Videoconferencing app Zoom is trying to keep its lockdown success rolling with two big new features: a marketplace called OnZoom that will allow users to schedule and monetize virtual events, and new ways for business apps like Asana and Box to integrate their wares directly into your next Zoom call.

First, OnZoom. This is an “event discovery and monetization” platform that will make it easier to find virtual events in a whole range of categories, says Zoom — from cooking classes to lectures to stand-up and more. Basically, any event or activity you might already have been doing through Zoom (or other videoconferencing software) will be available, with built-in tools for selling tickets, scheduling, and promotion.

Organizers will need a paid Zoom account to host events, but anyone can watch them. The number of attendees, though, will be limited by the organizer’s paid account, up to a maximum of 1,000 attendees. Payments will be processed through PayPal or by credit card, and tickets to events can be purchased as gifts. OnZoom is currently available in the US as a beta and will expand globally sometime in 2021.

Less exciting but more practical is Zoom’s integration of third-party apps directly into calls. That means you’ll be able to do things like access tasks in Asana or documents stored in Dropbox without switching to another window. In an act of insufferable corporate branding, Zoom has decided to call these third-party integrations “Zapps,” but we’ll try to ignore that.

Zoom says more than 35 companies are building such apps, including Asana, Atlassian, Box, Cameo, Chorus, Coda, Coursera, Docket, Dot Collector, Dropbox, Gong, Hubspot, Kahoot, Kaltura, LoomieLive, LucidSpark, Miro, Mural, PagerDuty, Pitch, Remix Labs, Rev, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Slack, Slido, Superhuman, SurveyMonkey, Thrive Global, Unsplash, Woven, Wrike, WW, and Zendesk. It’s not clear when each of these will be available, though.

“Zapps help surface all the applications you need to be productive and enable the free flow of information between teams before, during, and after the meeting,” the company said in a press release. “Think of Zapps as an app store right where you need it most — in a Zoom meeting, chat, webinar, phone call, and even your contacts directory.”

One notable third-party integration here, among the usual corporate productivity suspects, is Kahoot — an educational platform that’s popular in schools (and out of them) for creating quizzes. Integrating Kahoot directly into Zoom could make for a smoother quiz experience. So if you’re heading into lockdown this winter, at least you can use Kahoot’s Zoom Zapp to organize a quick virtual quiz while the pandemic rages. What a world we live in.

Image: Zoom

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