The Illinois Insitute of Technology is a research institution, so it's not surprising that its annual Real-Time Communications conference tends to emphasize emerging technologies. Right now the hot new idea in communications is WebRTC, which dominated much of the talk at this week's 8th annual IIT RTC conference. WebRTC is the emerging standard for voice/real-time-enabling Web browsers.
While I was at the event (where I chaired the Cloud track), I had a chance to sit down with Carol Davids, who directs IIT's Real-time Communications Laboratory and runs the RTC conference. Carol told me that one of the most encouraging signs she saw this week with regard to WebRTC is that the groups and individuals who drive different aspects of the specification work are pretty much pulling in the same direction to get something released.
Specifically, Carol sees the IETF, which works on protocols, collaborating with the W3C, whose work centers on APIs. "We see them coming together to solve this problem," Carol told me. "We've seen that demonstrated here."
I got some further perspective from Anant Narayanan of Mozilla Labs, who's working on WebRTC integration for the Firefox browser. His focus is getting the first Firefox implementation of WebRTC out the door and into developers' hands by the end of this year, and he added that Google is shooting for the same timetable for implementation in the Chrome browser. He said, "We feel like we're really close to shipping something."
One of the big question marks around WebRTC is the exact roles that Microsoft and Apple will play in the standard's development and eventual inclusion in those two companies' browsers. Microsoft just last month announced its own take on WebRTC, called Customizable Ubiquitous Real-Time Communications over the Web, or Cu-RTC-Web. Microsoft specifically criticized some aspects of the current WebRTC proposal.
Microsoft's positioning is clearly complicated by its ownership of Skype, which as an over-the-top Web voice/video application could be seen as threatened by purely browser-based real-time communications that don't require a plugin or application download. However, several WebRTC advocates that I spoke to at the IIT show suggested that a standard WebRTC could be useful to Microsoft by offering a simpler path toward voice-enabling third-party websites with whom Microsoft partners--for example, Facebook. One IIT speaker said a WebRTC-based voice/video integration for Facebook should be easier to implement than the more complicated Skype integration that Microsoft did.
As for Apple, the question seems to be whether Apple sees WebRTC as primarily a browser-based technology, or primarily a technology that could significantly impact the smartphone--i.e., the iPhone. One IIT speaker suggested that if Apple sees WebRTC as primarily something to implement in the Safari browser, they'll do it without much second thought. But if Apple sees WebRTC as something that could represent a VOIP play on the iPhone, they'll likely balk.
In any event, the key thing now seems to be getting a WebRTC specification out to developers. Mozilla's Anant Narayanan said any of the manufacturers can disagree about the details of how best to implement WebRTC in browsers, but ultimately it's the developers who will tell them what works and what doesn't.
