ZOOM Cloud Meetings

Zoom Cloud Meeting is the official app of the popular video conference service that got big in 2020. With this app, you can participate in video meetings or start your own ones, chat with other members, select virtual backgrounds, and enhance your picture. For many reasons, it’s considered one of the best apps of 2020.

Zoom-Zooming You!

ZOOM lets you conduct video conferences with many participants (the number depends on your plan). It can handle video and audio streams from multiple users, showing video previews in real time on the screen (if there are too many users, it will take two or more pages to show them all).

Its cloud-based AI enables some features for better conferencing. For example, when it detects someone’s voice, it shows the active speaker to the others, so they don’t have to find them manually. It lets you record the conference to show it to those who have to hear it but were absent at the moment.

If you’re participating from home and not eager to show your real environment, you can select a virtual background. ZOOM offers some preinstalled pictures, but, in fact, it can load any picture from your phone and use it as your virtual environment. The AI does it at a convincing level. There is also a special driving mode that involves no video at all, so you only hear the conference and speak to be heard.

Last but not least: it doesn’t take a smartphone and a camera to use ZOOM. It’s compatible with regular phones and dedicated H.323/SIP systems. There are special dial-in numbers that are assigned to a conference when necessary.

The number of users in a certain conference is limited, as well as its length. Free users can hold conferences up to 40 minutes long, with up to 100 people. The most affordable subscription extends the time up to 24 hours, adds user management features, cloud recording, and compatibility with Skype for business. More advanced (and more expensive) plans push the limits even further.

ZOOM’s credibility was seriously corrupted in the spring of 2020 when its vulnerabilities were revealed. It also turned out that some user management features are ethically ambiguous. Now ZOOM claims to have fixed all of these issues; also it adds end-to-end encryption even for free accounts.  

The App for Those Socially Distant

The times of quarantine make video conferencing important as never before. ZOOM provides the platform for group video calls with features useful for both employees and managers, small businesses and corporations, webinars and lessons. You can download ZOOM for Android or iOS, or use a Chrome extension for all desktop platforms.