Category Archives for Announcements

Announcement: Introducing New Pricing Plan and Product Update

At Gruveo, we’re always listening to our customers to build features that they need to succeed in this modern age of seamless video conferencing. Today we are excited to announce a new pricing plan and feature update - team management which enables our customers to manage their accounts more effectively.

What this means for a Gruveo user

Once you sign up for a Gruveo account (identified by the email entered during registration), you will automatically become the account admin. By default, there will be two types of users: admins and non-admins.

Admin users will have the following additional privileges:

  • Ability to manage the account's users and handles
  • Access to the account billing.

Manage your company account effectively

Previously, you would need to create a new Gruveo account for yourself even if your team member is already a Gruveo user. Now, you can easily assign links and allocate users to every member in your team to centralize billing. For example, as the CPO of esurance, you can now allocate the Gruveo link https://grv.to/@esurance.sales and assign it to each of your sales reps under one account. Gruveo makes it easier than ever to seamlessly support modern video experiences and software demonstrations!

How it works: User allocation and removal

When you go to the users settings page, you can see table of the account users with the following information:

  • Real name
  • Email
  • Invitation status (Invited, Active)
  • Removal button

To invite a user, all you need to do is enter the name and email address. Your team member will then receive an email from Gruveo with a signup link. Once the user clicks on the link, the user will be able to complete the signup process by creating their account password.

Estimate your plan better

With this new update, we decided to make changes to our pricing plan so that you can choose the right plan for your business. Effective immediately, we will be offering a flexible subscription which you can add or remove Gruveo links in your account at any time. Our plan starts at $29/month and scales accordingly. Start your free 14-day trial now.

Check out our new pricing plan here.

If you are an existing Gruveo customer and would like to get access to the team management functionality, please get in touch with us.

* A Gruveo link  is a shareable link that lets you easily invite others to video call you. Your callers don't need to download or sign up for an account. You can add or remove Gruveo links in your account any time.

Announcing Videola.io

Update April 1, 2019: If you are a Gruveo for Developers user and wish to migrate to Videola.io, please get in touch with us to have your API credentials activated on Videola.io.

Today, we are happy to announce the launch of Videola.io, our next-generation video chat API and SDK platform for Android, iOS and web. Videola.io builds on the success of Gruveo for Developers and separates our developer offering into a standalone and easy to understand product.

Why Videola.io?

When we launched Gruveo Embed API back in 2015, its primarily purpose was to allow websites to embed the widget for the free Gruveo service. Over time, Gruveo for Developers, our developer offering, grew into a powerful platform that enables the developers to implement any kind of call scenario across various platforms. However, even though Gruveo for Developers is no longer bound to the core Gruveo service, it was often perceived as such.

With Videola.io, we're making it clear that the platform is completely self-sufficient and is not tied to any particular end-user service like Gruveo. In fact, there is even no interconnectivity between Videola.io and the core Gruveo service.

Another reason for us launching Videola.io is stability. Gruveo for Developers shares its code and infrastructure with Gruveo. This means that whenever we need to roll out an update to our end-user service, we are introducing a risk of downtime for all Gruveo for Developers users, too. This will no longer be the case with Videola.io.

Finally, Gruveo and Gruveo for Developers infrastructure is based in the US. Videola.io is EU-based, and we will soon be able to offer the option of EU-only call routing with Videola.io - something that would not be possible with Gruveo for Developers.

Migrating to Videola.io

If you are an existing Gruveo for Developers user, you do not have to migrate to Videola.io. Gruveo for Developers will continue to work as before without any changes to your code. Also, we will continue to maintain Gruveo for Developers and issue any critical patches. That said, we will not be onboarding any new Gruveo for Developers users, and any new API and SDK features will be rolled out solely to Videola.io.

Should you decide to migrate (and hopefully you'll want to, given the reasons provided above), we have prepared a Gruveo for Developers Migration Guide that provides answers to common questions regarding migration. To have your existing Gruveo for Developers credentials activated on Videola.io, just get in touch with us.

We are excited about the bright future ahead and invite you to take Videola.io for a spin. Check out the documentation and let us know if you need any help adding video chat to your application!

Developer Alert: Deprecation of Basic Mode and the Old Embed Auth Method

As part of our effort to streamline and simplify our Gruveo for Developers offering, we will be retiring the Basic Mode for Gruveo Embed API on November 22, 2018. Starting on that date, you will need to supply a valid client ID when initializing the embed, as well as implement token signing for the embed to work. You can apply for a client ID on our API Pricing and Signup page.

On that same date, we will also be retiring the old Embed API authorization method that uses the generated and signature embed parameters. This method was replaced with token signing more than a year ago. If you are still using the old authorization method with the Embed API, please make sure to switch to token signing as described here.

If you are using the Embed API with a client ID and the token authorization method, you don't need to do anything.

Please feel free to contact us should you have any questions about the upcoming changes.

Now Available: Tiled Layout for Your Call Recordings

Up till now, Gruveo has supported a single layout for call recordings where the active speaker's picture was automatically maximized to occupy most of the screen space. This has worked for a lot of our customers, but some were missing an option to have all call participants shown in pictures of about the same size, without the switching.

We are happy to announce that Gruveo now offers the option to use the "tiled" layout for call recordings that tiles the participant images on the screen. The new layout is available to all Gruveo users immediately. Check out the images below to compare the two layouts:

In the new "tiled" layout, all of the participants' pictures are shown in about the same size on the recording.

The original "maximized" layout automatically maximizes the image of the current active speaker.

To use the tiled layout for your call recordings, go to your Call Recordings page, choose "Tiled" for the layout and click “Save Changes”. The new layout will apply to any subsequent call recordings you make. Please see our Help Center for details.

Gruveo for Developers

The tiled recording layout is available to the Gruveo Embed API users via the new optional layout parameter to the embed.toggleRecording() method. To set the layout of the recording, pass maximized (default) or tiled in the layout parameter when the recording is started. For more information, please see our JavaScript API Reference.

Support for setting the recording layout in the Gruveo SDKs for iOS and Android is underway and will be released soon.

Happy recording!

More Space for Your Call Recordings

We are happy to announce that all Gruveo subscribers now have 5 GB of recording space available in their account, up from 2 GB before. This upgrade comes at no extra cost for new as well as existing subscribers.

5 GB is roughly equivalent to 5 or more hours of HD call recordings. What's more, Gruveo allows for quota overruns for the last recording made. This means that if you have less than 100% of your account's recording space in use, you will always be able to record one more call – no matter how long it is.

You can learn more about our call recording feature in the Gruveo Help Center.