HOUSEPARTY REVIEW

Houseparty, the name itself defines its purpose, enabling us to connect with the people we care the most. The social networking app has gained huge popularity in the past few days. It is dominating the download chart on both Google Play and the Apple App Store.

The face-to-face social networking app, not only connects you with your loved ones but let’s you chat and play games with your friends and family.

The experience

Houseparty has gained a lot of popularity in the past few days. It has intuitive UI with one aim to offer its users a quick group chat (Party). At first sight, it looks interesting, when you start using the app, some of the features look similar to WhatsApp and Snapchat, but not exactly with improvements. It is a good mix of both apps.

Using Houseparty, 8 people can join in a video chat at one time. When you or your friend, connect over a Houseparty, others get a notification to join the chatroom. The trouble is your friends can start the party anytime, and if you are connected with multiple groups, then you should be ready to get plenty of party invites. Or better to be selective with your friend list.

Gaming with friends, Houseparty enables that. You can invite your friends to play games during chat sessions. However the games available in the room are not well developed, they have only a few rounds. So after a few rounds, you would get annoyed.

Houseparty lets you record the chat sessions, which is good to keep the memories, but it won’t notify you if someone is recording your conversation, so be very careful. Also, you can record and send video messages to your contacts, you will receive a notification when they read it.

Houseparty users can keep their party private from strangers without being invited.

You can create a private room by heading into Account > Settings > Private Mode.

Though Houseparty has numerous good features, but there is no monitoring by administrators. This can lead to a chance of being exposed to inappropriate content. Users can take screenshots so whatever you or other users do or posts inside the app has the potential to be seen outside of the app.

The outbreak of COVID-19 has upended economies throughout the world, but one in particular has shown extraordinary resilience: The App Economy. Global SaaS company Adjust’s annual App Trends 2020 report, which looks at long-term trends based on data from 2019, includes insights into how COVID-19 has affected the app economy by comparing Q1 2019 and Q1 2020 figures. The data shows that many app verticals are seeing increases in sessions and installs in 2020, most notably in the Business, Food & Drink, and Gaming verticals.

Microsoft has announced new features on the Bing COVID-19 Tracker to help citizens of India stay up to date with the latest on the pandemic. These include the integration of the Apollo Hospitals bot for self-assessment and a hub for telemedicine support from reputed healthcare organizations. The Tracker will also offer content in nine Indian languages to provide people across the country access to critical information related to the pandemic in preferred language. The Bing COVID-19 Tracker serves as a single, credible hub of news and official government information. It allows users to track novel coronavirus (COVID-19) infections across the globe and in India (www.bing.com/covid/local/india) at a hyperlocal level.

To aid global contact-tracing efforts and support the many essential business operations and public sector services provided by its customers, Kronos has introduced an automated reporting capability to help streamline the employee contact-tracing process, if needed, for tens of thousands of organisations worldwide. Leveraging data science to analyse labour records and time and attendance data collected by a Kronos solution, the new capability can generate a simple report, organisations can use to quickly identify and communicate to employees who may have come in contact with a co-worker who has tested positive or is presumed positive for COVID-19.

Admission24, an EdTech Start-up Company that spruces up the idea of quality education across nooks and corners today announced the launch of its Live Virtual Classes for students and educator, as schools and educational institutions, closes across the globe due to the COVID19 pandemic. The students and teachers will get the live class timetable a day before and will get a notification 10 minutes before the class starts. By the end of the session, the students will be able to ask their queries through voice messages, text and attachment. Looking at the Internet penetration in India, the brand has also provided teachers with the option to record the class which will be available on the app for 48 hours, so that no students can miss the important session because of internet bandwidth.

Venture Catalysts portfolio company peAR Technologies is offering restaurants free access to its contactless dine-in ordering feature. The Mumbai-based deep-tech startup has also waived off the listing charges for new restaurants. As social distancing becomes the new norm, the initiative by PeAR will enable customers to place orders from their favourite restaurants without making any physical contact.