Skyroom, a domestic platform for holding webinars, online training courses, web conferencing sessions and live webcasts, has been used by 27 million people since the fiscal 2017-18.
The announcement was made in a press conference on Jan. 10 by Majid Khahani, co-founder and CEO of Skyroom, which was also attended by Mohsen Khahani, co-founder and technical director of the platform.
Majid Khahani narrated the inception of Skyroom, detailing how and under what circumstances they created this platform and the reason behind its success, Ecomotive reported.
“During Feb. 20-March 19, 2020, with the outbreak of Covid-19, Skyroom was widely welcomed by the general public, schools, universities, private companies and various organizations. This led to a sudden increase in the platform’s users and the growth in usage gave rise to many challenges,” he said.
Records Set by Skyroom
Since the second half of the fiscal 2020-21 (starting Sept. 23, 2020), the platform mostly focused on completing the technical infrastructure and attracting employees.
The platform hosted more than 16 million events that amounted to some 400 million man-hours.
One of the features of Skyroom is the presence of simultaneous users. The record set in this platform is 540,000 simultaneous users during the period.
In other words, more than 500,000 people were in attendance and 33,000 events got underway online simultaneously in Skyroom.
One of the achievements of this platform pertained to hosting international scientific events with the participation of 45 countries. More than 3,000 users also attended a single event to set another record.
Majid Khahani also explained that the platform has hosted more than 10,000 universities and schools during the pandemic.
“We are glad that despite the presence of free foreign services, Iranian users decided to pay and use the domestic platform,” he said.
“We have a lot of plans for developing the platform. We want to host economic and social events in the near future that are currently taking place on other domestic and foreign platforms.”
Mohsen Khahani explained the technical challenges related to this domestic platform as follows: “Since the fiscal 2017-18, we had to develop a web-based version of the platform, which was a turning point in the development of Skyroom. Web-based development has enabled us to develop our features faster, which can be run on most browsers. After the Covid-19 pandemic, the number of users experienced a noticeable growth and we faced many challenges regarding our infrastructures.”
Covid-19 Offers Opportunity for Startups
The coronavirus outbreak presented an ideal opportunity for most startups.
With the expansion of internet access and curbs on social interactions triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic, people's preference for online shopping is growing worldwide, including Iran.
E-Commerce Development Center of Iran has released the results of a seven-month (March 21-Oct. 22) nationwide survey on the status of online businesses, IRNA reported.
Faranak Abolmasoum, the head of E-Commerce Monitoring Office at the center, said 51.9% of online businesses are retailers and wholesalers, 20.5% are service providers and 27.6% are active in both fields.
According to the survey, 80.6% of online businesses take orders through social networks, in addition to their websites, 34.1% use mobile messaging apps and 26.8% have developed brand-specific mobile and web applications.
Instagram, the social networking service that accounted for the lion's share of Iran's e-commerce, was used by more than 86.2% of online shops. WhatsApp Messenger was the second most popular media tool for businesses with online activities (50.3%).
According to Abolmasoum, 75% of online shops used Iran Post Company's delivery services, 31.4% used intercity transit services, 30.4% used their own delivery channels and 25.5% used private postal services for delivering parcels to the customers.
The survey showed men placed 62.9% of online orders while women accounted for the remaining 37.1%.
E-Commerce Development Center of Iran also found that 93.6% of the surveyed businesses used private investments for development.
Officials attribute these developments to the country's expanding ICT infrastructure and believe Iran's e-commerce has the potential to grow further if the necessary telecommunication services operate at a higher capacity.
NIN as a Base
The country’s ICT outlet is called National Information Network launched in August 2016 as a tool for offering electronic and smart services as well as a powerful platform for the local internet.
Iran's Minister of Information and Communications Technologies Isa Zarepour has declared that the integrated network project will be completed in four years.
“After around two decades of foot-dragging, it is finally time to give the initiative one last push,” he added.
NIN was first proposed in 2005 by the ICT Ministry as an alternative and independent network with content compatible with Islamic values to facilitate Iranian users’ access to indigenous content. After a long-running saga, the project was launched in August 2016.
Zarepour stated that to address the obstacles of NIN expansion, public education about the network's possibilities, the creation of a rich content generation chain and the convergence of many sectors to use NIN in their activities would be extremely beneficial.
