Bharat Tech: Tracking the Made in India Virtual Event Platforms and What’s So Innovative About Them

The early days of COVID-19 and its impact on business continuity across sectors pivoted the need to reflect and reinvent necessary solutions that the market was severely searching for. As employees suddenly had to adopt to remote communication, virtual meeting apps started popping up all over the world. Already existing apps, like Google Meet, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams, pulled up their socks adding new features that can now accommodate more people while taking care of user security.

India was not particularly warm to virtual meetings but now is forced to adopt this tech. As a result, several existing homegrown apps flourished and added to their retinue of features, while new ones ventured into this suddenly profitable area. Here are four such platforms that are competing with global competition within India.

Kestone

Kestone’s virtual platform solution provides pick and drop 3D layouts options with pick for events as in lobby, auditorium, tracks, and exhibitor booths in a completely virtual platform with layers of gamification with audience polls, quizzes, and hashtag contests, where delegates get the option to cast their votes as speakers stream their video and throw questions to the audience for their opinion.

Moreover, they have pick and drop required features at a room level; detailed analytics at an aggregate and attendee level. Even on a miniscule level like rooms visited, average video watch time, resources downloaded, chat logs, and event feedback are constantly tracked and reported live (real time).

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With cloud hosted platform architecture, CDN server configuration and GDPR compliant attendee registration process, access speed, data security and user privacy has been taken care of. Branded Virtual Exhibitor Booths and Resource Centre showcase products and interact with ‘walking-in’ customers in a dedicated private chat room.

Be it a small event with 50 attendees or a large one with 5,000, online conferences, virtual townhalls, virtual job fairs or an online training program, the solution provides endless possibilities for IT and ITES, FMCG, travel/transport aggregator, real-estate brands, media, ecommerce, automotive, artists and musicians, educators, etc.

This wholly-owned subsidiary of Career Launcher is headquartered in New Delhi and has offices in Bengaluru and Mumbai besides Singapore, Dubai, and the US.

Airmeet

Airmeet is a virtual platform from a Bengaluru-based startup, which recently raised US$3 million in funding. The platform has the capability of hosting up to one million live attendees, who can seamlessly interact with each other, thereby recreating the networking environment of an offline location.

It allows community managers to publish their event details online, manage registrations, and go live from the event via a single interface, with no additional downloads. Users can use a browser link to organize or join meetings on Airmeet.

VideoMeet

Rajasthan-based IT firm Data Ingenious Global Limited has launched Virtual Now (VNow), an event platform developed to revolutionize the process of hosting virtual events and exhibitions.

VideoMeet was among the top ten contenders in the Made in India Video Conferencing Innovation Challenge initiated by the Ministry of Electronics and IT, Government of India.

VNOW has been strategically developed keeping the aspects of pre-event buzz, on-going event requisites, live sharing, and post-promotion in sync. It has the advantage of hosting multiple meetings, lobby rooms, main stage area, coffee rooms under a single link.

JioMeet

JioMeet from Reliance is an HD video conferencing platform for cellular phones and tablets. The app has been existing since 2018, but after COVID-19 presented an opportunity, Reliance rolled out an upgraded version in March 2020 to cash in on the rising demand for e-meeting apps.

JioMeet allows five users in its free plan, and up to 100 users on its business plan. Meeting hosts can use email and OTP-based logins for meeting hosts. Guests can participate with the help of a simple conferencing link on the app or via a Chrome browser.

Users have the options of answering calls in audio or video mode. They can even switch between modes. The call host can make use of host controls to manage participant audio and video feeds. In addition, they have the option to selectively disconnect participants or terminate the meeting. The platform also provides information such as conference history, while all meetings are PIN protected.

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Virtual meetings were already fast becoming a norm in the world of global business, but come COVID-19, it became a necessity overnight, as events were cancelled in the hundreds. Thanks to so many homegrown virtual meeting platforms, it can be business as usual for the Indian industry.