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Technology

Teleconference Apps and New Tech Surge in Demand Amid Coronavirus Outbreak (reuters.com) 21

Posted by msmash from the future-of-work dept.
Global downloads of business apps including Tencent Conference, WeChat Work, Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Slack have risen nearly five fold since the start of the year, data showed, as the coronavirus outbreak changes how corporations work. From a report: While such apps attracted 1.4 million new users across the App Store and Google Play in the first week of January, that figure jumped to a record 6.7 million in the first week of March, according to app analytics firm Sensor Tower. The outbreak, which reached global pandemic status this week, has forced companies to rely heavily on business conferencing tools as workers stop commuting to offices. These services range from video conferencing apps such as Zoom and Google Hangouts Meet to cutting edge tools inspired by "Star Wars" to make remote work more manageable. Some of these newer services such as Rumii and Spatial, which let users attend meetings in digital rooms where they can see and interact with digitized, 3D versions of their coworkers. Zoom Video's daily active user base grew by 67% since early January, data from Apptopia showed.
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Teleconference Apps and New Tech Surge in Demand Amid Coronavirus Outbreak More

Teleconference Apps and New Tech Surge in Demand Amid Coronavirus Outbreak

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  • cutting edge tools inspired by "Star Wars"

    Think... much earlier.

  • The mpeg 1000/1000 encrypted teleconference hardware new old stock.
    Mil grade security with an advanced GUI to place your own company logo in the background.
    Every word spoken and all film footage is encrypted mil style. By a special mil grade computer chip at both ends.
    The home office might need some new cooling when the teleconference hardware is in use...
    All that mil grade computer hardware gets warm after a few seconds of use.

  • They're all clones of Cu-SeeMe.

    That said, having used several solutions, so far I'm most impressed with Zoom. Certainly better than Skype for Business or WebEx. Do people agree that Zoom is the solution right now, or are other options better?

  • And also exposing the achilles heel of cloud (Score:4, Insightful)

    by guruevi ( 827432 ) on Friday March 13, 2020 @09:07PM (#59828778)

    All these cloud apps are suddenly seeing a surge, causing many of them to have issues - cloud is fine as long as everyone is sharing and surge capacity is limited to one or two major customers. Now suddenly every one of their customers needs max capacity which traditionally these customers would've had individually in a largely offline datacenter and simply spin up nodes for events like these.

    Zoom's calling capacity during peak hours is severely limited, WebEx has similar problems, Teams is laggy and Office 365 janky as hell. Look at DownDetector for major services - ~10am-~4pm spikes a lot more reported issues over the last few days. We've just sent thousands of employees home and thousands of students need to join online classes starting next week and already having problems with small test sessions.

    The cloud was built for temporary surge capacity for singular failures, instead business leaders decided they never needed to plan for emergencies again, just spin it up in the cloud. I'm going to predict that within the next 2-4 weeks we'll see massive failures and even data losses as Amazon and Microsoft infrastructure gets brought to its knees. I'm sure Google and Oracle will be clamoring to pick up some stragglers on the way.

    • Zoom's calling capacity during peak hours is severely limited

      Our remote-only team uses Zoom a few times a day, pretty much only during the workday - we've not seen any issues so far. What are the limits they have had? So far it seems to be working exactly as normal, which has impressed me...

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by DeBaas ( 470886 )

        If you don't use phone to dial in and the computer audio you're fine as far as I know with Zoom. The issues are with dialing in to a phone number. They even disabled that for free accounts.

        However, if you're able, I'd say setup your own Nextcloud [nextcloud.com] and use its build in videoconferencing and screensharing. Secure, open source and you're in control.

    • Got any proof of any of this we can consider? We've experienced none of this on Zoom. Any thoughts on DSCP/ToS in Cloud offerings?

    • All these cloud apps are suddenly seeing a surge, causing many of them to have issues - cloud is fine as long as everyone is sharing and surge capacity is limited to one or two major customers. Now suddenly every one of their customers needs max capacity which traditionally these customers would've had individually in a largely offline datacenter and simply spin up nodes for events like these.

      Zoom's calling capacity during peak hours is severely limited, WebEx has similar problems, Teams is laggy and Office 365 janky as hell.

      Then switch to https://meet.jit.si/ [meet.jit.si]

      This tech is opensource, so you can host your own servers and videobridge at your company if you don't want to rely on the extra ressource they are currently deploying.

      As usual (see: Linux, etc.), opensource is the supperior technology, it just doesn't have the marketing budget to buy itself the mind share.

  • ... how all of a sudden a lot of jobs that had to be done on-site could suddenly be done remotely.

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