Video Conferencing So Easy a 3-Year-Old Can Use It Zoom brings affordable, full-featured video meetings to small businesses, and created a tablet-based education platform that children can use.

To many small-business owners, effective videoconferences are still the stuff of sci-fi fantasy. Sure, the technology is in widespread use, but it rarely delivers a quality experience unless one shells out for an expensive system and a dedicated IT person to run it. "I've looked at most every video and desktop collaboration tool on the market," says Aaron Gutfreund, lead project manager at iPractical Computing, a Waterbury, Conn.-based consultancy. "I am amazed at how most of them are ineffective."

But Gutfreund needed to find a video system that worked in order to help a client build a tablet-based education platform that would integrate live video, remote student/teacher collaboration, curriculum and rich media. And, oh yeah--everything had to be easy enough for 3- to 16-year-olds to use. Not to mention the fact that the school was operating in Poland, Germany and the Czech Republic.

Gutfreund knew that a videoconferencing tool was the key component. But as he vetted options for his proposal, he kept running up against the same problem: The high-quality, expensive conferencing apps were often too complex for kids to use, and most were not aimed at tablets.