Tencent conference releases version 3.0

On November 4th, 2021 Tencent Digital Ecology Conference released Version 3.0 of Tencent Conference. Here are a few tips to share.

• Tencent conference is positioned to reduce the cost of consensus, so the product design is all around this point

This point is deeply touched, people often say that small teams/small companies are more agile, is the people in small teams than the people in large companies, obviously not. The cost of building consensus in a large team is high, and you have to prepare a lot of content for the collaborative team to buy into your idea, but sometimes once it’s formed, it’s hard to reverse it.

• Tencent Conference released a webinar model

Tencent conference finally looked like Zoom and Hopin, make up the network seminar mode. At present, we can join the club as host, guest and audience. 5W people can attend the single meeting. Moreover, the cost of hosting a large-scale online seminar has been greatly reduced through activities registration, ticket sales, custom venue theme, in-session interaction and other links. Last year, when I saw the rapid rise of Hopin, I wondered whether Tencent conference would make up for this part. This year, I supported it. When I talked with a foreign investor studying Hopin before, I asked him how he thought of Hopin’s rapid rise. His answer was that, apart from the impact of the epidemic, Hopin polished every process of online activities smoothly and truly opened a closed loop of online activities. Not sure whether Tencent conference has completed the whole closed loop, what is the specific experience? For the domestic live activities of SaaS vendors, we have to consider the competition of Tencent conference, this market is also very big how to make differentiated competition.

• Tencent Conference open platform

Tencent conference upgrade open platform, open API + SDK + third-party application market, want to become the entrance of office collaboration SaaS, initially opened recruitment MOKA, small painting table, face bai and other SaaS products access. I checked the data of Zoom. At the beginning of the epidemic, there should have been 200 third parties connected by Zoom. A year later, this number became 1000, an increase of 500% in one year. I remember someone once said that a good open platform can grow more products than the value of the platform, we are looking forward to the performance of Tencent conference, a friend joked: Tencent conference has the taste of Zoom.

• Penguins voice engine based on deep learning

As a surprise, the conference also announced a deep learn-based voice codec solution that can make high-quality voice calls at an ultra-low bit rate of 6kbps. Several voice coding schemes based on deep learning have been developed this year, including Microsoft’s Satin scheme launched in February and Google’s Lyra scheme, which was open-source, followed a few months later by Google’s SoundStream scheme, which claims to be superior to Lyra. Expect these plans to be implemented more quickly.

Related: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/mdkFrKKyW5NUnYmScTNj7A

Microsoft will launch a meta-universe product

Microsoft also unveiled a preview of its metasverse products at the Conference on Nov. 2, which are based on Teams and its previously launched Mesh cloud service. Speaking of metasverse, Microsoft has been investing in things like HoloLens AR glasses. I tried Helolens2 once before and it was amazing. However, due to Helolens’ high price and high requirements for computer configuration, customers are currently limited to the B-end. Microsoft’s Team-based metaverse product, due out in the first half of 2022, will enable users to share Office files and features in virtual worlds, such as a PowerPoint panel, where users can appear in video conferences as avatars or animated cartoons.

Are you in the universe today?

Related reading: 36kr.com/p/146854171…

Firefox starts a maximum WebRTC upgrade

Firefox used to be a synonym for advanced browsers, many new features will lead the support, but later because Chrome’s share is gradually increasing, Firefox is gradually lonely, many features will support slower than Chrome. In the WebRTC direction, Firefox is also getting buggy. But the good news is that Firefox is about to receive its biggest WebRTC upgrade, to M96, in a process that has lasted more than a year.

Indeed a little sigh, from once the leader to be surpassed by Chrome, to be left further and further away. Let’s hope Firefox has a bright future, too.

Related: bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cg…

In M96 WebRTC has Opus+Red redundancy encoding enabled by default

Previously in WebRTC, if you wanted to improve the weak network resistance of audio, you could increase NACK(retransmission) and turn on Opus FEC. Now we have more solutions, WebRTC in M96 supports sending redundant audio packets through RED to improve the audio weak network resistance. The RED specification for RTP has a long history. It was proposed more than 20 years ago. The basic idea is to use RED to put one or two redundant audio frames into each packet by sending redundant redundant packets, sometimes referred to as “out-of-band FEC”. Of course, all of this comes at a cost, increasing your audio bit rate from 30kbps to 60kbps or 90kbps, but these bit rate increases aren’t huge compared to video and are perfect for audio-first scenarios.

In M96, opus+ Red can be enabled by using the setCodecPreferences method. By default, Chrome encodes only one red redundancy package, which improves weak network resistance without increasing bandwidth. Redundancy can also be adjusted by WebRTC Encoded Insertable stream. Github already has a demo on how to use it github.com/fippo/opus-… In addition, open source Janus media server is already supported.

Related reading:

Groups.google.com/g/discuss-w…

Webrtchacks.com/red-improvi…

WebEX enters the cPaaS market

WebEX is the Huangpu Military Academy in the direction of video conferencing. Eric Yuan, the founder of Zoom, Zhao Bin, the founder of Sound.com, and Zhao Jiayu, the founder of Paileyun, all came from WebEX. WebEX previously focused on the internal market of the enterprise. As the originator of online conferencing, WebEX did not know whether it paid attention to or explored the cPaaS market. It slowly joined the cPaaS market a year after the online market, which may be the so-called innovator’s dilemma.

WebEX’s entry into the cPaaS market at this stage also shows that the original internal conference market is also facing great competition. Zoom’s business is advancing rapidly, Microsoft Teams is gaining momentum, Tencent Conference in China is also gradually establishing a platform, and various innovative conference software are participating in the competition. WebEX cites a Gartner report that predicts that the cPaaS market will grow by more than 30% annually through 2025, reaching $21.7 billion by 2025.

Related reading:

Blog.webex.com/contact-cen…

Tencent Cloud launches 5G real-time remote control scheme — “Tencent Cloud boundless”

Tencent Cloud We5G officially launched 5G remote real-time products and solutions, based on 5G technology and Tencent Real-time Audio and video (TRTC), which can realize the remote real-time control of multiple vehicles with a delay of less than 100ms. It is very useful in two big scenarios, one is assisted driving, and the latest autonomous driving classification standards introduce the concepts of remote assistance and remote driving, as well as remote assistant and remote driving. There will always be a market for assisted driving until fully autonomous driving is mature, and remote driving is a very important way to achieve assisted driving. The other is high-risk/complex/harsh environment operations. Remote control can keep front-line workers away from danger and provide a safe and comfortable operating environment for front-line workers. Unmanned mining cards, excavators, bulldozers, cranes in port scenarios all require remote control/operation capabilities. Tencent Cloud has reached strategic cooperation with Sany Heavy Industry, and it can even drive a truck 1500km away through remote control at the site of the ecological conference.

Related: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/LYgap0B_R0jyrvVXCPcQ5w

Gather has raised $50 million in Series B funding

On November 4th Gather announced that it had raised $5,000 in Series B funding, knowing that the video conferencing scene it was positioning last year was just a staged meeting product. Now that its product is more than video conferencing, Gather is trying to move offices, shows and events offline to online.

At present, there are many scenes listed on Gahter. You can add various rooms to play, study and discuss with each other. More than 10,000 teams use Gather as a platform to build their virtual offices, hold more than 20,000 professional meetings and events, and have more than 10 million users.

Related: mp.weixin.qq.com/s/bzGrRO-Q2…

References

[1] groups.google.com/g/discuss-w… [2] webrtchacks.com/red-improvi… [3] bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cg… [4] blog.webex.com/contact-cen… [5] 36 kr.com/p/146854171…

Welcome to click on a button to subscribe to “Yunjian Big Tycoon” column, access to more quality content.

Watch the ups and downs of cloud technology and listen to the big shots for guidance.