Catalan Translation Added

The Gruveo web app is now available in Catalan, a language spoken by about 9 million people in Southwestern Europe. Huge thanks goes to Xavi Gelonch Ferreira who helped us with the translation.

Catalan is the 11th language supported by Gruveo, and that's only the beginning. Get in touch today if you want to see Gruveo in your language!

Dr. Diogo Medina: “Gruveo Saved My Life”

Last week, we received an email from a doctor in Lisbon, Portugal on how Gruveo embeds quite literally saved his reputation with patients. The email just blew our mind, and we are publishing it here with the author’s permission.

Dear Gruveo team,

My name is Diogo Medina, I am a medical doctor from Lisbon, Portugal, and I run an online medical consultation service in my specialty of Travel Health ("Consulta do Viajante" in Portuguese).

I started my online practice in April 2015, using an online booking platform embedded into my www.consultadoviajante.com website. At the time the platform’s technical solutions promised to automatically handle bookings and payments for me, as well as to assign each appointment its own unique video chatroom, making it impossible for different patients to "walk into" each others' consultations, or for them to contact me outside of previously scheduled appointments – as would happen in services that merely offered to give away Skype/Hangouts accounts.

However, yesterday I was shocked to find out that my platform had discontinued their proprietary private video chatroom feature, now only offering my clients either my Skype account or a link of my choosing. What is worse: I found out about this 30 minutes before my next scheduled video consultation with a patient!

First I panicked, immediately thinking about refunds and apologies – online services depend on reputation and word of mouth, and a single mishap such as this can ruin a business. However, I immediately googled "instant online video call" and came across your solution. I installed it on my website in a hurry (under https://www.consultadoviajante.com/consulta.html), and prayed to all available gods for this to solve my problem and to just work – and it did.

I have configured my website and the emails patients receive with instructions on how to join the video consultation to say they should use their national health system Personal Identification Number as the code (a number only they have access to, and that they provide me when booking appointments), thus solving the "unique" video room requirement. Also, the fact that Gruveo hosts the video chat through SSL and won't let a 3rd person peek into the conversation makes this a perfect solution to my very specific health care business needs.

So, to sum up: Congratulations on your service, and just thank you for existing. You saved my life. I look forward to witnessing Gruveo's growth and hope I can use it for a long time.

Best regards,

Dr. Diogo Medina
Lisbon, Portugal

We are extremely proud to have helped Dr. Medina. You can add easy video calling to your site, too – all you have to do is request your embed code on this page and then add it to your page's HTML. Try it right now!

iOS App Update Fixes a Firefox Connectivity Issue

Gruveo is built on WebRTC, a technology that enables browsers with real time communication capabilities. As any new tech, WebRTC is developing very rapidly and is sometimes rough around the edges.

We have recently been alerted about an issue with Gruveo users on 64-bit iOS devices (iPhone 5S and above, as well as newer iPad and iPod touch models) having difficulties connecting to Gruveo running in recent versions of Firefox.

The underlying cause for the issue turned out to be a bug with the particular build of the WebRTC library that the Gruveo app was using. We have promptly switched to a different, working build of WebRTC and submitted an update to the App Store, which just got approved.

Grab the latest version of Gruveo for iOS from the App Store and let us know how it works for you!

Gruveo Goes Polish

We are proud to have added a Polish translation to the Gruveo web app, which is now available in 10 languages. A big shout out goes to MDT Medical for helping us with the translation!

Want to see Gruveo in your language? Let us know.

The New Selfie Mode Puts You in Control of Your Looks

The latest update to the Gruveo iOS app introduces Selfie Mode, which lets you ensure that you look your best on the other end of the video conversation.

Using the Selfie Mode is simple: Tap own video in the upper right corner and enjoy the picture of yourself spanning full-screen, just like the other person would see you. To go back, tap the picture in the upper right again.

You don’t have to be connected to use Selfie Mode, so toggle it to check your hair while you’re waiting for the other person 🙂

The inspiration for Selfie Mode comes from an actual user need. We were contacted by a real estate company that uses Gruveo for virtual apartment tours. Gruveo’s ease of use made it the perfect tool for the job, if not for one thing: It was very hard to ensure the best shot looking at the tiny own video preview window.

As we pondered this use case, we realized that apartment tours are not the only situation that would benefit from better control of the outgoing video, and that’s how Selfie Mode was born. So whether you want to check your makeup, show your kids play to their grandparents, or conduct a virtual apartment tour, Selfie Mode is there for you.

Selfie Mode is currently only available in the iOS app but there are plans to port it to the web version of Gruveo as well.