Agora also announced its Extensions Marketplace, a plan to devote $100M to the RTE Ecosystem, and the winner of its Startup Battleground Competition

 Agora, a pioneer and leading API platform for real-time engagement, hosted day one of RTE2021, the company’s flagship virtual conference and the world’s largest event exploring real-time engagement (RTE) technologies. RTE2021 brought together leading global voices to discuss voice, video, and streaming innovations when these are perhaps more important than ever.

“Seven billion people from across the globe are ready for real-time engagement,” said Reggie Yativ, Agora’s CRO and COO. “This is the biggest community we’ve ever seen and it’s the true meaning of a global village. Members of this community want to stay connected to each other, whether it’s through work or social engagements. And these connections are happening today by leveraging new and exciting technologies that take people off their isolated islands and out of their silos, connecting them together in a more natural and meaningful way.”

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Highlights from the two-day virtual conference, which recorded thousands of attendees from over 100 countries and across five continents, include:

• Agora’s Extensions Marketplace – Agora launched its Extensions Marketplace featuring extensions from audio technology company Bose and a real-time content moderation solution from Hive. They also unveiled additional partners, including Banuba, Voicemod, Visionlab, Symbal.ai, Synervoz and Marsview.
• Agora announced a $100 million investment into the RTE ecosystem. At this year’s conference, Agora also announced that Blink Date – an audio-first blind speed dating app that helps people build meaningful connections based on genuine compatibility – won its Startup Battleground competition and took home a first-place prize of $10,000. For the competition, startups (companies with less than $8 million in total funding) submitted ideas relating to real-time engagement that were reviewed by a panel of judges. Second place at the Startup Battleground went to self-serve XR creation platform Volta and third went to interactive live streaming platform Venue, while the audience choice award went to education platform Edvi.
• The conference offered over 30 sessions covering trends and advancement in the RTE ecosystem. Attendees heard from industry experts and innovators who leverage RTE to increase customer engagement and driving business success in both the digital and physical domains across gaming, entertainment, education, health and wellness, remote work, and more. More than 1,500 tuned in virtually for in-depth sessions on driving RTE business success and advancing the online community, featuring execs from Google, FuboTV, Spotify, Caffeine.tv, Twitch, Bose, HTC Vive, HP, and more.
• Prior to the event – and to help set the stage for the conference’s conversations – Agora also released data that shows how the demand for real-time, interactive digital and audio has exploded over the past year. Between 2018 and 2019, RTE video (+75%) and audio (+67%) grew significantly. In 2020, partly due to COVID-19, Agora found that growth exploded, with RTE video rising 110% while audio climbed 143%.

“RTE technology is allowing everyone to be creators, empowering more people to build new communities while forging new networks of connections from work to school to anywhere at any time,” said Agora’s CEO, Tony Zhao. “As technologies continue to advance, we have seen tremendous business opportunities across every industry and in every part of the world.”

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