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BigBlueButton presentation at WebFWD Summit

Fred Dixon, one of the BigBlueButton developers, has just returned from a three day WebFWD summit at Mozilla's offices in Mountain View, California.

Kudos to Pascal Finette and Diane Bisgeier for putting on a great summit for the WebFWD fellows and giving us many opportunities to learn from Mozilla, each other, and select companies in Silicon Valley how to create successful open source projects.

As part of the summit, each project had to give a presentation on their current status. The presentations were alaphabetical, so BigBlueButton went first. Here's a link to Fred's presentation.

BigBlueButton joins Mozilla's WebFWD program as a Fellow!

WebFWD ("Web Forward") is part of Mozilla's Open Innovation program to support open source projects which help extend the web. As described on their web site:

WebFWD ("Web Forward") is Mozilla's Open Innovation program. We support Open Source projects which extend the Web — providing participants with mentorship from industry experts, access to the Mozilla global network, as well as infrastructure and other world-class resources.

The benefit to BigBlueButton's community is that our project now has one of the most experienced and successful open source companies helping us in our efforts to succeed.  You've actually already seen some results with the integration of popcorn.js into BigBlueButton 0.8 to support HTML5 playback of recorded sessions.

WebFWD's announcement does not change the work ahead: we still need to design, development, test, and release future versions of BigBlueButton that get us closer to our 1.0 goal.  But with Mozilla's help, the road ahead just got a little bit smoother.

See Mozilla's WebFWD announcement for more details.

BigBlueButton 0.8-beta-3 Released

BigBlueButton 0.8-beta-3 is now released, our third beta in the development of BigBlueButton 0.8.

In addition to the usual bug fixes under the hood (see release announcement in the bigbluebutton-dev mailing list), we added a push-to-talk feature in this release so end users can now un-mute/mute themselves if needed.

We encourage anyone interested in BigBlueButton to download and check out this release.

Managing webcams the easy way

The upcoming BigBlueButton 0.8-beta-3 is designed to manage multiple webcams by grouping them together into the Video Dock window.

The Video Dock window also let's a user click on any video stream to see a larger version of it alongside the others.

This is what 20 simultaneous webcams look like in BigBlueButton 0.8.

BBB-Mobile now available on Android Marketplace

The hard working Mconf-Mobile team have announced a beta of their BigBlueButton Android client is now available on the Android Marketplace for download:

We are glad to announce that after 10 months of development we are releasing the first version of BBB-Android and Mconf-Mobile on the official Android marketplace. It's the version 0.4.2, and it comes with many improvements on stability.

BBB-Android is a native Android client for BigBlueButton, and Mconf-Mobile is a mobile client for Mconf (https://mconf.org), a BigBlueButton based web conferencing system. Users running the Android client will be able to interact with others by public and private chat messages and audio/video both ways.

If you have an android phone, we encourage you to download their BigBlueButton client, try it out, and give them feedback on their mconf-dev mailing list

Kudos to the Mconf-Mobile team for getting their BigBlueButton client on the Android Marketplace!

BigBlueButton spotted at EDUCAUSE

Scott Siddall, managing director of Longsight, recently showcased BigBlueButton's integration with Sakai at EDUCAUSE 2011.

Longsight is also helping us update the Sakai Meeting Tool to support record and playback (see this post in sakai-dev).