, and its FEC algorithms allow us to seamlessly conceal the inevitable packet losses, which will occur on any mobile Internet connection.
What signaling have you decided to integrate on top of WebRTC?
We use SIP as our signaling protocol currently. While not the most popular option these days, it has the benefit of being one of the most well-supported and tried-and-true signaling protocols out there.
Backend. What technologies and architecture are you using there?
Our service is deployed on a mix of AWS and Azure. All clients connect to a “session server” which is fully custom code built in Erlang and manages a majority of the client’s server interaction, including registration, account management, and posting texts and photos. When a user enters a call, we dynamically assign a media server for that call session which all clients will connect to for live interaction.
The backend media servers are based on the open-source FreeSWITCH telephony platform, which we adapted and customized based on our scenarios and learnings over the last few years – at this stage, a majority of the pipeline is running custom code.
Where do you see WebRTC going in 2-5 years?
We expect WebRTC – and the forthcoming ORTC – to continue to grow in their usages and availability across all platforms. We hope to see adoption of the native APIs – specifically on mobile devices, continue to grow. Additionally, we hope to see optimizations for the unique challenges of running a VoIP stack on a mobile phone, such as: limited battery and CPU, the need to integrate with native audio APIs, and efficient and adaptive handling of network interface switching and network quality variation.
If you had one piece of advice for those thinking of adopting WebRTC, what would it be?
There’s a good amount of detail on this in our recent blog post, but for those already in the VoIP/live media space we think that adopting WebRTC is a no-brainer. It represents not only the latest technology, but also the greatest technology. It is a true best-in-class VoIP platform, and it is free. Rather than managing your own VoIP stack, you can rely on WebRTC and focus on building out your application logic.
Given the opportunity, what would you change in WebRTC?
There are certain modifications that we have made to the native API which we would love to see make their way into the WebRTC standard and the API for all platforms. One of these is the ability to be notified whenever the CSRC list in an RTP stream changes. This is data which WebRTC has at the lower levels, and surfacing it to the developers would allow them to expose rich information about who is talking and contributing to a stream at any given time.
What’s next for Talko?
We are currently in the process of developing both Android and Web-based versions of Talko, so keep an eye (and ear) out for that. We’re also in the midst of localizing Talko in about a dozen different languages – we’ve heard the demand and are excited to bring Talko to many more parts of the world!
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The interviews are intended to give different viewpoints than my own – you can read more WebRTC interviews.
Running your own service based on WebRTC? Offering WebRTC tools for developers? Don't miss out on this opportunity and register your company for free on the WebRTC Index.
Thanks to a partnership between Mozilla and Yahoo, Google has seen the largest drop in its share of the search market since 2009, Bloomberg reports — and amid rising tensions with Apple, further decline may be imminent.
Mozilla's Firefox web browser has historically come bundled with Google as its default search engine, but a five-year deal signed with Yahoo in November has seen Firefox automatically opting for the rival search engine instead. The result? Google's US market share has slipped to 75.2% from 79.3% — with Yahoo's up to 10.4% from 7.4%.
Bloomberg reports that Google is at its smallest share of the US web search market "since at least 2008" and, more significantly, that Yahoo is at its highest share since 2009.
Firefox is used by just 12% of Americans, and as illustrated above, Google remains the undisputed search-market leader. (Thirty-seven percent of Americans use Google's Chrome browser, and another 34% use Microsoft's Internet Explorer.) Nonetheless, the news will be seen as a win for Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, who has been struggling to turn the ailing internet giant around. And as The Wall Street Journal points out, this may just be the start for Google.
There are reports that Apple is considering dropping Google as its default search engine on the iPhone's Safari web browser. It's not clear what Apple might replace the search giant with, but whether Yahoo, Bing, or an in-house search, it would be a big loss for Google. The Journal reports that in December, more than half of all US mobile traffic came from Safari.
Cook was so angry over the Google Maps controversy that he reportedly fired a top Apple executive. If Apple is planning on ditching Google again, it's going to ensure the alternative it comes up with is up to the task.
T-Mobile tried valiantly but it didn’t overtake Sprint as No. 3 U.S. mobile carrier in 2014. Sprint actually had a great holiday season, adding 967,000 net new mobile subscriptions to its…
The security flaw has been highlighted by Samy Kamkar, a security researcher and entrepreneur who has previously flagged up issues with Parrot drones, illicit smartphone tracking and the PHP programming language. The device can be built for as little as $10, with optional features including sending SMS alerts when keywords are entered, and an internal rechargeable battery — meaning the device can keep logging keystrokes even when unplugged.
Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk took the stage at the North American International Auto Show on Tuesday.
