Coronavirus in the USA, are you ready to work from home?

Since the start of the COVID-19 (also name as coronavirus), there are millions of Chinese start to remote work from home. This becomes a trend after the Chinese new year break end by Feb 6th (then postpone one more week, end by Feb 13th).

Affected by the new crown pneumonia epidemic, starting February 3, many companies were forced to choose online remote offices. The huge demand instantly exploded the remote office market. According to data provided by Dingding, on February 3, tens of millions of enterprises and nearly 200 million people worked from home. As of press time, four of the top ten free apps in the Apple App Store are for remote office or remote classroom applications.

On February 3, the first day of the resumption of work online, a white-collar worker in Beijing, Jiangxi’s hometown, wore pajamas and participated in a department video conference. The main content of this video conference is to arrange homework arrangements. Shine’s department has never held a video conference, and even the Nail App used to start the video conference was registered only the day before.

Due to the impact of the new crown pneumonia epidemic, there are not a few people who require employees to work flexibly and work from home like Shining Company, which has really stimulated the demand for remote work.

Since yesterday (Mar 3rd), there are 9 death toll in the USA which related to COVID-19, and more panic was generated instantly, here it is what we see from the top US company which make the announcement right after the news of increasing of the death toll in the US.

Google ’s parent company Alphabet announced that it would cancel the annual developer conference, the Google I / O Conference, due to concerns over the new crown virus epidemic.

According to Google, due to concerns about the coronavirus and according to the health guidelines of the CDC, WHO and other institutions, we have decided to cancel the I / O Developer Conference at the Coastline Amphitheatre. In the coming weeks, we will explore other ways to conduct conference events and continue to build our developer community. We will continue to update on the I / O official website.

Earlier, Google ’s other company business conference, Google Cloud Conference, has been announced to be held online.

But compared to the cloud conference, Google I / O is not only heavier, but also involves a larger number of people.

In 2019, Google I / O has more than 7,000 developers from around the world.

Earlier than Google I / O time, GTC was originally planned to be held in San Jose, Silicon Valley hinterland on March 22–26, but now has to move to the front.

Nvidia said that founder and CEO Huang Renxun will still give a keynote speech, and the speech will be presented to everyone only by online live broadcast.

The reason why GTC has received attention this year is that rumors say that Nvidia will launch a new generation of 7nm GPU amps.

Unfortunately, in the face of the virus epidemic, the “nuclear bombs” had to retreat.

In addition to companies such as Google and Nvidia, Facebook and Twitter, they have also turned on the “cancel” mode, and Facebook has previously canceled its annual developer conference.

Now, the two major social media companies have announced their withdrawal from the industry event SXSW-Southwest Southwest Conference.

Twitter also announced that it encourages all 4,800 members of the company to work from home, avoiding the spread of immunity, which is also the first major US company to do so.

In addition, the latest news, Amazon has confirmed internally that one employee was infected with the new crown virus pneumonia.

It seems that the remote work is not the trend which was introduced to increase productivity, instead, it may be forced by a special situation such as the crown pneumonia epidemic.

But which tools and which company will win big in this trend.

There are more than 30 different service available in teleconference marketing, but only a few of them provide the high quality and affordable price (for most of the small business owner), let us focus on the top three remote conference tools.

1. Cisco Webex Meetings

PROS

• Free plan available.
• Minimal voice and video lag.
• 25 simultaneous video feeds.

CONS

• “Call Me” plan has additional cost.
• Only one presenter per license.

THE BOTTOM LINE

As one of the pioneer in this field, video conferencing service Cisco Webex Meetings offers a generous free plan and it’s dropped its price considerably in the past couple of years. However, it has some feature limitations you’ll need to test carefully before committing.

2. ClickMeeting

PROS

• Easy to use.
• Free trial.
• Doesn’t require credit card to try.

CONS

• Lacks phone support.
• A little pricey for a solution that delivers only video conferencing.
• Still utilizes Adobe Flash, which is scheduled for deprecation in 2020.

THE BOTTOM LINE

ClickMeeting is a competent video conferencing solution for small businesses that’s simple to use and nicely priced, although it may not be feature-rich like its competitor, it can grow fast in the short run. It could stand to beef up its customer support, though.

3. Zoom Meeting

PROS

• Generous free account.
• Competitively priced paid plans.
• Stellar performance.

CONS

• No toll-free dial-in numbers for the US or the UK.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Zoom Meeting’s claim to fame is top-notch performance, but that’s hardly the only reason to choose this feature-rich and competitively priced video conferencing service. It has almost all the required features at low price, plus it is the very few truly global-wide support tool (include support in China, surprise?), which makes the small business reach out to the global market far more easier than before.

In the next article, I will list the feature, and compare more teleconference service, and tell you why I am thinking one of them is better than another one.

Stay tuned.