The frustrations of speed, sign-ups and limitations of video/conference calls made Mandla Ngcobo create a local free video platform to help small to medium companies and the general public remain connected and communicate securely via video and audio during the lockdown period.
Quickchat is a locally-hosted, free and secure group video platform that has been produced in Mzansi. It was launched to enable faster connectivity for big or small groups and it is free to use.
One of the biggest advantages of the video platform is that since it’s hosted on local servers, it significantly reduces latency between local conferencing sessions while improving overall quality in group conversations and there are no sign-ups required. A session can be launched within seconds while complying fully with the South African data privacy laws.
Ngcobo is the founder of Accelerit Technologies that he launched in 2013. Through his company, he was able to launch Quickchat, a standalone video platform hosted on local servers. With a background in computer science, he took it upon himself to build the platform together with his team after being continuously frustrated with other video calling apps. he finally decided to build the platform in his house.
“It's one of those projects that I've just been toying around in my spare time with. I built it and customised it, launched it locally. And we started using it internally within accelerate, which is our fiber company. Through seeing how easily we could spin up sessions, and improve quality and speed, we then decided to make it public,” said Ngcobo.
Ngcobo wanted to create a video platform that would be different and stand out from the rest with three things in mind and that was the easy access, speed, and finally the limitations number of users.
“Most of these applications will come with limitations the duration of the session is limited with quick chats, we've removed that completely. So you can have as many people in your session as you want. And also there are no limits in terms of the time. So you can do that fairly quickly, fairly easily with no limitations on Quickchat,” he said.
Ngcobo hopes people will realise that they don’t need to overly use complicated solutions that are born international and spend funds when they don’t need to, especially startup phase or SME phase when they can easily leverage a locally hosted platform.