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At the beginning of the coronavirus lockdown, the new buzzword in the corporate world was ‘virtual meeting’; everyone was hosting or participating in one, and the likes of Zoom witnessed a huge surge in their revenue numbers and stock prices. From students in Primary School to senior citizens at Old Age Homes, video conferencing is now part of everyone’s life and will be for the foreseeable future as well. From embarrassing moments to memes to light-hearted initiatives to serious security and privacy concerns, the platforms that are available today have provided all sorts of possible news-making events. But why an article on all of this now, 6-7 months into the lockdown?
Atmanirbhar Bharat Moment
What made us write about Video Conferencing platforms today an Indianaut success story in this domain, a deal sealed by Lalit Mangal, the co-founder of Airmeet, a startup that offers a platform to host virtual events. Airmeet announced last month that it has raised $12 million in a new financing round. Sequoia Capital India led the $12 million Series A financing round in one-year-old Airmeet. Redpoint Ventures and existing investors Accel India, Venture Highway, Global Founders Capital (GFC), and Gokul Rajaram (Caviar Lead at DoorDash) also participated in the round. The new round values Airmeet at about $50 million, more than double the valuation that it was pegged at, in March this year.
(Credits: Business Standard)
Airmeet allows users and businesses to host interactive virtual events. Its platform intuitively replicates aspects of a physical event, offering a backstage, grouping people to a table, allowing participants to network with each other, and even enabling event organizers to work with sponsors. Airmeet, currently in public beta, is available through a freemium model where it charges businesses based on their usage.
While the idea did interest a few investors, securing funding for his venture last year was still an unfulfilled aspiration for Lalit, the turn of events had him say no to few investors this year.
Covid-19’s Impact on Virtual Conferencing Platforms
While the entire world came to a standstill due to COVID-19, there were few industries and companies for which the pandemic created once in lifetime kind of an opportunity. And what company would be a better fit to be used as an example than Zoom. With millions of people being forced to stay home to help stop the spread of COVID-19, many have found creative ways to virtually stay social through happy hours, stand-up comedy shows, concerts, trivia nights, and birthday parties. And Zoom, one of the dozens of video conferencing services, has risen to the top, thanks to intense separation measures and a profound resonance within this new social distancing culture.
Daily downloads of the Zoom app have increased 30x year-over-year and the app has been the top free app for iPhones in the United States since March 18, according to Bernstein Research and Apptopia. Zoom said daily users spiked to 200 million in March, up from 10 million in December.
Tom Eagle, senior research director at Gartner, believes that the COVID-19 crisis will be a “catalyst for transformative work cultures and practices that will be significantly characterized by remote work,” noting that video conferencing will become an indispensable tool for workforce collaboration and communication. And it isn’t only Zoom that grew at such an enormous scale during the pandemic. Hangouts Meet saw 30 times the weekly level of downloads compared to the last quarter of 2019 in the U.S., while Microsoft Teams saw an 11-fold increase. Such was the scale of the rapid shift to virtual modes that companies like Google, Microsoft, and Cisco offered their VC Platforms for free to their users.
Someone’s Gain is Someone’s Loss
It should have been an easy win for Microsoft. When coronavirus sent entire offices home, Skype — which for nearly two decades has been the de facto app people use to keep in touch via video — ought to have been the natural choice for businesses to communicate. But soon after the lockdown was announced, Skype found itself out of sight, out of mind, and being replaced by an app half its age: Zoom.
This can be attributed to various reasons. First and foremost, Zoom is much easier to set up and use than Skype. And I don't mean you and me here, I mean all the regular Joes and Josephines out there who don't find this so easy. The muggles. Non-technical people. Downloading Zoom is a doddle, installing it is painless, and inviting people to a meeting is as simple as sending them a link. It really doesn't get much simpler than Zoom. Bugs and Spam on Skype was another reason for its downfall. Skype started having a lot of bugs to accommodate the new UI and features while Zoom kept it simple and was bug-free. Remember secret texts and spams messages on Skype? You don’t get them anymore Zoom. While Skype was trying to clean up its act, Zoom started adding relevant features and firming up the quality of calls to result in fewer dropped lines. Quality > Number of features.
By July 2021, Skype will disappear, and anyone wanting to make a business video call through Microsoft products will instead have to use Teams.
With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility
Zoom’s revenue numbers and the stock prices weren’t the only numbers that saw a meteoric rise during the pandemic. Security and Privacy concerns came in bulk as the number of users depending on Zoom globally increased. The concerns at one point of time were of such intensity that Zoom had to pause any future development of its product in order to focus on security and privacy breaches and Zoom’s Founder and CEO, Eric D. Yuan had to apologize for the security issues.
Each Zoom call has a randomly generated ID number between 9 and 11 digits long that’s used by participants to gain access to a meeting. Researchers have found that these meeting IDs are easy to guess and can be exploited by experts, allowing anyone to get into meetings. Part of this ease of use has led to the “Zoombombing” phenomenon, where pranksters join Zoom calls and broadcast porn or shock videos. Zoom then had to rewrite parts of its privacy policy after it was discovered that users were susceptible to their personal information being used to target ads.
Another app that became popular during the lockdown and faced severe backlash due to privacy concerns was Houseparty App, with series of social media posts claiming that the application was responsible for data breaches on their phone and requested others to delete the app.
What the Future Holds?
The social distancing norms in place, restrictions on mass gatherings and WFH policies being extended till next year at corporations around the world, firms such as Google, Microsoft, Zoom, Cisco would make sure that surge in users of their video conferencing platforms translates into profits in the foreseeable future and brings in new users for their other products. The pandemic has expedited the process of technology adoption in offices and proved that WFH, despite not being perfect, works.
What would be interesting to witness is how these platforms would be able to sustain themselves, develop the product, convert free users into paying customers and find new ways to monetize the platform, that too, in an environment where even the slightest privacy breach shatters the reputation of the company. We are also excited to see the trajectory Airmeet takes, how it differentiates itself from the incumbents, and generates an active userbase.
Dilip Mishra is a B.Com (Hons.) graduate from the University of Delhi and has previously worked with S&P Global Market Intelligence as a Data Researcher.