Whereby makes video meetings accessible to more users. This idea emerged in 2013, when I was a student intern at Telenor Comoyo (now Telenor Digital). I was part of a team of three students who developed and launched a beta version of the software in only seven weeks.

The Covid-19 pandemic has shown how important online services are for helping people keep in touch when they can’t physically be together. Quality, user-friendly video meeting services have helped people stay connected throughout the pandemic and have kept the wheels of society turning.

For the internship project in 2013 we were asked to take the then-new technology WebRTC, which was embedded in web browsers, to build a video meeting service directly in the browser. It was initially called appear.in. Since we made such rapid progress, the service was launched as a beta and further developed with full-time engineering resources.

The success story of Whereby shows it is indeed possible for us to innovate in the software/online services space. I think there are lessons here for how to succeed with 5G as well. I’m proud, eight years later, to see my summer project turned into a booming service loved by millions of users and sustaining dozens of new jobs.