If we talk to people about our product one of the first lines we hear is “Video conferencing? I use Skype for that”. Well yes, Skype certainly is an excellent product, offers to some extent similar functions as Veeting Rooms and allows you to conduct online meetings. But Skype’s focus has always been audio & video communication over the internet. In contrast, Veeting Rooms is a web conferencing solution that provides additional added value with its collaboration functionalities for interactive online meetings. This is what we would typically respond to these Skype users:
- Invite anyone: With Veeting Room you can invite anybody to your meeting by sending them the unique meeting link. Unlike Skype you don’t have to worry whether your meeting participants have an account or have Skype installed.
- No Software needed: Veeting Rooms is completely browser based, the participants don't need to download any software. The process of joining a meeting is a critical component of our user experience. Our primary principal is to keep Veeting Rooms as simple as possible - as you don’t want any additional complexity from a task as simple as organizing a meeting.
- Live presentations: In a business meeting you often want to share a document with the participants and discuss it. Veeting Rooms allows you to share documents live on screen with all the participants. Meeting participants no longer get lost in large documents wondering on what page the presenter is on. As a presenter you can even mark important information within the document with the annotation tool which makes your meeting more interactive.
- Better Audio & Video Quality: Many of our users say that the quality of our audio & video streams is significantly better than that of Skype. Veeting Rooms is built with a new web technology called WebRTC, allowing us to transmit the audio & video in higher quality and peer-to-peer.
- Lower latency for a more real-time conversation: As audio & video is transmitted peer-to-peer, there is no server in the middle. Data packages take the shortest route between sender and receiver giving you less delay and a more real-time conversation.
- End-to-end encrypted: All communication is end-to-end encrypted using DTLS-SRTP and TLS/SSL. This provides an additional layer of security, because the audio and video streams are encrypted by the sender and not decrypted until they are received by the recipient.
- Hosted in Switzerland for data privacy: Switzerland has strong data privacy laws which regulate governmental access to private data. Service providers are required to hand out private data only if there is a juridical order from an ongoing criminal proceeding by a judge. In contrast to US providers falling under the Patriot Act, the government can not freely access data without even informing about the fact that your data has been accessed. Switzerland has a long tradition of handling confidential data and of rule of law.
Further reading
- Dan Goodin (May 20 2013): Think your Skype Messages get end-to-end encryption - Think again. https://arstechnica.com/security/2013/05/think-your-skype-messages-get-end-to-end-encryption-think-again/
- Youtube video on WebRTC: Real-time communication with WebRTC, Google I/O 2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2HzZkd2A40
- Blog by Chris Chranky: Following WebRTC and emerging communications technology: https://www.chriskranky.com
- Tsahi Levent-Levi: Fundamentals on WebRTC for the Enterprise https://de.slideshare.net/tsahil/webrtc-fundamentals-for-the-enterprise