Technology

What is Up With Zoom?

By: Shirine Daghmouri

At the beginning of March, the word Zoom was only associated with cameras or cars. So, how did this little app take over teaching, learning, and even socializing? How is it that a relatively obscure platform like Zoom became so popular in such a short amount of time? And why is it that it only became mainstream now but has existed for seven years?

In the last couple of weeks, a lot has been happening, and it's been hard to process that just a month ago we went to school every day at 8:05, left school at 2:30, and maybe went to practice until 5. Now, we're juggling assignments, an overload of emails, and a bunch of awkward Zoom calls.

When I asked Mr. Cohen, my history teacher, why he uses Zoom, at our Zoom meeting yesterday, he said: “I just use Zoom because everyone else is using it.” Mr. Cohen, like many other teachers, is using Zoom for his daily lessons, meetings, check-ups and as the biggest source of communication with his students.

I remember hearing about Zoom about a week before school ended, so somewhere around March 10th, because most colleges were using Zoom for their classes.

According to Zoom themselves, “Zoom is the leader in modern enterprise video communications, with an easy, reliable cloud platform for video and audio conferencing, collaboration, chat across mobile devices, desktops, telephones, and room systems.” I mean… that's a lot of credit to give to a company that no one knew existed a year ago.

The company was founded in 2011, by a man named Eric Yuan. He was a lead engineer at Cisco Systems, which from what I understand, is a company that sells software and technology stuff. More specifically, Yuan worked in the business unit Webex, which according to Wikipedia, is an “American company which develops and sells web conferencing and videoconferencing applications.” See the connection?

In 2011, Yuan became more ambitious and advocated to his fellow executives that major changes needed to happen to Webex, and that it needed to be improved. According to the co-founder of the FYI blog, “at that time, Cisco’s strategy for web conferencing didn’t involve improving existing products.” So despite Webex being an important part and investment, Cisco didn't listen to Yuan.

Like every classic success story, Eric Yuan didn't “give up on his dreams,” so he… (drumroll please) … founded his own company, called Zoom!

By June of 2011, Yuan had $3 million in seed money. Apparently, according to FYI blog, most of this money came from a former colleague. By August of the following year, Zoom was introduced to the public, with his first big press release. By 2013, just two years after the company was founded, Yuan raised $6 million to expand the business. At this point, the very first version of Zoom, Zoom 1.0, was launched. But like any other platform, changes would have to be made. One of the new features added to Zoom 2.0 was the mirroring effect that turns video on and off, screen sharing, and more. Most of these things are what makes Zoom helpful for teachers to use.

I believe that the main reason why many people haven't heard about Zoom is because it was mostly used by enterprises and companies to hold meetings. By June 2014, Zoom already had ten million users. This was shocking to me, but considering how many employees companies who used Zoom had, it makes more sense.

Clearly there was a huge increase in usage since the start of the COVID-19 outbreak, since many schools and companies are now using the platform to have meetings and teach classes. Apparently, the company provides Zoom for free to K-grade 12 classes in some countries. According to Forbes, in a single day, the app was downloaded 343,000 times, with 18% originating in the US. According to Forbes, “Zoom gained over 2.22 million users in the first months of 2020 which is more users than they amassed in the entirety of 2019.” The value of the company, as calculated by Yahoo Finance, almost doubled in three months to reach a whooping $36 billion in market capitalization. That is a lot of money for a little app. My question is will Zoom continue to expand or is it just something that’ll stay in 2020?

COVID-19 and Google Trends

By: Gray Bittker

What is Google Trends? Google Trends is where Google displays publicly-available search information, which can be sorted by region and time. The graphs below all contain relative scores for the searches, with 100 being maximum interest and 0 being minimal to no interest. Interest is measured in terms of searches by users of Google products, which provides for some very interesting visual representations of society. The following data is all from the United States and is organized in a 30-day graph spanning across March 2020. Any and all data used in this project can be found on the Google Trends website at https://trends.google.com/trends/?geo=US. (All graphs can be found below this article.)

Household Supplies: This graph is very interesting because of how it represents the stockpile situation using the lines and search terms that relate to them. The blue line is the most interesting, as it represents toilet paper, which reached a peak point of interest over this 30 day span but has now leveled out with other supplies. Face masks have also been rising, but were after toilet paper and hand sanitizer, which went up together once the virus reached the United States. The green line represents a very interesting outlier, which is dish soap. This line on the graph shows that not everything is bought in multitudes because of the pandemic. The green line at the bottom is the reason why you never see any dish soap commercials because they are not an item that consumers buy online.

Dining Out: This graph is by far the most interesting, as it shows how COVID-19 has affected the hospitality industry, but also shows how Americans typically come across their fast food meals. The blue line shows data for restaurant searches, which has a notable spike every weekend. This spike continued, and actually got bigger on the weekend of March 17th, but this past weekend you can see that there was a decline in searches for restaurants. I think this graph is probably one of the most crucial representations of how small businesses are struggling during the coronavirus, and that they need our help the most. The red, yellow and green lines are included to show that the fast food industry does not seem to be taking as much damage during this crisis, but this could be because of how fast food is marketed as a quick stop on the road, and not something that one actively searches for on the internet.

Travel: Another industry that has been under heavy fire during this crisis is the travel industry. Because the media has been showing many stories about how cruise ships and airplanes are great breeding grounds for the virus, searches for air travel and cruises increased slightly. However, this only happened after the initial rush of interest, since then it has decreased to a very low point. The yellow line, representing searches for gas prices, spikes several times during this 30 day period, which is indicative of how many citizens are preferential to personal travel instead of public transit. The green line, which has never been a popular search, shows that even before this pandemic public transport was not searched often. I have a lot of theories as to why gas prices have been searched more, though I suspect it may have to do with people trying to stockpile supplies that are hard to get in a shutdown.

Paranoia: This graph shows the selective paranoia that is surrounding daily life, and how we choose to focus on threats that are in the news and do not focus on things such as bacteria, which is also very dangerous despite it not being in the news as much. The red line showing searches for the term “Virus,” peaked over this 30 day period, due to obvious mentions in the media concerning coronavirus and other threats. However, the yellow and blue lines represent searches for bacteria and germs, respectively, and these terms are not searched at all, which shows the selective paranoia that people have about this situation.

Countries: This graph includes searches for some of the hardest-hit countries, and shows how there has been a steady increase as there is more news coverage about the virus in the United States. One thing to note is that this graph only indicates searches originating in the United States, which is probably why Italy and China are searched so much, but Spain still remains relatively low despite the high case count there. Again, the media is likely to blame for this as they direct attention to these countries that Americans may have more ties to.

Summary: In summary, the media and Google go hand in hand to show us selective views on world situations. This final graph shows searches for quarantine, which was a late countermeasure, peaking after the declaration of the pandemic, in green. This graph clearly shows the timeline of events. The red and yellow lines show past outbreaks of infectious diseases that have also had a small spike because of the coronavirus situation. Overall, it is important that we rely on first-hand information when talking about something as serious as COVID-19 because media misinformation can prove to be very dangerous in times like this.