It’s time to celebrate! Exactly 21 years ago today we visited a notary office in Barcelona to officially incorporate Digital Samba. Over the last two decades a lot has changed, but what hasn’t changed is our enthusiasm for bringing people together in new and imaginative ways. We remain dedicated to providing a safe and secure environment for your online communications in the new era of artificial intelligence.
But before we reveal what we have in store for the future, let’s take a brief trip down memory lane and visit some of the highlights of the past 21 years.
21 years in a nutshell
- 2002 - Macromedia released the Flash Communication Server. Flash was already a hot topic in client-side development, but the introduction of a communication server opened the door to “quick and easy” online video applications. Intrigued, three of us got together, plugged in our bulky Logitech QuickCam Express webcams (remember those?) and got cracking.
- 2003 - Digital Samba is born! We delivered a full suite of video applications for a telemedicine customer this year. Armed with this experience, we won a contract with the Spanish department of transportation (Dirección General de Tráfico). The rest, as they say, is history.
- 2006 - After years of project-based work, we stepped into the product world and released the OnSync video conferencing platform. Over the next 10 years, we added a huge amount of features.
- 2016 - Flash is dead! Well, sort of. Not quite yet. But there’s a new kid on the block, and you can’t go into a sales call without hearing about WebRTC. We took a pragmatic approach and started investigating, without losing our heads in all the drama.
- 2019 - Flash is dead! For real this time. But we’ve been busy and bring our WebRTC product called Samba Live into action. Almost all the features of the Flash product were developed from scratch in the WebRTC product, but most importantly, the product was ready to be used at scale.
- 2020 - The pandemic hits hard, and luckily we are ready. We experience accelerated product usage and company growth, and we’re proud to say that our platform handled it with extreme finesse.
- 2022 - SaaS video conferencing products are commonplace. But if there is one thing we learned during the pandemic, it’s that people want embedded solutions. We pivot from a pure SaaS to an embedded VPaaS and release Digital Samba Embedded.
- 2024 - Embedded solutions are not built equally, and we strongly believe in the prebuilt approach. We have been working hard to bring all our SaaS features into our embedded product. You don’t have to use all the features, but they are there if you need them! And of course, 2024 is the year of AI - more on that later.
Our users love us, and we love our users
A picture is worth a thousand words, and these pictures say it all.
Above all, our customers value our approachability. We care, and it shows. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that our platform is super stable, scales really well, is extremely secure, and delivers crisp audio & video.
If you prebuild it, they will come
If you understand that movie reference, congratulations - you’re as old as us 😛
Since we last celebrated a birthday, we have rolled full steam ahead towards the belief that prebuilt is where we want to be. There are lots of VPaaS solutions out there - lots of competition. We aim to stand out by making embedded as easy as it can be (as easy as it should be). We give you all the tools that you need to make your embedded solution a success, no matter the use case. You want to embed a simple 1v1 video conference? We can do that. You want to embed a full video conferencing solution with all the bells and whistles? We can do that, too.
Hold on, prebuilt sacrifices flexibility, right? Correct, but 21 years of experience allows us to make solid decisions, and we provide an API that is powerful enough to dissuade even the pickiest developers from going down the strenuous development path with a low-level VPaaS provider.
Privacy, privacy, privacy
Privacy first, second and third. We don’t play fast and loose with your data. We are one of the only European providers who don’t use any US subprocessors in our product. Your data is only processed in Europe, and only on European servers belonging to European companies. All our competitors are GDPR compliant, but if you read the fine print, you will find that most of them process your data on servers belonging to US mega-corporations (AWS, MS Azure, Google Cloud). If you interpret the privacy legislation literally, these data transfers are allowed, but it just doesn’t sit right with us.
When it comes to AI, we could easily take shortcuts and develop those features on US-based AI cloud platforms. But we’re sticklers when it comes to keeping your data safely within European borders, so we gladly do it the hard way and host all AI models ourselves. With us, your sensitive data doesn’t get bounced around from datacenter to datacenter like a pinball. You can trust that your data is processed only within Digital Samba infrastructure.
12 months worth of features
We may not be the biggest team in the world, but we get things done. We practise our own flavour of Agile, releasing updates in regular 2-week intervals. Want proof? Check out our release notes, and subscribe if you want to receive update notifications.
Here’s a taste of what we’ve been up to, starting with July 2023:
- July: Custom logo
- August: E2EE
- September: Room entry control, Custom CNAME, Custom HTML title
- October: Whiteboard (based on the awesome tldraw project)
- November: Google calendar integration
- December: Support for 500 users per session (up from 100)
- January-March: Support for 2000 users per session
- April: Breakout Rooms, Q&A, Private Chat
- May: AI Transcripts, AI Summaries, Image Presenting, In Session Component Control
- June: LTI integration, Polling
All feature development follows privacy by design and security by design principles. It’s not an afterthought - it’s baked in.
If you just glance at that list, you could be fooled into thinking that we’re once again developing a SaaS product. And that’s the thing, we kind of are, but not in the traditional sense. We are prebuilding SaaS features that can be embedded. All of these features are managed and configured via our API, and all of them can be controlled via our SDK.
With Digital Samba, you get a partner (not just a supplier or a vendor) with a unique perspective. We have lots of SaaS experience, and we know how end users think. We are also developers, and we know how to create tools for developers. This allows us to create an embedded platform that is both easy to use and offers you an insight to the data that you care about most. You can push data into our platform, and you can pull data from our platform into yours - all via the API. Take a look at some of the API calls to retrieve a session transcript, or a session summary, or Q&A. There’s more where that came from.
The future is bright
AI is scary. AI is awesome. We cater to both sides of the coin. We won’t deny that we are extremely excited about AI and the opportunities it presents. At the same time, we believe in the ethical application of AI, and we will never send your data into a black box, especially when we don’t have any idea what that box does. Over the next 12 months, we will be exploring how this nascent technology can be applied to specific use cases in industries such as telehealth, education, sales support, and recruitment - to name but a few. We’re also keeping a close eye on the evolution of “on-device” processing capabilities that would allow AI models to run in the browser instead of on a server, thereby cutting out the middleman and keeping data processing local and private.
Perhaps less revolutionary, but still exciting, we will continue to push features into the platform to achieve full feature parity with our previous SaaS product. We’re close but not quite there yet. Expect to see the release of a full-fledged content library, integrated web application, picture-in-picture and multi-user screen sharing in the next months. Again, these are just tools. If your use case doesn’t need them, don’t activate them. Do please drop us a line if you want to see other features that aren’t currently on our roadmap.
A big thank you to all
We would be nothing without you, so thank you for your trust! If there’s anything you’d like to see on our roadmap as we speed ahead towards our 22nd birthday, please get in touch. We’re great listeners, and we love a good conversation. Find us on social media or subscribe to our newsletter.
https://www.digitalsamba.com/blog/happy-21st-birthday-digital-samba
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