Kollokvium – Connecting people (of any language) instantly.
Short Pitch
“You may say I'm a dreamer but I'm not the only one. I hope someday you'll join us and the world will live as one” — John Lennon
With COVID19, we are all in quarantine which means that we desperately need better communication options with family, friends, colleagues, and customers. These digital “meetings” should be user-friendly, fast to join from any device, secure, private (peer-to-peer), just a browser and internet connection, no downloads required, no registration required, and no data collection. Meetings should be flexible, resilient and protected! To remove language barriers we have added Native Language Support - in realtime. Less need for interpreters or misunderstanding in conversations. We have also added realtime, downloadable transcriptions for each private conversation so that all parties can have a history or meeting minutes of the conversation or business transaction.
What we have learned
We have learned society was not prepared for a crisis of this magnitude and that many people (elderly and non-tech savvy people) were totally excluded from social connecting virtually. We needed a solution that everyone can use regardless of age, origin, language, or tech experience. Existing video chat services such as Zoom, Google Hangouts, and even Cisco’s WebEx were overwhelmed with the additional traffic. Once people registered for these services, they were frequently unavailable. We identified the risk with overloaded servers capacities and endless emails asking for verification. Kollikvium removes all registration, email hassle, cloud services, bandwidth, and does not depend on servers that can be overloaded. We leverage a new web browser feature called WebRTC that is built into every device’s browser to deliver instant video chat conversations that are peer-to-peer encrypted for privacy and immediate access.
What inspired us
Kollokvium targets companies, associations and individuals (both young and old) through our user-friendly, click-and-go video chat solution. It does not require downloads, registrations, verification emails, and no deep IT/tech/computer experience. Our video chat sessions start by simply following a link and clicking start. It’s that easy!
Unnecessary logins, user registrations and data should not flow through third parties, but rather between the peers involved in the meeting. This makes the connection private and also resilient against overloaded servers that applications like Skype, Discord, and Zoom experience under high load, which often happens in a crisis like this one. Experiencing these overloaded services and recent Zoom security announcements, we were inspired to build a communications platform that bring the world together without corporate monitoring, breeches, and dependencies. COVID19 really showed us how important peer-to-peer communications are to world - especially when multi-lingual translation services are also built into device browsers. We truly want the world to live (and communicate) as one!
The Challenge
The biggest challenges and problems with online meetings via computer/smartphone/tablet we see is integrity and security. Users are forced into what we deem to be: unnecessary user registrations and application of their accounts from social media, while excluding elderly and non-tech people who face an obstacle to solve communication with their families and friends. Kollokvium is an inclusive solution, leaving no one out. Everybody can communicate easy with security and integrity. Best of all, they can communicate even when they don’t speak the same language.
Solution Description
Unlike many other video conferencing technologies, we pass everyone’s Media Streams to all participants, rather than sending the to a central media server for mixing the streams, The result is lower latency, better quality, privacy and security, as data flow peer-to-peer(P2P) - there is no middleman involved - except in the setup phase of the room's negotiation. Nothing is stored on our server and data is of course encrypted, our server is just a message broker for signaling - basically like a dial tone on a traditional phone service.
Easy User Onboarding A simple link is all you need to join, this bridges the gap between technically challenged users as there is no installation of software, passwords to remember or complicated sign-ups required to partake in the meetings, this can help families communicate with minimal setup or knowledge required, this is great for the elderly as an tablet or smartphone with a browser is all they need to join the conversation with their families. Our solutions is also great for elevating social media text-based conversations into next-level video-present conversations!
Languages supported are: Spanish, Italian, German, French, Swedish, Chinese, Afrikaans , Bahasa Indonesia, Bahasa Melayu, Czech, Hrvatski, IsiZulu, Icelandic, Magyar, Dutch, Norsk Bokmål, Polish, Portugués, Romanian, Slovenian, Finnish, Turkish, Bulgarian, Russian, Serbian, Korean, Chinese, Mandarin, Mainland, Hong Kong etc, , Japanese, Taiwanese and Latin. Most accents of languages can be found as well.
Resilience from overloaded servers, in times of high demand servers can be overloaded, this causes dropped connections and sometimes renders the service unusable, while Kollokvium sends data between the users and not via servers it will not be affected by this problem, the servers’ only role is to match up users - afterwards the connection is directly between the users themselves.
Meeting Minutes/Journals are frequently the most overlooked and most important part of business meetings - who said what when? - what was the outcome of the meeting? - did we have any action items or next steps? - did we all agree on the outcome of the meeting? Kollokvium’s transcription services allow all participants to download a the conversation with active speaker notes along with the recording of the meeting if agreed to by the participants. Note: this feature works best when all users are wearing headphones.
Support for hearing and visually impaired* users. A side affect of our multi-lingual translations and meeting transcriptions allow hearing and visually impaired users to communicate via text and or text-to-speech services in the browser. There are no downloads or extra steps to use.
Kollokvium - the video conferencing site for everyone! We offer a free smoother, more efficient way for remote working, to keep in touch with your family, friends, colleagues, and customers - even people that don’t speak your same language!
COVID19 means troubled times and isolation. People's access to easy and secure digital communication is now more important than ever. Our solution is truly unique and timely. This is our contribution to the world so that everyone can stay connected while working or keeping in touch with family and friends.
Public organizations have approached us because the need of a safe, smart, fast, anonymous, resilient solution for them to keep in contact of adults and children subjected to Domestic Violence crimes. The number of victims is generally high but during COVID19 they see alarming numbers and total silence on their hotlines because victims are at home around the clock with the perpetrator.
In short, Kollikvium is good for remote working, for friends, family, colleagues, and customers to digitally come together but it can also serve to prevent mental as well as physical health and trauma. There is no need for an interpreter since varieties of languages are supported.
What have we done during euvsvirus hackaton
During the hackathon we implemented the speech to text functionality that enables real time subtitles for each participant in their native language, so we can help remove the language barriers. We have also enganged adviors to the team i order to make it stronger and ready for full scale roll out. We have also added the ability to record video and meeting minutes for accurate transcriptions and results of each meeting between peers.
What will we do after the hackaton
We are on a mission to bring the world closer together (regardless of language obstacles) while ensuring all communications are private and secure. We will continue working on this product and mission after the hackathon to help quarantined people around the world. We will begin spreading the word on social media and inspire others to join our mission through open sourcing this project. We also plan to add support for more languages as well as broadcasting capabilities to allow leaders and organizations make broader announcements world-wide. The work with the user interface will also include implementation of ARIA support to make the system accessible to users with disabilities who use assistive technologies.
After this crisis ; Post-COVID, we are convinced that the usage of online meetings will be more common and accepted. We are also convinced that more meetings can be done online, regardless of location (local, national or international), resulting in less traveling and less pollution. We want to contribute in making the world more climate smart and sustainable while making the world truly live as one.
We plan to add upgradable features to generate a revenue stream from organizations that choose to switch from their existing Zoom, Team, and WebEx paid subscriptions.
Tech Description – How it was Built
- WebRTC for Realtime media streaming (IETF standards)
- WebSockets rfc 6455 Real-time engine hosted on express (NodeJS)
- Client written in TypeScript (JS), CSS and HTML for front-end.
- Typescript (NodeJS) for backend
- Thor-io Server & Client packages, abstraction layers.
- Bootstrap CSS front-end.
Git repo
https://github.com/coloquium/kollokvium
Team Description
Magnus Thor
Geek, Lead Developer and founder of Thor-io. Magnus has since the end of the 90’s been working with software development, primarily with web applications. Magnus has been involved in several startups and open-source projects. He is an active demo-scener and open-source contributor. His regular job nowadays is in the area of game development and freelance gigs.
Tibi Covaci
CTO at Cloudeon A/S Skilled in .NET, C#, TypeScript and Azure aficionado, recognized as Microsoft Regional Director and MVP (Microsoft Most Valuable Professional).
Chris Matthieu
Chris Matthieu was the CEO of Computes Inc, a revolutionary decentralized and distributed mesh supercomputing company. Computes was acquired by Magic Leap in September 2018. He is now the Senior Director of Distributed Services for Magic Leap. Prior to founding Computes Inc, Chris founded and sold four other companies including: Octoblu (IoT platform) acquired by Citrix, Nodester (NodeJS cloud platform) acquired by AppFog, Teleku (telecom API platform) acquired by Voxeo, and Digital Voice Technologies (VoiceXML browser platform) acquired by Ideas and Associated. Follow him at @ChrisMatthieu
Ricky Davies
Developer and founder of Cornerstone Ltd. Ricky has been developing web, desktop and service-based software for the past 19 years for many industries including Asbestos surveying and removal, Automotive, Music and many others. Ricky has a passion for interconnectivity and has worked with many technologies including, .NET C#, Javascript, CSS, (T-)SQL, Typescript, Node and many, many others. Ricky loves to do low level hardware (Arduino/STM32) based programming in his spare time.
Megan Gustafsson
Geek, translator of geek language to laymen. Megan started out in the 80s as a programmer and Lan admin in the U.S. She went on to Sweden and acted as the interface between the architects and developers at Ericsson IT Test Environment in Kista, been involved in several projects pertaining to the 4G and 5G solutions. Her role was to be SPOC between the developers and the global decision makers. Megan changed career and is now in Culture Anthropology, specializing in 2 areas: Digital Anthropology and Religion in the North Americas. She is also an avid gamer.
Ersin Başaran
Ersin Basaran Ersin graduated from Computer Engineering , Bogazici University as the top of Departmenthis class in 1998. He co-founded two online marketing agencies since then and these agencies gathered the most prestigious awards in regional advertisement festivals. He is a full-time music lover and quarter time PhD student.
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