Zingaya, the startup that offers companies the ability to add one-click voice and video services into their websites and apps, today is announcing that its click-to-call widget is available on WebRTC on the newest version of Chrome. The news comes at the same time that Zingaya has passed a couple of milestones: 250,000 calls per month and 1 million minutes going through its service.
The WebRTC standard gives significantly better call and video quality than Flash — with less bugs. And given that Flash is unlikely to have any mobile future, WebRTC is coming in and hoping to be the default standard in the wireless world as well.
For now, it’s not at the point of being supported by all browsers, however. Alexey Aylarov, CEO and co-founder of Zingaya, notes, “Firefox has made some early implementations and we are playing with them now, and Opera was going to show something rather soon, but in the end I wouldn’t expect WebRTC to appear in all browsers till the standard is ready, I think it won’t happen until the middle of the next year.” For that reason, Zingaya’s widgets recognize if a caller is using a WebRTC browser or an older one that needs Flash.
The company is also working on launching a platform-as-a-service product, in which its call technology will work with cloud-based private applications used by enterprises — a more secure version of what Zingaya is already offering for B2C services on the more public web.
Zingaya’s light approach is similar to what Twilio offers in that both are client and hardware-free ways of accessing traditional communications services, and they are becoming an increasingly popular and easy way of using and accessing communications services online.
Voice is the most popular service on Zingaya’s platform, but Aylarov says that some customers have been testing video calls to their contact centers on it already. In terms of other future projects, it already has SDKs for iOS and Android to embed calls into apps for those platforms, and it is working on Windows Phone 8 support now, too, “but I expect that WebRTC will be used instead of it on mobile devices in the future,” he says. He adds that Zingaya’s plan to open its platform to developers soon to let them build apps they want — the platform as a service product — “because we receive a lot of interesting requests from people who want to build their own products using our technology and infrastructure.” But, he adds, “It doesn’t mean that we won’t be developing our own apps and improving our click-to-call service – we have some rather interesting ideas we would like to try in CRM and advertising.”
Zingaya has raised $1.15 million in seed funding from Esther Dyson, is in the process of raising a round of funding that it expects to close early in 2013. Aylarov will not say who the company is talking to, but as it has been building up its business in the U.S., here is one signal of where it might be looking: it is also announcing today that Bill Tai of Charles River Ventures and Cary Fitzgerald, former director of engineering at Cisco, are joining its advisory board.