Zoom removes time limits over the holidays so you can spend more time with loved ones

While we’re lucky enough to see a relaxation of social distancing rules in the next few weeks, countries in Europe and even some in Asia are having to reverse earlier decisions and ask their citizens to go into a lockdown mode.

So for families kept apart by Covid-19, Zoom is removing the 40-minute limit on free Zoom accounts for all meetings globally for several upcoming special occasions .

So for families looking to get together for celebrations like Hanukkah, Christmas, New Year, or Kwanzaa , Zoom is automatically removing the limits for you over the following periods (note the US time zone):

• 10 a.m. ET Thursday, Dec 17, to 6 a.m. ET Saturday, Dec 19
• 10 a.m. ET Wednesday, Dec 23, to 6 a.m. ET Saturday, Dec 26
• 10 a.m. ET on Wednesday, Dec 30, to 6 a.m. ET on Saturday, Jan 2

As part of these celebrations, Zoom has some festive virtual backgrounds and video filters that participants can use to add to the atmosphere.

Zoom expands operations in Singapore

To support its global growth, Zoom announced plans to expand in Singapore with the establishment of a new Research and Development (R&D) Centre and a doubling of its data centre capacity in the country.

The R&D centre which is targeted to open in the third quarter of 2021, will supplement Zoom’s existing R&D centres in the US, India, and China and the company said that they hope to hire “hundreds of engineers” for the facility.

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Velchamy Sankarlingam, President of Product and Engineering for Zoom, said:

We plan to immediately hire employees, leveraging Singapore’s highly-educated engineering talent pool.

As for the data centre, while the company was unwilling to give the size of their current facility, Zoom said that they would be increasing their current co-located data centre capacity throughout 2021 until they have achieved double the capacity to ensure the quality of experience, security and reliability for users.

This article was first published in Hardware Zone.