Feest Isolation Days – 27 January 2021
ZOOM! Have you been zooming? As I have three different and unrelated Zoom activities today, I thought I’d find out a little more about where this came from. Prior to lockdown, I had never heard of Zoom, like most of us I suspect! Unless we were working, there didn’t seem to be any reason to try and see people on a computer screen. And when I was working, I remember trying some of those meetings with others dialling in, and they never went terribly well. The technology has clearly moved on!
We have this young man to thank for Zoom. He is one Eric Yuan, born in China (Tai’An City, Shandong Province) forty nine years ago. His parents were mining engineers, and he has a Masters degree in engineering. He got the idea for starting Zoom when he was 19 and at college, a ten hour train ride away from his girlfriend, now wife. He only managed to see her a few times a year and thought the idea of clicking a button and connecting would have been so much better than the train he needed to take to get to her. When he was in his late twenties he applied for he and his wife to settle in the US. His visa was turned down eight times before he was successful. He didn’t speak much English when he arrived but clearly was excellent at writing computer code. He never took formal English classes, instead he “learned it from my teammates”. His company is now worth a fortune and so is he. Not bad for a chap who arrived not speaking the language!
Eric doesn’t travel for work as all of his meetings are now on Zoom. He has three kids and they clearly had a hand in the naming of the company! The name comes from a book written for toddlers by Thatcher Herd called Zoom City. Herd’s book is filled with energy and noisy sounds that young kids love to imitate. Honk Honk! Beep Beep! Cars and dogs everywhere. We now seem to live in not just a Zoom City but a Zoom world!
There were originally some issues about safety on Zoom, but these seem to have been rectified. The National Cyber Security Centre guidance shows there is no security reason for Zoom not to be used for conversations below a certain classification. Professor Alan Woodward, a computer scientist at Surrey University, agrees and says, “There is no evidence that Zoom has any problems in its latest versions but in these crazy times it seems sensible only to use systems that are tried and tested. It does reinforce the message that whatever you use you should use the latest version.”
So there you have it…Zoom indeed!
And here’s a chuckle from a child that probably still reads Zoom City….Enjoy!
Stay safe and enjoy!
With love,
Kathy x