Tag: convo

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Zoom earnings, remote work and a terrible but possibly bright moment for startups

It’s a bit gauche to talk about positive economic impacts of what may become a global pandemic, but the novel coronavirus hasn’t been bad news for every company.

Video conference provider Zoom appears to be one beneficiary; after going public in 2019, its share price rose from around $68 at the start of the year to $115 today. Why? As governments lock down cities and close borders — and companies and conferences shift to virtual for the time being — services like Zoom are well-positioned to see increased demand. (Indeed, Zoom announced today that it is rolling out select products to new territories after improving its free service in impacted regions.)

That Zoom’s shares have appreciated is perhaps not surprising.

The company quickly moved from being a relatively unknown video chat upstart to becoming a celebrated profitable IPO that today is synonymous with its product category in the startup world. Seeing rising investor interest in Zoom merely matches its growing brand; naturally, folks looking for a trade — however that makes your moral center feel — might pile their chips on Zoom.

The rise in Zoom’s value begs two questions: Are future-of-work and remote work-focused startups seeing a global increase in demand? And if so, what impact is that having on their growth? (Are you a startup building remote-work tools? Email me if the outbreak has impacted your growth rates.)

Luckily for you and me, Zoom reports earnings tomorrow. The quarter that Zoom will report, the fourth quarter of its fiscal 2020, stretched from November 1, 2019 through the end of January 2020. So it does include a bit of time in which the novel coronavirus was active, impacting work and perhaps corporate behavior. Obviously, its next quarter will be more interesting, but Zoom should provide guidance for that period. So we’ll get a look at what’s ahead, even if it is provisional.

What about startups?

If Zoom has a bullish outlook, it could lift other, similar companies.

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Convo now lets you see which employees got the memo

Convo, a tool perhaps best described as a real-time company message board, picked up a new trick this week: automated acknowledgements.

It’s a pretty common thing in the corporate world: you need to send something out to all of the employees at your company, but you also need to know exactly who has seen it (and, of course, who hasn’t.) Who actually got the memo? Can you say that everyone has seen some mandatory reading? Who still needs to see it?

You can try to use email read receipts, but those are hit-or-miss — particularly as many email clients disable them by default nowadays. You can make everyone sign a form saying they’ve seen the document in question, but that’s a pain in the butt. When all you need is a list that says “Yep, these employees have all seen this blurb of text” so you can meet some new compliance requirement, it shouldn’t be complicated.

Convo’s new tool makes it pretty easy: write your post like any other, but check the “Recipients must acknowledge to view” box before sending it out.

When it pops up in your colleagues’ Convo timeline, it’ll be almost entirely blurred, save for a subject line and a prompt asking them to acknowledge the post. Once they deliberately acknowledge it, the post is de-blurred, the original poster gets an alert letting them know someone has read it, and the reader’s name moves from the “Has not seen” to the “Has seen” list.

To be clear, this isn’t a security feature; there are ways to get around the blurring without officially acknowledging it. Hell, you can just say ‘Hey Jim, did you already open that convo post? Let me see it on your phone’. The point here isn’t preventing anyone in the company from seeing something, but in making sure everyone has seen something, and having an automatically generated list to fulfill any compliance requirements. If you’re using Convo’s group features correctly, it should only show up for people you intend to see it in the first place.

The feature rolled out earlier this week. It’ll be available for all Convo networks for the next month to check out, at which point they expect to limit it to Enterprise-level customers.