Vendors Seeking to Participate in Work-from-Home Trend, Even as Threats Loom
Hardware vendors are pivoting from traditional customer bases, hoping to land as a home-based option while Americans shelter in place during the COVID-19 crisis.
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Video monitor maker ViewSonic announced availability of myViewBoard Clips Thursday. The myViewBoard ecosystem, powered by Boclips, is available to educators who can access more than 2 million licensed videos -- curated for education use, ad-free and fit for common core standards, said the company. Software enables annotation, lecture capture and distance learning. A 30-day trial version is free for new users; annual subscription is $1,000 for 20 concurrent streams.
Key Digital hopes to apply its digital video smarts to “build a sense of normalcy" within the requirements of mandatory teleconferencing, said the company. It’s pitching its professional PTZ USB camera for business productivity or teleconferencing for virtual classrooms, places of worship, training, performances and at-home video conferencing. The camera works with software including Zoom, Skype, GoToMeeting, Microsoft Teams, RingCentral and Google Hangouts. The camera plugs in as a USB source, has 10x optical zoom, 1080p resolution and the option to store and recall presets, said the company.
Nearly a fifth of U.S. households used video and conference call platforms such as Zoom and Slack over the past week, up 7 points from March 27-29, said a CTA survey fielded April 3-5. Some 70% of households used a streaming or download service -- such as a video, gaming or music service -- while confined to home, up from 66% a week earlier, it said.
Household use of online education courses was up 4 points to 13% week to week as more kids practiced distance learning, said CTA. In addition to using video conference call platforms for work and school, they're using them socially for activities including virtual birthday parties, happy hours and game nights, said CTA Research Director Lesley Rohrbaugh.
As the use of video conferencing software skyrocketed, hackers followed. Zoom’s privacy and security came under scrutiny as companies scrambled to equip employees working from home with online conferencing solutions. (See reports including in this issue and the previous issue.) Zoom is one of the platforms bad actors have taken over to hijack teleconferences and then transmit pornographic images, dox participants and deliver hate speech and threats.
Zoom announced Wednesday a council comprising chief information security officers. They are from HSBC, NTT Data, Procore, and Ellie Mae, among others, and will collaborate and share ideas about privacy, security, technology issues and best practices, it said.