Setting up a Zoom call requires three things: a Zoom account, a webcam and access to the internet. The secret to Zoom’s popularity lies in the platform’s ease of use.

(British Prime Minister Boris Johnson made history by holding the first ever cabinet meeting via Zoom, though he was promptly chastized for posting a screenshot of the meeting on Twitter with the meeting ID clearly displayed.) Boris Johnson / Twitterīritish Prime Minister Boris Johnson held the first-ever cabinet meeting using Zoom he wound up in trouble for inadvertently posting the meeting ID. As the app’s popularity grew, Zoom showed up in surprising places: it became, for instance, the platform of choice for the UK government.

When work-from-home orders swept the globe in March, Yuan said his company would work to support those affected by the outbreak. The platform provides video services for enterprise, consumer and educational customers, and its relatively simple setup (compared to competitors) took it to Unicorn status in 2017 and an IPO in 2019. What is Zoom? The basicsįounded by former Webex executive Eric Yuan in 2011 and officially launched in 2013, Zoom’s aim is to make videoconferencing easy and accessible. Here’s a look at what Zoom is, does and how it works. Zoom for Home marked a sharp pivot by the company into hardware.ĭespite some missteps, the company appears poised to continue to grow and evolve, making it an important tool for companies looking to ride out the pandemic with workers distributed far and wide. (Zoom is apparently so sure that’s the case that in July it launched Zoom for Home, an ill-conceived piece of hardware that assumed everyone participating on a video call wants as much of their home in view as possible.) Zoom for Home With most countries still in at least a partial lockdown and coronavirus spikes continuing, videoconferencing is here to stay. (This is when “Zoom-bombing” became a common phrase.)ĭespite the furore, the company that same month announced it had 300 million daily meeting participants. In April - after a slew of security and privacy issues arose - Zoom CEO Eric Yuan announced that the company would stop developing new features for 90 days to address the problems. Few companies have seen the kind of growth - and boosted name recognition - as quickly as the San Jose, Calif.-based videoconferencing platform.

Zoom use same meeting id