Update on Beulr, the site that lets you fake your attendance in Zoom meetings (VIDEO)
Earlier this month we told you about Beulr, the web app that can also be used with the mobile browser on your phone to fake your attendance during a Zoom conference call. Using a pre-recorded tape loop that shows you intently listening in to the meeting, users simply go to the site and type in the date and time of the Zoom meeting from Hell that they wish to avoid and leave other pertinent information that will allow Beulr to show your recorded tape loop during a virtual call.
The last round of funding valued Beulr at $12 million or six times the valuation that the Sharks thought was too rich
We told you about the company a day after founder Peter Solimine visited the Shark Tank hat in hand for some of the Shark's money and wisdom. Even though the Sharks passed, Beulr still received funding ($700,000 at a valuation of $12 million). Using Beulr will cost you nothing and thus far the platform has 126,000 users who used it to avoid 970,000+ meetings freeing up 1,095,000 hours.
Beulr works right on your mobile browser
To use the app, point your mobile or desktop browser to Beulr.com and follow the prompts. Today, Peter sent a YouTube video to us media types to tell us what has been going with Beulr over the last few weeks. He tells us that the technology has improved...a lot. Failure rates have been reduced from 10% to .01% which makes the service much more reliable.
A recent survey taken of 500 Beulr users showed that 56.8% would be disappointed if they couldn't use the service anymore. The benchmark aspired to with this question is a result of 40% or higher.
And now Beulr users can upload a 10MB video file that will continuously loop so that you don't need to film a four-hour clip to fake your way through a four-hour Zoom meeting. So with the looping, a 10-second video could be enough to convince your boss that you have attended this critically important virtual meeting at 6:30 am when the truth is that you're sound asleep.
And soon, Beulr users won't have to completely miss the meeting that they were supposed to attend as a transcript will be available to keep the user up to speed. The Beulr roadmap starts with offering transcripts of meetings on top of recordings, adding a searchable dashboard, building a transcript summarization engine, and building a video meeting summarization engine. And of course, building a "seamless integration" between Beulr and Google (and Outlook) calendars and with Microsoft teams.
Beulr can be considered a productivity app that allows you to have the time needed to get things done
This roadmap is short-term although there is a long-term road map that Solimine says is up to the users of the site. And eventually, Beulr hopes to be able to put on Zoom not just a video loop but a realistic agent-an image that carries your own persona and makes decisions and behaves the same as you would, even answering questions the same. If this scenario becomes real "the possibilities are endless," Solimine says.
Can Beulr get some traction and show those Sharks (especially the smarmy Mr. Wonderful Kevin O' Leary) that they can be wrong? It's happened before as the Sharks passed on what became Ring. The latter was sold to Amazon for over a billion dollars.
Solimine says that the point of having Beulr attend a Zoom meeting is to give people control of their own time. With Beulr, users make the ultimate decision whether to attend a meeting or do something else that they might consider a more productive use of their time. And the founder states that "it is definitely an exciting and challenging road ahead."
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