In 2010, Google purchased GIPS for $68.2M. In 2011, using the technology it acquired in the acquisition, Google created an open source version of GIPS software called WebRTC and built it into its Chrome Web browser. This became the basis of the WebRTC movement and standards activities. With WebRTC functions built into a browser, a Web service can now instruct the browser to use local resources to make a real-time voice or video connection to another WebRTC device or to a WebRTC media server, using SRTP (Secure Real-time Transport Protocol). With a HTML5- and WebRTC-enabled Browser, a soft client is now just HTML pages passed from the server, displayed as the visual and functional interface.
Signaling and protocol standards are coming from the IETF, and the APIs for Web app developers are coming from W3C. The next step at the IETF is approval of the RFC next month. Today, WebRTC-enabled browsers are generally available from Google (Chrome) and Mozilla (Firefox) So far, Microsoft has an alternative approach and Apple is in stealth mode. So, we have the start of something...a standard supported by some vendors but not all (so is that really a standard?). As you can imagine, there are a number of topics that come to mind; please let us know if you would like us to add some others to the list we're starting with:
* Market Dynamics
* Security
* Integration or replacement
* Technology
