Zoom Launches OnZoom Marketplace Alongside New Features

Some say that you've really become a platform when you're big enough to have your own store, be it for digital content or even physical products. In that sense, Zoom has probably now grown up to be exactly that, perhaps to the chagrin of Google and Microsoft who continue to try to displace it as the household name in video conferencing. While it continues to grow its features aimed at the usual meetings, Zoom is also launching a marketplace to help users monetize those videos.

It might sound a bit weird why you'd have a marketplace for a video conferencing platform. While Zoom has mostly been used for meetings and even classes, new use cases have also popped up in the past few months that took it to places beyond the board room, quite literally, too. Zoom is now being used for things like online events, conferences, classes, and everything in between and that is where OnZoom comes in.

OnZoom is Zoom's marketplace that allows paying Zoom users to monetize these events, mostly by selling tickets. OnZoom helps with listings, billing via PayPal or credit cards, and even in promotion via email. The service is still in beta, though, so it's still unclear if it will really take off in the long run.

Zoom is also kicking off new features, like Immersive Scenes that dump attendees' busts into different themed backgrounds, like a classroom. For users of the Zoom Phone, there is also a new E911 service that will simultaneously alert a workplace's internal safety team in case of an emergency and very few people are around to help.

These updates are pretty much Zoom's way of showing that it isn't out of the game yet, despite how some of these new features may sound familiar to users of Microsoft Teams and Google Meet. Zoom has also started the trek towards rolling out end-to-end encryption, a much-needed feature for the service to be taken more seriously by some high-profile and high-risk customers.