Neat, but is it really that impressive? Instead of using an external plugin, the plugin is rolled into the browser. There was no reason to expect that would be difficult. The real difficulty will be getting different browsers to provide reasonably compatible implementations.
WebRTC is a w3c standard - it's part of HTML 5 - so getting browsers to support it isn't going to be as big of a problem as you suspect.
Browsers today (even with HTML5) are mainly consumers of media. There's great ways to get audio and video to a browser, but no capabilities for getting access to a user's microphone and camera and no way of sending media from a browser to elsewhere. WebRTC fixes that.
A phone call has two halves, there's the signaling (where does this call go to, is it still active, did the other party hang up, etc) and the audio (the "media" in telecom parlance). What Phono is doing in this demo is connecting the media and the signaling from an early WebRTC implementation to the public phone network. Using the audio capture from the browser and letting you make and receive real phone calls with it.
While I agree that the real difficulty is getting consistent adoption, such first steps are extremely important. If no one takes these steps, such technologies as WebRTC will never get proper adoption. Features with such technologies will not be revenue drives, but you get media exposure and also can give yourself a pat on the back for doing the right thing.
Comments
Neat, but is it really that impressive? Instead of using an external plugin, the plugin is rolled into the browser. There was no reason to expect that would be difficult. The real difficulty will be getting different browsers to provide reasonably compatible implementations.
WebRTC is a w3c standard - it's part of HTML 5 - so getting browsers to support it isn't going to be as big of a problem as you suspect.
Browsers today (even with HTML5) are mainly consumers of media. There's great ways to get audio and video to a browser, but no capabilities for getting access to a user's microphone and camera and no way of sending media from a browser to elsewhere. WebRTC fixes that.
A phone call has two halves, there's the signaling (where does this call go to, is it still active, did the other party hang up, etc) and the audio (the "media" in telecom parlance). What Phono is doing in this demo is connecting the media and the signaling from an early WebRTC implementation to the public phone network. Using the audio capture from the browser and letting you make and receive real phone calls with it.
Nicely put.
While I agree that the real difficulty is getting consistent adoption, such first steps are extremely important. If no one takes these steps, such technologies as WebRTC will never get proper adoption. Features with such technologies will not be revenue drives, but you get media exposure and also can give yourself a pat on the back for doing the right thing.