The last installment of webrtc conf and Expo was in Beijing, china, while the original events in USA are scaling down from 2 to 1 a year. The most recent webrtc Conference was in Tokyo, Japan. The next installment of krankyGeek will be in India. There are a lot of signs that the webrtc heat is shifting to Asia.  

I think there are at least two reasons for that. First, the US and EU markets are quite saturated. Second, the Asian markets are doing double digit growth, and have a lot of developers to be hired! The japanese conference shows the existence of a local ecosystem, while the chinese and indian ones are more evangelist in nature.

In A previous post I mentioned Google’s hiring spray in Singapore. It’s getting increasingly difficult to hire engineers and devs in general in US or EU. Visa process being what it is in USA, it is also almost impossible to bring people in. The solution? Go where the devs are and create a local center. Google already made an acquisition in Singapore last week, the first in the region, a small chat company called PIE, which illustrate how hungry they are, and what the focus is: mobile. In the mean time, Niklas, the new WebRTC PM at google, was confirming that no core webrtc activity would take place in Singapore, as it would remains focussed geographically in Stockholm, Seattle and Mountain View.

Another very interesting shift is happening, a technological shift this time. Two separate announcements last week, one by Netflix, one by Orange (French historical Telecom operator, and in the world top 15).

Netflix announced the end of its 7 years transition to the cloud (AWS), consecutive with the opening of its services in all countries in the world but 3. The move was justified not so much by the reduction of cost it triggered, but by the capacity to scale fast enough.

Orange informed the regulator and its competitor that it will phase out the traditional Switched infrastructure to a full IP-based infrastructure. Because of regulation, it will have to maintain it for at least 5 years, but this is a strong indicator that even the Telecom operators are acknowledging the obvious: Everything is or should deb going over IP (as a technology). Wether it’s directly over IP (think OTT) or through the Web, multiple segments of the industry are converging there and will find themselves competing with companies that were previously in a different silo. No more distinction between entertainment (TV, Cable, DVD, …) and Web, or between Telco and Web. It means difficulties for operators that were in a position of de fatco monopoly in their silo, but that also means opportunities for start up that foresee the point of convergence and position themselves there before anybody else. WebRTC anyone?

This work by Dr. Alexandre Gouaillard is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

This blog is not about any commercial product or company, even if some might be mentioned or be the object of a post in the context of their usage of the technology. Most of the opinions expressed here are those of the author, and not of any corporate or organizational affiliation.