After a successful visit to OSCON in Oregon last month, Matrix is this week represented at Clue Con in Chicago. We have a speaking slot later today - see the full schedule here. However, this time, we will be calling in remotely from London, but what better way to demonstrate video calling than by using it?
More upcoming events include Fosscon in Pennsylvania (August 22nd), where we have two talks scheduled, and ElastixWorld in Columbia (Oct 7 & 8), where we are participating as a keynote speaker. We hope to see you there!
Over 800 hackers all over the world spent this weekend working on hacks and prototypes in the Global TADHack hackathon. Some were working from home, and others gathered at one of the 14 official locations. Matrix were physically present at the London and Lisbon locations, and we also handed out two prizes (a massive amount of tessel modules) to the best hacks using Matrix in some way or another.
After a hectic weekend, over 90 different hacks were submitted and presented. There was a live stream available (archive here) so that everyone could watch all the submissions. We were of course particularly interested in Matrix-related hacks, and there were several:
Matt Williams continued his Project Clearwater/Matrix integration from TADHack-mini London earlier this year; this time he added support for IM{'<->'}SIP MESSAGEs.
Sacha Nacar and Mike Dauphinais wrote a sign-language interpreter that uses Matrix for conversations.
Igor Pavlov made it possible for users of Lytespark to be contacted via Matrix and OpenMarket's SMS AS when they are offline.
Phani Pasupula showed a PoC for using Matrix as a platform for starting a Dialogic XMS conference.
In the end, we had to pick only two of these awesome hacks, which wasn't easy. We are really encouraged by seeing the Matrix ecosystem grow bigger - and more bridges to various existing systems being built; this is exactly what Matrix needs!
We awarded our two prizes to Igor for his use of OpenMarket's SMS AS, which adds a new and very wanted feature to Lytespark - and Sacha/Mike for their inventive sign-language -> Matrix translator. Congrats to all of you! We were also happy to see Phani win one of Dialogic's prizes with his hack!
Below you can watch our two winners' presentations:
In our continuous journey around the world to promote Matrix, this week we have come to Kamailio World in Berlin, Germany. During the conference, there will be 5 technical workshops and 28 presentations about SIP, VoIP, WebRTC and other real time communication technologies - and Matthew will talk about Matrix at 11am on Friday.
I'm looking forward to lots of interesting talks (full schedule here), including an open discussion panel with Randy Resnick about real-time communications at 17:10 Thursday evening. Of course there will also be dangerous demos - and hopefully lots of people interested in Matrix! If you are going to the conference, please come and say hello - we will be exhibiting as well as presenting, and we will be there all day Thursday and Friday.
This weekend was spent at IDEA-London where the TADHack-mini London hackathon was going on. In total, there were around 18 different projects being hacked on all day Saturday and Sunday morning, before a 5-minute presentation on Sunday afternoon.
Four different projects used Matrix in one way or another: Matrixbot - a robot controlled through standard messages in a Matrix room - done by Scott Barstow and Anders Brownworth (project code and presentation video and picture). Neil Stratford's hack included lighting up his roll of LEDs whenever a push-notification hit his Matrix webclient (picture from the presentation).
The Co-Browsify hack by Žilvinas Račyla and Augustinas Bacvinka allows two people to browse the same webpage, with scrolling events being collected and duplicated to the other browser via Matrix (picture from the presentation). Finally, Matt Williams of Metaswitch created a Project Clearwater/Matrix Gateway which enables Project Clearwater/IMS to set up WebRTC calls with any matrix user (project code and pictures from the presentation) - this is the first time we have had a SIP-to-Matrix call (let alone IMS-to-Matrix) set up!
As TADHack sponsors, Matrix had two Parrot Drones to hand out as prizes, and the winners for best Matrix-related hacks are Matt Williams for the Clearwater/Matrix Gateway - and Scott Barstow and Anders Brownworth for Matrixbot! We are also happy that the other two Matrix-related projects were rewarded with prizes from the other sponsors (full list of winners).
All in all it was a very productive weekend, both in terms of tech and also meeting people. Thanks to everyone who participated and especially those who worked on Matrix-related hacks!
Next up is the WebRTC conference and its related Kranky Geek event - which will be happen tomorrow and the day after. See you there!
As of 9am tomorrow, somewhere in the depths of East London (and remotely from around the world), a diaspora of elite VoIP/WebRTC/Telco developers will compete to build the most innovative and impressive communications demos at Tadhack Mini London! Dave, Oddvar and myself are going to be there from the core Matrix.org team, both on-site and online (at #matrix:matrix.org, of course) to provide support - especially to everyone who's using Matrix APIs in their solution. And as we mentioned before, we'll even be giving away two Parrot Bebop Drones to the best hacks built using Matrix!
It's not too late to get involved - the more the merrier. We reckon it's going to be a really fun weekend, so look forward to chatting to some of you soon!
Quick heads up that Matrix.org is going to be at Enterprise Connect next week in Orlando. If you're attending and interested in open federation between WebRTC solutions, Enterprise UC, messaging/voip apps, the PSTN etc - then needless to say we'd love to talk to you! Please come seek us out, or drop us an email (firstname at matrix.org) or find us on #matrix:matrix.org to schedule a chat in person.
Just a quick heads up that we'll be attending Mobile World Congress (Mar 2-5) this year, chatting to the telco community about how they can benefit from Matrix; encouraging companies to build gateways, servers and clients and generally trying to grow the Matrix ecosystem. If you're going to be there and are interested in finding out more, please mail us (matrix at matrix.org) to arrange a meeting - we'll be hanging out at the OpenMarket (8.1D113) and the Amdocs (3G10) booths.
Last week we had a great time attending WebRTC Conference Expo Paris 2014 - chatting to lots of new folks about Matrix; speaking in the "To Build or Not To Build" panel discussion; giving a general presentation on Matrix, and participating in the Demo shoot-out.
And we're very proud to say that we won the Best Innovation Award for a slightly frantic demo, showing an iPad mounted on our pet Trossen Robotics PhantomX Hexapod being used for robot telepresence by streaming video and audio to an Oculus Rift VR headset. This was using our proprietary in-house WebRTC stack, but once Matrix has fully taken off we hope to share our WebRTC stack with the world too :) This was a very last minute demo - we wanted to show something different to normal browser-to-browser IM/Video calling via Matrix and had the idea to use the Rift at the last minute - and in fact it still wasn't working when we went on stage (turns out that iOS 8.1 introduces some quirks in the video capture API which were producing corrupt video). By switching from an iPhone 5S running iOS 8.1 to an iPad running iOS 6 we were able to turn the demo around in the nick of time and get it working live on stage (modulo a RGB<->BGR colourspace bug) just in time to win the award. Huge thanks to the jury for voting for us against the odds :D For those interested in displaying raw video straight onto the Oculus Rift (without using any head-mounted tracking), there's an OpenGL code snippet up at https://gist.github.com/ara4n/875b5e8b66be3617efb7.
Also, huge congratulations to Vladimir Beloborodov who won the Best Data Channel Award for hacking his Romotive telepresence robot to rendezvous via Matrix with his iPad, stream video via Google's WebRTC stack and control the robot's motion via the WebRTC Data Channel:
We're really excited to see other folks' Matrix projects out there winning prizes!
The Matrix team is at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2014 this week - we had a great time at the hackathon on Saturday/Sunday where we were really excited to see several teams building their hacks on Matrix APIs - we stayed the night to support whilst building out our own hack (experimenting with sending collaborative 3D animations over Matrix as JSON)! Huge thanks to everyone who built on top of Matrix - hope you had as much fun as we did :)
Please come talk to us in person in Startup Alley (next to the Brazilian Pavilion) if you're attending Disrupt and find out all about Matrix first hand!
(Photo shows us somehow surviving in the 6am slot. Mental note to never try to do raycasting vector maths after being up for 24 hours again...)
