Zoom: From work to parties, meetings app is now a household name

Videoconferencing app Zoom began the year as a virtual unknown, but has become a household name as the Covid-19 pandemic profoundly changed how people live and work around the globe.

Nobody could have foreseen at the start of 2020 how much of the year would be spent online, and how widely people's social and professional lives would be upended.

These disruptions have been somewhat mitigated by Zoom, as billions worldwide hunker down at home amid calls to reduce human contact to curb infections.

Rival apps - Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, Cisco Webex, Skype and Slack, just to name a few - can likewise do the job. But none of them was arguably as pervasive as Zoom, one of the biggest tech success stories of the year.

Its eponymous developer - known in full as Zoom Video Communications and based in San Jose in the United States - is expanding worldwide and will open a research and development centre in Singapore next year.

Share prices of the Nasdaq-listed company have soared by more than five times this year, after opening at US$68.72 on the first trading day of 2020.

It was trading at more than US$350 at the beginning of this week, having pared gains from a high of US$588.84 in October.

Global sales for the current quarter are expected to rise a whopping 367 per cent year on year to US$777.2 million, the company said in a Japanese-language blog post this month.

Zoom added, without providing newer figures, that the number of daily users rose from an average of 10 million worldwide in December last year to 300 million in April.

Cyber-security fears and connectivity problems manifesting in frozen screens or laggy videos have done nothing to stop Zoom's exponential growth.

The app, which has functions such as screen-sharing and simultaneous interpretation, has infiltrated nearly every social setting one can think of.

It is being used by schools and universities to conduct lectures and classes, and by companies to hold meetings and seminars.

And then there are online gym sessions, music lessons, and even online drinking parties or catch-up sessions among friends.

In Japan, the number of free Zoom users surged 63 times between January and April, with the number of companies that have bought at least 10 licences jumping from 2,500 to 20,000 this year.

Zoom said in a blog post that among its clients are start-ups and multinational conglomerates in sectors as diverse as technology, manufacturing, retail and aviation, as well as educational institutions and government agencies.

The rise of Zoom amid the Covid-19 pandemic has fuelled the widespread adoption of remote work, giving momentum to the Japanese government's embryonic efforts at fostering work-life balance and wooing mothers back to the workforce.

This is significant for a country known for its noxiously excessive overtime and low productivity, having long been wedded to the work culture of putting in face time in the office.

Employees are now liberated from the watchful eyes of their superiors and the pressure of attending after-work nomikais (drinking parties), allowing them to reclaim their personal time.

Mothers can more easily go back to work while raising their children, with the office just a Zoom call away.

A roll call of Japanese companies keeping in place the "new normal" includes electronics firms Fujitsu, Hitachi and Ricoh, building materials group Lixil, and glass manufacturer AGC, in addition to the Tokyo metropolitan government.

As many employees no longer have to physically report to work every day, with meetings done on Zoom, densely populated Tokyo has seen its resident numbers drop for five months and counting.

Among those who have left is Ms Nanami Takahashi, 24, who moved in last month with her grandparents in Yamanashi. She started work in August as an IT engineer at tech firm Headwaters, which has adopted work-from-home policies since the start of the pandemic.

"I was worried that I would not be able to adapt to my new workplace due to the lack of face-to-face meetings," she told The Straits Times. "But regular 'remote lunches' and 'remote general meetings' have eased my fears of not being able to meet or communicate with my co-workers."

She added: "I hate how Covid-19 has caused major disruptions to life as we know it, but it is also thanks to Covid-19 that there is now diversity in the way we work."