Patents

For the past few years I’ve been mulling over a seemingly simple problem: what’s the fastest way to obtain ownership of an arbitrary record in a distributed system? Consider, for example, a global network of multi-party video conferencing solutions. Users are assigned “meeting rooms” that are really just identifiers (e.g., 9813492 or dagan@example.com). When a user starts a meeting, that meeting room needs to be assigned to a specific conferencing server to receive and mix media streams for each user. It needs to happen fast, and it needs to happen only once per instance of the meeting. With conferencing servers distributed globally for high-availability and reduced latency, how can a distributed system ensure exactly once instance of the meeting room exists at any given time without incurring the performance impact of a single source of truth?

I’ve been working on video- and audio-conferencing solutions since I joined Vidtel in 2011, and it’s been exciting to see the space grow so quickly. For the past couple of years, I’ve been working with my colleagues at Fidelity to improve the enterprise experience in video conferencing, and I’m excited to share that we’ve been awarded US Patent 9,118,654 for a system my colleague Eric Anderson and I designed to address the complex requirements that govern communications between various compliance profiles (e.g., traders whose communications must be retained, human resources professional whose communications may need to be retained, and legal counsel whose communications are rarely retained).