The Acano key executives all have a long heritage in the video conferencing industry. Acano is bringing a fresh look with the concept of cospaces. Namely Acano promotes that collaboration will come from a variety of input devices that will all need to play nicely together. Acano is about providing that experience.
In a trend I’m seeing in these new era companies, Acano isn’t a hardware company, but you can buy hardware from them. Not a service provider either, but they do have a trial service as well. It’s an interesting trend these hybrid companies. The fact is they’re focused on providing an application. How it’s delivered is based upon the customer needs. Fundamentally though they’re a software company.
WebRTC with it’s voice & video capabilities was early on in the sight as an Acano offering and I spoke with Mark via their clean corporate slate grey web interface about his prospective. Like so many, Mark immediately commented that their development effort for WebRTC was considerably less than they expected. He acknowledged that the amount of IPR Google has provided to WebRTC was considerable and powerful.
The speed of WebRTC core components is amazing as well. Mark indicated that 6 months ago, he would have deemed WebRTC nearly unusable, trade show demo quality. Today, he noted, WebRTC is certainly quite usable (as he demonstrated) though with some caveats. The question, Mark pondered, ” how fantastic will be in another 6 months?”
Mark admitted WebRTC still has some bugs, particularly when running outside the Chrome-to-Chrome world with remaining issues about device selection and particularly screen sharing. But he could clearly see the opportunity that awaits and it’s not far off.
Acano is a new company, in a new space, thinking about new ways to communicate – we’re beyond a simple phone or video conversation.