Zoomtopia 2020 (14—15 October) was a virtual cornucopia of brightly coloured, creative content.
The event, which was supposed to be in California in September, was moved to a completely virtual format due to Covid-19. This resulted in an was an event that suited the platform better than an in-person event ever could have. It was fun, it was interesting, and it was jam packed with new releases, colourful content, freebies and prizes. Plus, participants from around the world could enjoy, rather than just those who could make it to California for the two-day event.
Attendees started on a mythical, magical home base (pictured below). From there, you could navigate to your personalised agenda, the master list of speakers, sponsor homepages, an online shop, a video library and a virtual tour of rooms and workspaces in the format of an igloo field!
This year’s platinum sponsors were DTEN, Dropbox, Logitech, Neat and Poly. Among the announcements, Poly and DTEN stood out for us.
Poly announced the Zoom certified Poly Sync 20, the personal-sized USB/Bluetooth® smart speakerphone and portable speaker; the Poly Sync 40*, for flexible/huddle rooms, and the Poly Sync 60* for small to medium conference rooms.
DTEN announced the DTEN Me, featuring professional quality video that is perfectly sized for the desktop, Zoom for Home – DTEN ME is the affordable, professional grade solution for home offices. The newly released all-in-one 27″ device makes it easy to connect via video conference, share and annotate content, and interact through the built-in touchscreen for whiteboarding.
Attendees were also encouraged to collect points to earn prizes. You could collect points by interacting with the event – accessing different “lands”, watching keynote speeches, and creating an agenda. The tier 1 prize was a downloadable background pack, the tier 2 prize was 30% off a product from one of the sponsors, and the tier 3 prize was entry to a raffle to win a VC system. Well worth doing!
And finally, the most exciting bit – Zoom’s latest launch reveal – Zapps (apps in Zoom)! Zapps bring best of breed applications into the Zoom experience for seamless productivity and engaging experiences. Zapp examples include Asana, Coursera, Dropbox, Trello, Hubspot, Kahoot!, Slack, Survey Monkey, and Zendesk (among many others). The idea is that you can open these apps within a meeting to improve workflow, collaboration and productivity. Click here to find out more about Zapps.
Also introduced at the keynote was OnZoom, the new platform from Zoom for live events, concerts, shows and classes that allows users to pay for live “online experiences”.
In the keynote speech, Zoom discussed the roadmap for upcoming Zoom Rooms software updates which include digital and outside room signage to display covid information and internal room information like room temperature and room occupancy. A new in-meeting feature is the ability to translate a group of people in a boardroom into individual squares for a better one to one view. Lots of other exciting features to come.
Overall, Zoomtopia was a fun and informative online event, and we expected nothing else from the virtual meeting platform. We look forward to next year!
VideoCentric are Zoom Room certified installers. If you are looking to implement a Zoom solution in your workplace, get in touch.
