Mitzvah services. Zoom formed a partnership with Formula One to create a virtual club where fans can go behind the scenes and take part in virtual activities through Zoom, beginning with the Hungarian Grand Prix on July 19, 2020. An article published in July 2020 in the San Francisco Chronicle noted a new real estate trend in San Francisco and Oakland where some listings include "Zoom rooms" with backdrops for Zoom calls.

Richard Nelson's play What Do We Need to Talk About? takes place on Zoom, with its main characters congregating online during the coronavirus pandemic using Zoom. Written and directed by Nelson, it was commissioned by The Public Theater and premiered on YouTube on April 29, 2020, as a benefit performance. The New Yorker called it "the first great original play of quarantine". Oprah's Your Life in Focus: A Vision Forward was a live virtual experience hosted by Oprah Winfrey on Zoom from May 16 through June 6, 2020. In Source Material's play In These Uncertain Times, directed by Samantha Shay, characters communicate on Zoom. The play premiered on Zoom on July 25, 2020. In the 2020 British found-footage Zoom-based horror film Host, directed by Rob Savage, a group of young people have a remote séance in which they try contacting spirits over Zoom. It premiered on Shudder in July 2020. A live reading of Kristoffer Diaz's 2009 play The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity over Zoom streamed on Play-PerView from August 15–20, 2020.

On July 3-4, using Zoom Webinar, the International Association of Constitutional Law organized the first "round-the-clock and round-the-globe" event that traveled through time zones, featuring 52 speakers from 28 countries. Soon after, a format of conferences which "virtually travel the globe with the sun from East to West", became common, some of them running for several days.

Data routing

Zoom admitted that some calls in early April 2020 and prior were mistakenly routed through servers in mainland China, prompting governments and businesses to cease their usage of Zoom. The company later announced that data of free users outside of China would "never be routed through China" and that paid subscribers will be able to customize which data center regions they want to use. The company has data centers in Europe, Asia, North America, and Latin America.

Censorship

An April 2020 Citizen Lab report warned that having much of Zoom's research and development in China could "open up Zoom to pressure from Chinese authorities." Lee Cheuk Yan's (Chairman of Hong Kong Labour Party) account was also closed in early May 2020, and human rights activist Zhou Fengsuo's was closed in June after he held an event discussing the Tiananmen Square protests. In June 2020, Zoom acknowledged that it had terminated two accounts belonging to U.S. users and one of a user from Hong Kong connected to meetings discussing Tiananmen Square protests, the accounts were later re-opened, with the company stating that in the future it "will have a new process for handling similar situations." Zoom also announced upcoming technology that could prevent participants from specific countries from joining calls that were deemed illegal in those areas.

Zapps

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In October 2020, Zoom announced Zapps, or apps that both free and paid Zoom users will have access to within the Zoom platform.

"Think of Zapps as an app store right where you need it most - in a Zoom meeting, room, chat, webinar, phone call, and even your contacts directory," Zoom announced while explaining that Zapps can "improve productivity and help create more engaging experiences".

Launch partners include Atlassian, Asana, Box, Dropbox, Slack, Wrike, Coursera, Kahoot, Kaltura, HubSpot, Chorus, Gong, Cameo, Exer, Slido, Lucidspark, Miro, Mural, ServiceNow, and PagerDuty. For example, you can use the Dropbox Zapp to share the document you’ve been working on, or you can put up a poll using the Slido Zapp, or you can pull up the Asana Zapp and do updates on team projects.

The first of these Zapps will land by the end of 2020. Zoom plans to open the ability to offer a Zapp to more developers in the future.

Users will be able to search and add approved Zapps and integrate them directly into their Zoom accounts. Visit zoom.us/zapps to see watch demo videos. Zoom also has a blog post that details how to get started using Zapps when they finally launch in the Zoom app for everyone.

Zoom tips and tricks

Zoom has introduced settings that allow you to adjust the audio on your call and remove unnecessary and unwanted background noise.

In order to activate this, click into the settings, then find the audio options. In there you'll see a drop-down menu with "suppress background noise".

There are varying levels of suppression you can add here. The highest will remove as much as possible, reducing issues with fan noises and dogs barking while the lower levels will still let you play background music on a chilled-out casual call with friends.

If the built-in noise removal isn't enough there are other options available.

Zoom virtual backgrounds

If you want to jazz things up a bit or don't want other people on the Zoom call seeing the awful mess of your home then there's good news as Zoom offers virtual backgrounds. These are backdrops for your calls that include things like space, cityscapes and ocean-side views too.

Best Zoom backgrounds: fun virtual backgrounds for Zoom meetings

With Zoom virtual backgrounds, you can also upload an image of anything you want to customise your background. It's available for both iPhone and desktops

How to use virtual backgrounds on desktop.

It's fairly easy to get started with Zoom virtual backgrounds. On a Mac or PC, for instance, just open up your Zoom client, click on the "Setup" icon on the corner, and select "Virtual Background" in the side menu.

Zoom provides a few virtual backgrounds. Click on the one you'd like to use. If you would like your own background, click on the plus sign above and to the left of the sample backgrounds, choose an image from your computer, and add it.

You can also add a virtual background during a meeting. In your Zoom client, click on the arrow next to the video symbol on the left, select "Choose a virtual background", and you will see the same Virtual Background page.

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