$8Bn Mills & Zoom Story

How the video conferencing app that’s taken off had very romantic beginnings

- Peter Sheridan

The Queen does it. Boris does it. Even educated celebrities do it. Let’s Zoom it, let’s fall in love...

Okay, the lyrics are tweaked but 200 million users a day in lockdown around the world really have fallen for the video conferencing app.

Zoom allows friends and families to have group chats, schools to run classes, fitness nuts to join live sessions and many of us to work from home – all online.

Pub quizzes have attracted literally hundreds of thousands of participants.

And Her Majesty, self-isolating at Windsor, marked her 94th birthday last Tuesday with her family on Zoom. A royal see-all of approval, you could call it.

That’s the good news for Chinese founder Eric Yuan – who used love as his inspiration for Zoom way back in the late 1980s. Long before smartphones and easy-to-use video calls, he dreamed of a way he really could see his girlfriend, who lived 10 hours away.

The bad news is that hackers love Zoom too. In the past week technicians have been upgrading the app to stop pranksters – some naked – who have “Zoom-bombed” private sessions, yelling obscenities and even screening porn.

TARGETED

Some NHS meetings were targeted. And security issues prompted space agency NASA to halt its use of Zoom.

The app was designed for business and makes its money by selling corporate licences at £15.99 per month per host.

Now, in the age of coronavirus, it has gone from an office tool to a virtual gathering place in an era of social distancing.

And it has made 50-year-old Yuan the 293rd richest man in the world. He owns 20 per cent and his worth has risen more than $4billion since the Covid-19 crisis, to an estimated $7.9billion.