South Africa’s version of Zoom is Room.sh – Win 3 business accounts

If you’re tired of having your meeting cut off after 40 minutes with Zoom and are looking for an affordable alternative – look no further than Room. Or Room dot SH as the URL reads. While everyone is looking for a way to communicate without actually meeting in person, it may be the perfect time to look into this home grown option.

This platform has its birthplace in online education. It is the software developers that brought us SkillUp tutors (which I have blogged about here) who invented something for their own meetings.

Co-founder Matthew Henshall emphasises how pivotally important it was for their semi-remote team to become experts at online meetings.
“A good meeting can move a company forward and over the last three years we’ve needed to get really good at meetings” Henshall explains “We initially started building software for students and teachers to conduct live, online lessons, and almost by accident, we started using this software to conduct our team meetings. That’s how room.sh was born, we’re on a mission to
Make Meetings Better”

The room.sh story continues with non-viral growth and maintaining high retention rates until March 2020 when everything changed and the world’s offices and schools became online overnight.

“In the space of a week, we had companies, schools and individuals around the world looking for a solution to keep their businesses alive, looking for a way to conduct their meetings” Co-founder, Andrew Cowley says “I’ve heard us being referred to as ‘South Africa’s Zoom’, which we’re proud of, but the reality is that we’re serving customers in just about every country on the globe. We’re really grateful to be able to grow a business during this time. More than ever we’re leading with empathy towards our customers, to serve them as best as we can during this change”

So how does the meeting experience work in practice? I had a Room.sh meeting with Matthew Henshall to test it out.

One of the first things you’ll notice about the format is that all the screens are small and to one side. So you won’t have the “zoom fatigue” of being enlarged on camera. The focus is on the document.

You can open a document and type on it.

You can also open a white board to draw on.

Within the whiteboard you can paste screenshots or pictures and draw on them too.

You can also upload a document.

You can even do code. (I’m guessing that because they are software developers they used that for themselves!)

Matthew also showed me some other capabilities from thelessonspace.com because I’m an online teacher and I’m curious how you could use this as a classroom. You can drag and drop objects using this platform.

All in all, I’m very impressed and I think this company is going to go from strength to strength as people turn online for their meetings.

So what is the cost?

There are different options and there is a free one.

Zoom is an app that you download, so you can many participants in your meeting. But you will get cut off after 40 minutes and the app is on your computer.

Room.sh limits its participants to 10 (the free version is 4) because you use it in your browser (there is no app) but the length of your meeting isn’t limited.

It’s still an excellent saving compared to paying in dollars on Zoom.

SA Mom blogs is giving away three business accounts with up to 10 participants for one year. If you’d like to win the subscription, comment below.

Terms and Conditions:

1. This competition will run for a week. The winner will be announced on the Facebook page, and emailed.
2. This competition is open to South African residents only.
3. The prize is not transferable.
4. If you have won on SA Mom Blogs in the past 3 months you will not be eligible to win this competition.
5. If you win the same prize on another site then you forfeit this one.

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