Happy 17th Birthday Digital Samba!

Exactly 17 years ago today, we founded Digital Samba, the company behind Samba Live. Back in 2003, in a time before Skype or iPhone, it was impossible to predict the wealth of tools the age of digitalisation would bring to the world. While we clearly had a vision to connect people that was way ahead of our time, in 2003 even the nerds among us couldn’t imagine what remote work will look like in 2020.

Over the past years, we powered countless of hours of video conferences – from global initiatives fighting COVID-19 to webinars hosted by network solution providers. We want to use this opportunity to celebrate with you and take a short look back on our exciting journey.

Digital Samba's founding team in 2004.

Our mission

When founding our company, we had a clear vision in mind: we wanted to leverage the internet to connect people and to build beautiful software that's simple to use. Our goal was to see a digital world where you don’t need to install any software or updates to enjoy a great user experience and to be able to communicate simple or complex ideas, from anywhere, to anyone.

Company registration of Digital Samba back in 2003

We took this journey to create a video conferencing experience that empowers any work and any business, and aim not to have a single thing get in the way of growth and understanding.

We believe a world where people can speak freely is a better world.

We captured this vision in a slogan:

Simply communicate.

Going fully remote in 2020

We have always put our money where our mouth is. Our global team has been working remotely ever since the company was founded. However, we had our headquarters and a physical office in Barcelona – until now.

Today we announce that with July 2020, we are going fully remote. For us as a team, this isn’t a change at all. We always believed that if a company dedicated to technologies enabling remote work cannot do it, then no-one can.

Of course, for our customers, this won’t have any consequences, except a bit of extra budget for us to invest into making Samba Live even greater. Phone numbers remain active and snail mail will be forwarded and if you want to meet us for a virtual coffee, we are happy to jump on a Samba Live session.

Bye bye Flash!

In 2019, we replaced OnSync with Samba Live by rebuilding our technology and our brand. Samba Live is Digital Samba's answer to antiquated Flash-based web video. It was built from scratch with HTML5 & WebRTC to offer a fully featured video conferencing platform.

We held flash dear to our heart and have been very lenient with legacy support for Flash, but after supporting it for 10 years after it was declared dead by Steve Jobs in 2010, it’s now time to say goodbye to Flash by the end of 2020.

COVID-19 changed everything

In response to the outbreak of the coronavirus a few months ago, more and more employees but also teachers and students had to switch to remote work. We wanted to do our part to help everyone during this crisis. That’s why we came up with a free 3 month plan of Samba Live Pro Plus (no strings attached) to help businesses, educational institutes and individuals.

This was (and still is) a hard time for many people around the globe. New obstacles came across everyone’s life. Switching to home office and home schooling within a few days. We’re proud and honoured of doing our small part by helping people stay connected.

We were surprised by this huge increase in demand for video conferencing solutions. The number of people signing up for Samba Live skyrocketed literally over night on Friday, 13th March 2020. We rose to the challenge and hired new team members for all areas of our business to keep up with the demand.

Samba Live usage during COVID-19

Needless to say, it was tricky to support such unexpected massive scale and I am extremely proud of how our team and software responded.

A platform YOU can build on

As a wave of new customers flocked to our software from all four corners of the Earth, we learnt about a million and one new use cases. Many of these are very specialised, and we continue to build out our Samba Live REST API to allow you to integrate better into the systems you already use in your day-to-day and have removed dependency on cookies for better iFrame support.

Our latest release includes a brand new Web App feature, totally unique in our industry, and allows you to load your own apps into our HTML5 interface. We also allow you to add custom code to our session pages. This continues our commitment to building a future-oriented system. By giving you tools, we can now create the future together.

We're excited about what's next so we can all focus on our goals without struggling while shifting the world to a virtual work environment.

Celebrating our birthday with Samba Live

Although Digital Samba is still a teenage company (and not allowed to enjoy any alcoholic beverages), we are going to celebrate our birthday with a Samba Live session, responsibly, from home.

Cheers & happy birthday to Digital Samba!