Zoom is an American company offering remote conferencing services. It is headquartered in San Jose, California. It primarily provides a remote conferencing service that combines other tertiary services like video conferencing, online meetings, chat, and mobile collaboration to facilitate conducting business virtually.
Zoom Cloud meetings offer a free video-conferencing facility for up to 100 participants. It offers a communications platform that connects people through video, voice, chat, and content sharing. Originally, it came with a 40-minute time limit but now due to coronavirus lockdown, this limit has been removed. If the companies want to add more participants and avail more advanced features, paid subscriptions are available with Zoom.
Initially, when Zoom was launched, it could host video conferences with 15 participants which increased to 25, two years after its inception. From there, it directly jumped to a participation limit of 100 in 2015 followed by 1000 for business customers.
The company has an easy, reliable cloud platform for video and audio conferencing, collaboration, chat, and webinars across mobile devices, desktops, telephones, and room systems.
Zoom – Impact of COVID19
COVID-19 really boosted the success story of Zoom. We’ve outlined its impact below!
1. With the pandemic intensifying, lockdowns were announced in almost all the affected countries which took Zoom to an altogether new level.
2. Be it companies, schools, or colleges, all started using Zoom Video Communications to conduct business meetings and deliver lectures.
3. Zoom also offered its services to K–12 schools free of charge in many countries.
4. Zoom also released a paid education plan which allows unlimited meetings for up to 300 people. Not just that, these meetings are graced with the options of recording, transcription, and various other administrative controls.
5. These activities contributed to a sharp rise in Zoom usage. For example, in just a day, the Zoom application was downloaded 3,43,000 times.
6. The company gained over 2.22 million users in the initial months of 2020. This number exceeded the users they Zoom had amassed entirely in 2019.
7. Consequently, by March 2020, the Zoom share price increased to US$160.98 per share. This drafted an increase of about 263% as compared to its initial share prices when it came out with an IPO.
8. Zoom also became the go-to social platform for the Millennial. During this pandemic when they couldn’t step out, they used Zoom for blind dates and recess and many more fun activities that could turn their boredom into delight.
9. The founder, Yuan, added $20 Million to his net worth in just one day. This took his total net worth to $5.6 Billion
Zoom in a Nutshell
Zoom is one of many web conferencing tools, but it has grown quickly in popularity in part because it offers a lot of capabilities for free and also is well regarded as a reliable, high-quality conferencing tool that works easily and effectively. Most people will encounter Zoom simply through a meeting that has been set up by someone else, but it’s available for you to use as needed, at no cost.
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