First up, OnZoom. This is an “event discovery and monetization” platform that will make it easier to find virtual events in a whole range of categories, says Zoom.
All you need is a paid Zoom account to host events, up to a maximum of 1000 attendees. OnZoom has built-in tools to facilitate organisers for selling tickets, scheduling, and promotion. Payments via PayPal or by Credit Card. OnZoom is currently on beta but will be available globally in 2021.
Another feature Zoom introduced is the Zoom’s third-party apps called “Zapps”. It lets you integrate third-party apps directly into calls, which can be very useful for all your Zoom calls.
With these added features by Zoom, it’s evident that the company is readying themselves for the future of remote working.
See London In A Different Hue with Snapchat’s “City Painter”
Back in June 2020 at the 2020 Snap Partner Summit, Snapchat announced “Local Lenses” a new feature that allows users to interact with an AR version of the real world.Their first activation of this feature is currently live, featuring London’s, Carnaby Street as their new collaborative AR project – “City Painter”. Uses are able to virtually paint over anything they want, from streets to buildings, and when they are done, their creation will be visible to other Snapchat users too.
As technology advances, there are endless possibilities of what we can do with AR, such as innovations like AR glasses, which could be something that Snapchat may or may not be developing in the future.
Wearable AR could be a breakthrough in the way we experience the digital world moving forward and it’s highly likely that companies like Snapchat, Facebook and Apple could have a fully-functional AR tool in the pipeline.
Snapchat joins Instagram in the battle for short-form video supremacy
Snapchat joined an ever-growing list of Social Media platforms to have added TikTok-Esque features after the latter’s breakaway success. This week, Snapchat launched “Sounds on Snapchat”, a feature that allows users to add music to their Snaps from a catalogue of Snapchat licensed audio. This comes after Instagram released its own challenger.
To attract users in an increasingly crowded industry, Snapchat launched “Sounds on Snapchat” with an exclusive from Justin Bieber and Benny Blanco. “Lonely” will only be available through Snapchat’s Featured Sounds list. Beyond that, Snapchat has also crucially inked deals with music publishers such as Warner Music Group and Universal Music Publishing Group. The platform has touted a catalog of over a “million” licensed songs. Snapchat will hope it’s youthful demographic will help make “Sounds on Snapchat” a success and bring users back onto the platform. However, as Instagram quickly found out, it may not be easy to imitate TikTok and achieve the success they managed to in such a short period. One thing that is for certain is that fans of short-form video content are spoilt for choice. “Sounds on Snapchat” is currently available on IOS only.
