Indigenous tech firm launches Konn3ct into $75bn world’s virtual conferencing market
A Nigerian tech start-up firm, Newwaves Ecosystems Limited is pitching for a major stake in the multi-billion-dollar global online meeting market with the launch of its virtual conferencing platform, Konn3ct.
Chinese company, Zoom Video Communications in 2020, emerged as the global leader in the virtual conferencing business, controlling 14.73 percent of a market that has more than 140 other competitors.
Market research firm, Research and Markets projects the worlds Global Web Conferencing Market, to reach a valuation of more than $78 billion by 2030, up from $2.1 billion at the end of 2020.
Konn3ct is entering the market with more than 40 differentiating propositions carefully infused into the platform for enhanced user experience and quick adoption and which could place it in firm stead to compete with Zoom and a host of other players that include; Huawei Technologies, Adobe Systems Inc., Cisco Systems, Inc. and Microsoft Corporation.
An analysis of Konn3ct reveals that it is the only product in the market with capacity to enable a break-out session during a large conference.
As explained by Femi Williams, CEO, Newwaves Ecosystems, this feature enables conveners of large virtual conferences to create up to eight rooms within the same meeting room for participants break out into smaller groups for private sessions.
Konn3ct has a video-sharing feature which, Williams explained, enables participants, especially those leading presentations to stream YouTube, Vimeo, Twitch and other forms of audiovisual material during sessions.
The feature, the Newwaves CEO highlighted, also has voice-over capability that allows audible conversation even while the video plays.
“In envisioning this platform, we also took into consideration, the importance of smooth viewing experience and created a solution with high-definition (HD) default audio quality while the video allows for picture quality bands ranging from low to high definition,” Mr. Williams, who founded the company after spending years as lead solution provider for Chams Nigeria Limited, said.
Konn3ct, he revealed, also enables the administrators of meetings to record both the main meeting and break-out sessions.
This, he said, minimizes the need for the distractions from having participants taking notes during sessions, ensuring also that rapporteurs have the benefits of second playbacks for more accurate documentation of meeting details or summaries.
The main and breakout rooms sessions can be recorded and accessed from the Admin dashboard.
Unlike other solutions in the market, Konn3ct enables the preloading of multiple presentation documents in the virtual meeting room for download by participants to, according to Williams, “save bandwidth and make for seamless admin management of meeting paraphernalia.”
“We also thought of the need by certain institutions and organisations to secure their conversations from the public internet and embedded in Konn3ct with a security protocol known as the Secure Socket Layer Encryption (SSL Encryption).
“This is a protocol that protects data during transfer and transmission by creating a channel, uniquely encrypted, so that the client and the server have a private communication link channel over the public Internet,” he explained.
The current global crisis due to COVID-19 has compelled companies to come up with innovative solutions which will allow employees to work without being afraid of contracting the virus.
Attributed to this, several businesses have now adopted the work-from-home model, thereby allowing people to avoid unnecessary travel.
It has further been found that employees who work remotely can work for an additional 1.4 days per month, as compared to normal working situation. This means that employees are able to contribute an additional 17 workdays, thereby increasing the productivity.
In Nigeria, where commercial cities such as Lagos and Port Harcourt, witness chaotic traffic that cost workers many hours on grinding road traffic every day as they commute to work, developments in online meetings ecosystem will even save employers additional time while also relieving the health challenges associated with road traffic stress.
This may explain the speed with which virtual meetings solutions such as Konn3ct had been adopted in Nigeria and other countries.
