COLLEGE STATION, Texas — When Texas A&M University went virtual for the rest of the 2020 Spring semester, Jonathan Samuel found it difficult to manage all his Zoom meetings for classes.
“Our professor was just bombarding us with emails," said Samuel, who is part of the A&M class of 2022.
At some point, Samuel realized there was no centralized place to keep track of all his Zoom meetings. Being the Electronic Systems and Technology major he is, he created an app called Zoom Utils.
“It’s the best way to keep track of, launch and notify all of your meetings," Samuel said.
All people have to do is enter their meeting ID into the Zoom Utils browser extension and it will notify or auto-join the user to the Zoom call.
“The student's outpour is crazy, I’ve never worked on something that I’ve had this much engagement with a community of how many people I’m helping," Samuel said.
Zoom Utils hit 5,000 downloads as of Thursday.
Samuel said about two weeks, the browser extension was only at 1,000 downloads and a week before that it was at 100 downloads.
“I think it's going to really help a lot of people," Samuel said. "It’s crazy you can search Zoom Utils on Twitter or Instagram and you can see random people I’ve never talked to or random schools say, ‘Use Zoom Utils, use Zoom Utils.’"
Samuel hopes his app will continue to reach even more students, teachers or anyone that uses Zoom often. He believes that if it grows enough he might be able to establish a partnership with Zoom itself.
“Zoom was built for businesses and of course, schools have latched onto it," Samuel said. "I think Zoom Utils would be a really good partnership for Zoom to help more students."