The “Lost” Months
We’re a month and half into this almost worldwide stay-at-home voluntary quarantine. BTW, the original meaning of the word is 40 days. We have already surpassed that.
At Tsingyuan, we’ve been ZOOM fans for years. But the intense usage of ZOOM in the last 2 months have really made us experts. ZOOM has experienced explosive usage growth and has been put under microscopes for security and privacy bugs while big companies (especially MSFT, GOOG and FB) have scrambled to promote alternative solutions. All of these IMHO are very good news for ZOOM to go from good to great.
ZOOM’s vision has always been making meetings better. Even after we go back to normal office work, I’m certain that it will be a daily habit to stay with most of the people. For enterprise knowledge workers, it is quite common to spend more than half of the working day in meetings. It is an area ripe for disruption by technology.
Otter.AI is such a technology play to make meetings even more productive. We invested in Otter last year and have also since become big fans ourselves. Not only is Otter the designated transcription engine for ZOOM meetings, it works standalone for any meetings. It has one of the best speech recognition engines that just works; it also does a great job identifying speakers and summarizes the content of the meetings. As its AI and NLP technology improves, the potential use cases to our meetings is limitless.
We are also in an age of informational tools overload. Even our middle-schoolers use no less than half a dozen different communication tools. The context switching, the endless notification and missing important notices can be maddening. That’s why when it comes to life-saving, critical communication in hospitals, many doctors still prefer the simplicity of text messaging — if only it could be made more secure, HIPPA compliant and better.
Hypercare is such a tool loved by physicians/nurses/surgeons, built by the eponymous Toronto based startup and its disarmingly friendly cofounder Albert Tai. It’s a secure/compliant communication tool that has a very clean design. It taps into the on call schedule to know who’s in and who’s not; it has zero clutter so that doctors only get the critical message, piping through the high priority alert engine built-in to the mobile phones. And because it is secure and compliant, it can tap into EHR/EMR to send and receive sensitive medical info/charts to get a quick consultation. In Covid-19 crisis, seconds/minutes really count; and its usage has grown exponentially.
I don’t know how long the current quarantine will last. But I’m relatively certain that only technology can truly move us past the current crisis for good.
