What they offer for free or at a discount try in quarantine. Business selection

Offers vendors for organizing remote work and education.



While regulatory authorities are catching unscrupulous sellers of medical masks and manufacturers of arbidol, software developers are advertising their medicines. Remote work is now a panacea for all viruses, which even employers who denied it as a phenomenon have to agree with. Even miraculously not infected, Donald Trump recommends video conferencing.

Vendors record a huge demand for video calling and networking with employees at a distance. Especially in those regions where quarantine is introduced and mobility is limited. No one canceled business meetings.

In the fall, we published Zoom lock history in China . There is an opinion among Chinese experts that the outbreak of SARS in 2003 became a catalyst for the development of video conferencing in the country. Then the rest of the globe almost cost, here you can play around in comparison. Now Zoom CEO Eric Yuan is talking about a record increase in users amid the spread of coronavirus (there was no Zoom yet during the 2009 swine flu epidemic).


Shares of Zoom and even the long and beautifully falling shares of Slack grew in February against the backdrop of an epidemic

In February, Microsoft noted a six-fold increase in the use of Teams in China from a computer and three-fold - from mobile devices. Chinese Webex traffic has increased 22 times since the start of the epidemic, the number of users in Japan, Singapore and South Korea has increased 4-5 times, the time of meetings has doubled. The number of free registrations in these countries has increased seven times. In Russia, in February, TrueConf increased the number of activations of a free video conferencing server by 50%.

If in peacetime we are reluctant to sell our contacts to marketers, now there is an opportunity to try for free, according to a simplified scheme, that usually costs a lot of money or is distributed with tangible limitations.

Business, video calling and teleworking

1C-Bitrix lifted restrictions on the number of users in the free tariff of its Bitrix24 business management service. Previously, only 12 people could work for free.

8x8 does not offer anything special in connection with the epidemic, but it makes sense to mention their free video communication service , which now has a limit of up to 50 full participants, the rest can only watch the broadcast. If you register, then with a flick of the wrist, the created account turns into an elegant corporate tool.

Avaya will provide for freeits Spaces cloud communication service to educational and nonprofit organizations around the world until August 31, 2020. Russia, however, is not yet available.

Cisco removes the time limits for using the free version of Webex where it is available (again, no Russia). Where not, they offer free 90-day licenses to new customers.

Discord increased the limit on free broadcasts through Go Live from 10 to 50 participants for an indefinite period until the situation stabilizes.

Dr.Web offers its corporate clients 3-month free licenses to protect home computers of remote workers in order to protect the network from surprises and prevent leaks.

Google until July 1, 2020Opened free Hangouts Meet Enterprise Enhancements to all G Suite and G Suite for Education customers worldwide. You can organize video conferences for 250 participants, record them and save in Google Drive, do live broadcasts with an audience of up to 100 thousand viewers.

For six months, Lifesize gives free access to its cloud-based video conferencing service to new organizations and an unlimited number of user licenses for the same period to its customers within their current tariff.

LogMeIn providesmedical workers, educational institutions, municipalities, non-profit organizations, as well as all current customers, unlimited access to GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar for three months. The proposal was called Emergency Remote Work Kits. Starting March 19,

Mail.ru will open free access to its new Myteam corporate messenger and add free features to the cloud-based tool for collaboration with Teambox files.

Microsoft opened a 6-month trial access to the premium version of Teams around the world and removed the restrictions on the number of users in the free version (there you need to clarify the availability of certain functions for Russia).

StarLeaf givesFree access to your online video calling service and free trial for a fully functional corporate product.

TrueConf provided its flagship TrueConf Server video conferencing product to all educational institutions in Russia for free by the end of the school year. In 15 minutes, you can deploy a server and organize distance learning for 1000 online users. And from today, a similar offer is valid for all other non-educational organizations.

Zoom canceled40 minute limit for free group conferences in China and for schools on request in a number of countries. They also granted a 30-day trial license of Zoom Rooms to their DTEN partner, who supplies subscription equipment for meeting rooms - the 55-inch DTEN ON touchpad with a wide-angle 4K camera and an array of 16 microphones. Within a month, medical, educational, various municipal and public organizations can test the kit for free.

Distance learning

Until July 31, 2020, Coursera will provide universities with free access to their courses in more than 400 specialties through the Coursera for Campus platform. According to the situation, the service will consider the possibility of extending access.

Uchi.ru will provide an opportunity for teachers to conduct online lessons via video link on their educational platform from March 23, when schools finally close.

Foxford opens all courses of the basic school curriculum for free until the end of the school year.

Yandex March 30 promises to add tools for remote lessons to your Yandex.Tutorial.

The Ministry of Education and Science has published a list of free courses at various universities.

There are many more specialized resources on interests, look on the sites of your favorite services, for sure there is something they distribute.

What else interesting

If you wander around the sites, then all the participants of this marathon will gladly teach the wisdom of distance work and training employees and employers, publish all sorts of rules and life hacks, conduct webinars. Here GetVoip published a crazy infographic about how happy remote workers are. Under the pressure of the pandemic, despite the skepticism of many business leaders and owners, a massive exodus is brewing from offices around the world.

Moreover, it is brewing that some analysts, for example, Content Review, are worried about how to return all this to the pre-coronavirus era when everyone went to work.


Reduction of nitrogen dioxide concentration over China in February due to shutdown of plants, NASA / ESA

Apple and other IT giantsdismissed employees home, the Chinese scare Scientists clean air above the plants and do not want to go back to work , so we will soon be left without telephones and vacuum cleaners (to be fair, everything is slowly returning to normal, if you can call air pollution).

Facebook prohibits ads that promise to cure or prevent COVID-19, Google first prohibits, and then limits the monetization of YouTube videos with the mention of coronavirus + prevents developers from promoting such requests on the Play Store.

Heredescribes various interesting ways to make money during the epidemic: high-tech antiseptic processing, robots, warehouse automation, thermal scanning technologies, air purification, shipping containers with bars on windows, hats and panama shields with protective screens, souvenir and other strange entertaining products.


Photo Global Sources

Bundles canceled planned for spring exhibitions and conferences. Of “our” Enterprise Connect , they previously moved to August, InfoComm Southeast Asia - from the end of May to July, and, of course, InfoComm China will not be held in March in Beijing either . On TJ, you can peek into the updated chronicle of cancellations for other technological and near events.

In general, it is not yet clear how long the current pandemic will last and how it will end, but it’s certain that it will become the next driver for the development of the video communications market and remote work. Justin Uberti, creator of Google Duo, says (though the context is slightly different there, but why trifle)) that "this will be the biggest day for video conferencing in the history of the Earth."