Ever since 2020 began and COVID-19 gripped humanity, Zoom has taken over our lives at such a grand scale that ‘Zooming’ was become an actual verb. But then, even if Zoom is the king of work-from-home, some other apps/platforms have captured the virtual events space, pretty fast. Zoom is now joining that party, and during its virtual event Zoomtopia, has launched a couple of new services– OnZoom and Zapps.
Starting with OnZoom, it is an event hosting platform where creators, performers, professionals and event organizers can host a virtual event for up to 100 to 1,000 attendees. Be it a yoga class, a concert or even a talk show, OnZoom will allow you to host events and promote it as well via email and social media.
Additionally, the new OnZoom platform also allows the host to monetize the event they are hosting. That means they can list and sell tickets of their event on the platform, and interested people can buy it using PayPal or credit cards. Zoom users can browse through the available public events on OnZoom and attend it by paying for the tickets. Users can also buy and gift the tickets to their friends or families.
Zoom has also partnered with Pledgeling to activate an option where users can donate funds in events with an active fundraiser. Wei Li, head of the platform and AI at Zoom Communications said that no additional platform fees will be collected from the hosts and Zoom won’t be taking a cut of any event from the hosts.
OnZoom has been rolled out in the United States as a public beta with both free and paid accounts, and it will be launched internationally in 2021.
Moreover, following the example of Microsoft Teams, Zoom has introduced an integrated app-store called Zapps, right in its platform, that can be used to launch ‘collaboration, productivity and education’ applications. These apps can be screen shared, but you can also share them with other participants on the call to collaborate.
For this third-party app marketplace, Zoom has partnered with 35 launch partners that include Asana, Atlassian, Dropbox, Hubspot, Slack, SurveyMonkey, Wrike, Zendesk, Hubspot, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Slack, SurveyMonkey and Kahoot.
Zoom says, developers can also create and build their own apps for Zapps that can be submitted to Zoom for testing, approval, hosting, and publishing.
Ross Mayfield, product lead at Zoom said, “[We are] bringing an app store into the meeting experience so you can add and use apps on the fly. You can send Zapps to other Zoom users to engage them in a specific feature.” He added that Zapps is currently available as a public beta in the US and will be rolled out internationally in the future.
