WebRTC Conf & Expo - Martin Geddes

At the WebRTC Expo in San Francisco, consultant and futurologist Martin Geddes explains the impact of WebRTC and its potential for transforming businesses.

Blair Pleasant: This is Blair Pleasant at the WebRTC Expo, and I am here with Martin Geddes and Martin has been doing lots of presentations and sessions talking about WebRTC. So tell me what you think about WebRTC and its potential for transforming the way we do business today.

Martin Geddes: I think it is very significant technology. It democratizes basic voice and video communication on the web. It makes communication available not just to a few tens of thousands of teleco developers, but tens of millions of web developers. So that is a big deal.

Blair Pleasant: What about the fact that not all the web browsers today are supporting WebRTC; what impact will that have?

Martin Geddes: We will certainly see a limiting in the initial market when not all web browsers support it, but for example in a single enterprise they can select or choose to standardize a web browser that does support WebRTC. I think the real significance of WebRTC is that it allows a huge experimentation with new modes of communication, particularly those that are not tied to legacy assumptions of telephony, unified coms, and PBXs.

Blair Pleasant: What do you see as the initial killer apps that are really going to make a difference?

Martin Geddes: Everyone sees the killer app as the most important thing, but in some ways the killer app is cost. Every time you lower the cost of technology by one, two, three orders of magnitude it eventually becomes something new. So once upon a time someone crossing the Atlantic was about the equivalent of a moonshot. It was really an incredible feat and cost to do that. Then you could go across the Atlantic in a sailboat, then it becomes an ocean liner, and then it becomes a prop plane, and then it becomes a jetliner and now for a few hundred bucks you can cross the ocean. And each time we go through a transformational effect on society. So the killer app is not one user experience. The killer app is lowering the cost by several orders of magnitude, enabling the technology to disperse.