Category Archives for Announcements

Invite Your Twitter Followers to a Gruveo Call

We have rolled out an exciting update to Gruveo that allows you to quickly invite your Twitter followers to a Gruveo call. All you have to do is start a call and then click the “Tweet” button on the connection screen:

Here is what your tweet will look like (you can edit it before posting):

Whoever clicks your Gruveo link first will get connected to you and the call will begin. Try it today!

P.S. Don't feel like inventing a number to start a call with? Just leave the "Number" field empty and Gruveo will do that for you 🙂

Gruveo and the Heartbleed Vulnerability

On April 7, the Heartbleed vulnerability was announced which affects certain versions of the popular OpenSSL software package. OpenSSL is used throughout the Internet to enable secure connections (such as the HTTPS protocol).

We take our users’ security seriously here at Gruveo and have taken the necessary steps to weigh the impact of the vulnerability on our service. We are happy to announce that the affected versions of OpenSSL have never been used by Gruveo and thus we have not been susceptible to the CVE-2014-0160 (“Heartbleed”) bug.

Thank you for using Gruveo and rest assured that your security is of utmost importance to us.

Call Quality Improvements

We are excited to announce an update to Gruveo that introduces significant improvements to the call picture quality. These improvements have been made possible by dumping the old Sorenson Spark codec used for compressing video and replacing it with the newer H.264.

H.264 is a state of the art codec that offers better video at drastically lower bitrates. Using H.264 allowed us to slash Gruveo’s bandwidth requirements almost in half while offering better picture quality. These quality improvements will be even more pronounced on slower connections.

H.264 is more CPU intensive than the old codec, which may become noticeable on older computers. However, most computers these days have no problem processing H.264, and we feel that the gains in call quality are well worth the switch.

Finally, H.264 encoding is supported by Flash version 11.0 and later, so Gruveo’s required minimum Flash version has been bumped from 10.3 to 11.0. That shouldn’t be an issue for most of our users because less than 1% of them have older versions of the Flash plugin installed. If you have an old version of Flash, please upgrade – it’s totally free.

Try the new Gruveo today and let us know what you think in the comments below!

Gruveo August Update

We have just rolled out an important update to Gruveo that focuses on improving call stability and quality. You will automatically enjoy this latest version of Gruveo the next time you log on to www.gruveo.com. However, if that doesn't happen and you start experiencing issues establishing calls, just clear your browser's cache and restart your browser.

Linux Love!

Some of our users have been reporting connection problems on Linux. When making a call, Gruveo would say “Connecting…” and then return to the home screen. Further investigation showed that this was caused by a pesky bug in Flash Player for Linux that prevented Gruveo from establishing a secure connection.

This past week, our team has coded around the bug so now you can make instant, secure video calls with Gruveo on Linux, too. All you have to do is clear your browser’s cache and reload the Gruveo homepage.