Zoom.us, the hottest new video conferencing company, is revealing its paid UMX (Unified Meeting Experience) offering for businesses. Zoom previously raised $3M in angel funding. It has also just raised $6M in series A funding, from some of the biggest names such as Qualcomm Ventures, Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, and Cisco WebEx co-founder Subrah Iyar! With this video conference startup Dream Team – super smart, experienced leaders, and very nice guys, too — Zoom is looking to do great things!
[See Zoom Company Profile here]
Initially a free consumer offering, Zoom received a great review from Walt Mossberg’s AllThingsD column for its clear 15-person group video and screen share. Now Zoom is limiting free video to 1-on-1 calls as it focuses on entering the enterprise space and the education sector.
David Maldow from the Telepresence Options Human Productivity Lab recently reviewed the new features and gives Zoom a hearty thumbs up. Some of the finer points David points out include multi-screen desktops (so video can be displayed on one screen while screen share content is displayed on another panel) and unlimited video recording.
However, the biggest selling point for Zoom is its full featured mobile support. It also can accommodate 40 participants in a video conference unlike WebEx Meetings which supports 9 or ooVoo which supports 12.
Vidyo and Blue Jeans out of the picture?
Zoom architecture still uses servers in the cloud to to stream video, like Vidyo and Blue Jeans – two startups that have raised tons of money. (VSee is peer-to-peer and only uses a server for http tunneling if peer-to-peer connection is not possible).
However, Zoom also has significantly higher video performance than either Vidyo or Blue Jeans. It is unclear how these two earlier hot startups will compete with Zoom. A great advantage of Zoom is that it has a simple pricing — $9.99 for businesses and enterprises, $0.99 for education — unlike Vidyo’s complicated pricing model.
How does VSee compare with Zoom?
A key unknown is how much users care about security. Zoom streams video to its servers, which have full access to your conversations. VSee, on the other hand, uses end-to-end encryption where your conversation is always private, confidential, and off-the-record.
Another unknown is how simple the user design needs to be. VSee has a simpler user experience compared to Zoom for creative team work, telemedicine, and telehealth. How much will people care about a few extra clicks?
The final unknown is the importance of global collaboration with people in developing countries where Internet speed is just not that great. VSee requires significantly less bandwidth than Zoom making it the ideal tool in developing countries (Africa, Middle East, Latin America) where we have lots of users.
As for Zoom’s education focus, VSee not only offers free group video for anyone, it also gives all students free screen sharing as well. Why pay for Zoom if you can get it free with VSee?
Please give VSee a try and tell us what you think! 🙂
Related articles
- Zoom Debuts New Video Conferencing Plans (BetaKit)
- Press Release Zoom Video Conference for Enterprises (Telepresence Options)
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I find it interesting how easily you seem to write off Vidyo without any explanation other than a “complicated pricing plan”. I guess that depends on who you are comparing it to. If you are comparing it to Polycom, Cisco, or LifeSize on an enterprise level, it is much less complicated and a fraction of the cost with better quality. You don’t mention the difference in architectures either. Unlike vidyo, BlueJeans uses an antiquated MCU based architecture which was never designed to scale to thousands. What is the architecture behind your VSee? BCG, the US department of defense, Kaiser Permanente, Google, the Gap, Cerner, and CERN are just a few of it’s named clients. I guess if you’re a mandy moore or Branjolina fan, those names would wouldn’t mean much to you. Cheers!
Gary, from all my blog writings, you should see that Vidyo is a competitor I personally admire. They are an extremely successful company – they make a great product, the video quality is amazing, and they are ~10 times bigger than VSee. So I would love to make vsee as big and successful as Vidyo 🙂
Vidyo’s server requirements, UI, and pricing are complex. We steal tons of customers from Vidyo by competing on simplicity. And we actually serve almost all the companies you listed as Vidyo customers 🙂 we stand behind our product so much that we include all our competitors on the button of our home page: https://vsee.com/videoconference
Zoom has a more modern and scalable architecture – and this give it an edge over Vidyo in the longer term. My personal prediction is that Zoom will be sold for more money than Vidyo. Vidyo was radical and innovative when it disrupted Polycom/Cisco, but now newer players are disrupting Vidyo via simpler design and newer thinking. Btw, Vidyo will be sold for a lot of money (Polycom/Cisco are forced to make them an offer) – so Vidyo is already a big success and it will be a bigger success when it exits. But Zoom will have an even bigger exit since it will impact more people 🙂
Interesting article. Vidyo, Polycom, BlueJeans, Accutel are established players in Video conferencing market. Zoom’s New Enterprise Video Conference is a good product. Apart from these, companies are already using various desktop video conferencing tools such as WebEx, gomeetnow, gotomeeting, RHUB appliances etc. for conducting web conferences, webinars, online demos etc.
I’d love to use VSee on my Android tablet. Are there any plans to release an Android version soon?
Dear Madera, here is our Android beta thanks! 🙂
Hi,
nice review and i like the straight forward answers. Im currently comparing the different offerings out there and it seems to be that things are getting more and more exciting :).
we always hear that “this is the year for video”. do you think we are ready now? i still see video as being environment specific meaning i get the anywhere, anytime , any device but i not seeing that this is necessarily a good thing….i like all the products and ive evaluated most (now actually looking at VSEE) but i still have a confidence factor issue in quality….in any event just wanted to say i do believe video is definitely the future….
hi Arvind,
I believe this is definitely the year of the video 🙂 re. confidence, there are still many failure cases such as poor network, defective AV devices, etc. However, our company is distributed in a dozen countries and I do a dozen plus calls w/ customers around the world everyday – video definitely has passed the threshold of being a must-have business tool. thx 🙂
You just love saying ‘start up’ to insert some ?? uncertainty into your posts on say- vidyo.
Vidyo is NO start up… how many years over a 5-6-7-8 does one have to be in business to not be start up?… You information is flat out wrong on Vidyo ( exception perhaps 2 points that do not matter) Hummmm lets see you seemed to like Google , ( which uses Vidyo as engine in hangouts) … you right about Google not being secure and collaborative share share does not exist. Hence the enterprise reality of Vidyo offering all of that and by the way the same security and MORE than Vsee. Requires infrastructure on Vidyo ???.. sure if you buy an On Premise solution like everyone else… but Bconnected Video from BBH Solutions offers Vidyo as a HOSTED Solution ( engine) , and with Cisco , we can deliver our customers a FREE audio bridge. Gary of may 20th post is closest to level setting your brain.
Raed your stuff and Vsee is best on planet- which of course is nonesense.
I’ve been using VSee for my education site for years now and I have always been satisfied. The pricing plan is a bargain. Only lately with the CoVid19 virus have I discovered Zoom for different clients but unfortunately the 40 minute limit is a bit of a deal breaker. VSee has never had that limit and I can share only the window I want, not my entire desktop.