As of the previous edition in Atlanta, the WebRTC Conference and Expo that took place last week in Santa Clara was a great opportunity for the WebRTC ecosystem to gather and debate about the last advancements in WebRTC. For Weemo, it has been an exciting week with its share of announcements and product demos.

Day 1: TechCrunch, eXo Platform & Salesforce Service Cloud

Weemo opens up the conference on Tuesday morning by making a splash in TechCrunch announcing the launch of our WebRTC compatible mobile SDKs for iOS, Android and PhoneGap apps. Following with the session “The WebRTC Big Build Comparison”, Benjamin Mestrallet, Founder and CEO of eXo, shared his experience of integrating video chat and conferencing into eXo Chat using the Weemo JavaScript API.

The demo he did on stage could be seen at our booth by those who missed the session. The demo was set-up to showcase how easy it is for users of eXo to initiate the following within eXo Chat:

WebRTC Expo Demo Contest

A demo contest was held later during the afternoon, offering the opportunity for 20 or so companies to walk on stage and present their product in 10 minutes. From integration services to self-service solutions, it was interesting to notice the different business models companies have built around WebRTC. Unsurprisingly, companies offering self-service solutions got most of the attention.

Since the recent announcement ofMayday by Amazon, there hasn’t been a day that has passed in which we haven’t seen the press talking about the benefits of video for customer support. With Weemo, no more talks; it is what our live demo was all about!

The demo started with an online shopper browsing on an eCommerce website to buy a printer. In the search of additional advices, the shopper initiated a text chat conversation with a customer representative. After exchanging a few messages, the shopper wanted to verify that the pack of 12 ink cartridges bought 2 weeks ago will work with the new printer. The representative, who accessed the discussion on LiveAgent from Salesforce Service Cloud, proposed to start a video call so that he could have visual access to the cartridge. After the video call was launched, the agent was able to confirm that those two products were compatible. The shopper went ahead and made the purchase.

Whereas most of the demos were showcasing WebRTC for casual communication, Weemo showed that video can also be used to close deals. This demo earned Weemo the award of the “Audience Favorite”!

Day 2: Video Chat into Salesforce Chatter

On Tuesday, Soufiane Houri, our VP of Product, explained during a session how we see the addition of real-time capabilities into collaboration application as a natural evolution for the market. He also pointed out the increasing demand from enterprises and business users to be given easy-to-use conferencing solutions that exceed the experience provided by consumer-oriented conferencing services such as Google Hangouts.

In the evening, Soufiane came up a second time on stage to demo the integration of Weemo video chat into Chatter, another Salesforce product. A part of the Weemo team was attending Dreamforce in the meantime so Soufiane decided to call them to get a sense of how the ambiance was in San Francisco. Thomas Cottereau, our CEO, responded to the call from his iPhone and showed the concert that was playing at Dreamforce in the back of him. Whereas iOS compatibility is one of the most wanted capabilities, this demo definitely made its effect among the audience.

Day 3: Social Enterprise & Contact Centers

For the last day, Cottereau participated in a panel session called “WebRTC Portals and the Social Enterprise”. On this topic, Thomas commented that even though real-time video enriches the way we collaborate in the enterprise, other forms of communication will not disappear. This is especially because a request for a video call is often perceived as intrusive if not wished by the receiver. In this context, text chat and email represent an adequate intermediary before escalating the conversation to video chat.

During the Q&A session, the discussion changed gears to tackle the question about the usage of real-time video in the contact centers. On this one, Thomas assured that the infrastructure of the contact centers is so complex that it would be a nightmare trying to upgrade it to enable real-time video. Instead, it would be more effective to bring the capability directly to the application. This pure software solution should rely on a scalable cloud platform making the signaling and stream optimized for the customer connected in any point of the Internet and the agent.

Besides the presentation and demos, we received a lot of mark of interests and gathered very valuable feedback from the attendees. We will summarize those in a second blog post, stay tuned!