New ways to e-meet
This is a beginning of a weekly blog, where I will try to present a single, bite-sized idea or tool. The idea is not to write something fancy, but simply share something I’ve learned or discovered during the last week.
Today I’m going to share two platforms I recently discovered and I found really useful. Throughout the last two years, many of my interpersonal connections have become virtual. COVID was the initial trigger. Close friends became figures on my laptop screen, elder family members were hiding behind a safe network medium and the only ones to get an actual hug from were my wife and pets.
But that wasn’t the end for me. At the end of 2021 if found myself moving with my wife abroad. Leaving all our friends and family behind. Even though many of them visited us, relationships are built on top of frequent, intimate and high-quality communication. At the beginning, we tried using WhatsApp, but at the time, using a phone app really wasn’t the best experience. Then, we tried using Zoom, a platform we were all accustomed to from our work places, but it turned out most of us didn’t have a paid account through our employers anymore, and meetings were limited to 40 minutes. For some reasons, Google Meet didn’t really work well for us and just now did I realise we didn’t even consider Microsoft Teams. I was constantly looking for better solutions.
Just this week, when I was cleaning up my Google calendar, I noticed the ‘add plugins’ button and realised I never explored it before. When I clicked it, I found a world of different platforms that integrate with the calendar. Some were tools you were expecting to find in a corporate, and didn’t seem useful to me, but two plugin descriptions hinted that I’ve just found the solutions I was looking for.
The first one was Around.co. By their own words, Around is for:
“Video calls loved by extraordinary teams”
Around supports all the platforms you would expect (Android, IOS, Any web browser, Windows, MacOS & Linux) and is built for the future of hybrid work. Their biggest innovation is being able to support multiple participants connected from the same room, each using their own laptop without any annoying echos, allowing everyone to participate equally in the meeting.
They also present new display layouts during the meeting. From focus modes, where an entire team can stay in the same meeting all day long and keep on working on their things while being able to reach out to anyone else in a hitch, to game modes that boost team productivity.
But for me, there was another bottom line that made it very useful. Since many of my online meetings are 1 on 1s, I can use this platform for free without any time limits or restrictions. Especially if I’m collaborating with a peer on some open-source project or meeting a friend to discuss some investment options, this platform proved to be very useful.
The second one was Crewdle, an online video conferencing solution that attempts to be:
“The greenest videoconferencing solution in the world”
This one is relatively similar to the platforms we’re used to, but it definitely pushes a very important agenda, calculating the CO2, Water and Energy we all save every year by meeting and working online rather than commuting to the office.
They UI is very clean, the app is really easy to use and it works directly from your browser, so friends won’t complain about you asking them to install a new application. The experience as a whole is really great and it comes with a great plus: they have a personal plan with up to 30 participants and unlimited duration that is FREE FOREVER.
That’s it for today, I hope you’ll find this as helpful as I did. I already feel less dependent on Zoom and other paid platforms that held me captive. See you next week.
