 The Indian company Geo recently launched its video conferencing software GeoMeet to take on the likes of Zoom. Let's see how it stacks up against its more famous competitor. Let's get started. When we visit the website, we can see that the product is still in beta, but if you still want to go ahead and sign up for the service, it's very easy to do. Just give in your name and you can sign up either using your mobile or your email address. In my case, I have already created the account, so let me sign in with my email address. The home page of Geo looks uncannily like a Zoom page. If we keep Geo and Zoom windows side by side, we can see it's almost a copy paste. The only difference being that the color is slightly darker blue. There are not many settings available in Geo unlike Zoom, which has tons of settings to make your meeting really professional. Based on this, we can understand that the functionality of Geo will be limited compared to Zoom. Let me schedule a meeting and see how it goes. Again, the interface is almost same as Zoom, so if you have used Zoom, you will feel right at home here. To plan a new meeting, click on this button and enter your meeting details. Select the date and choose the time. Let's say we want it at 11 o'clock and some simple settings whether the audios and videos of host and participant should be on or off when they first join the meeting. Next, we can choose whether we want the meeting to start before the host or you can enable the waiting room which automatically disables the join before host. Finally, choose whether you want guests to join your meeting. That means if they don't have a Geo account whether they can log in to the meeting or no and finally click on the save button. So it has created a meeting for me and if I want to share this meeting details with my friends, click on it and you can use the copy invitation to copy the invite and then send it to your friends via email, WhatsApp, etc. Once you are ready to start the meeting, we can click on the start button. This will take us to the link to download the GeoMeet app. In my case, I have already installed the GeoMeet app so I can click on the open GeoMeet button. This will launch the Windows app and all I have to now do is click on the join button and we are now live in GeoMeet. Let's get some friends so we can continue the demo. So now we have some participants in the meeting. If you want to invite participants while the meeting is in progress, click on the invite button and either use the copy URL or the copy invitation option which will give you the invite for this meeting which you can then send via WhatsApp or email to whoever wants to join the meeting. As far as controls are concerned, we have the basic audio and video settings at the bottom left corner of our screen where we can choose the microphone and the speaker. For the video settings, we can set the camera which will be used for the meeting and that's about it as far as audio and video settings are concerned. To manage the participants, we have the participant button. We have a chat option that allows us to send messages during the meeting but we don't have the fine green control as we have in Zoom where we can send messages to individual participants or we can even disable chat. When you send a chat message, it goes to everybody. You can choose whether your camera view is visible or not by clicking on the self view or it will be visible. You can toggle between full screen which takes up the entire screen or like a normal window and we have a share screen option. Currently, there is only one way of sharing your entire desktop. Click the share button. This will bring up your desktop and you can then open up any file and that will be visible to the participants. When you want to stop the share, click stop share and you're back into GeoMeet. To manage participants, we have two options. One is mute all. If I click on this button, all the participants will be muted but they always have an opportunity to unmute themselves anytime during the meeting. The other option is force mute all and if I enable that, this will mute all the participants and they won't be able to unmute themselves unless the host un-mutes them and that's a quick view of GeoMeet video conferencing software. In terms of performance, the app still has a long way to go. As of now, it's a very basic video conferencing system which is fine for casual meetings but we want to hold professional meetings that you can do with Zoom with things like recording, live streaming, breakout rooms, polls, all of this are not available in GeoMeet. I like the fact that you can control the participants with the force mute option. That's a nice touch which is not available in Microsoft Teams or even Google Meet. Other than that, if you want to conduct professional meetings in GeoMeet at the same level of Zoom, it has a long way to go. I wish them all the best because at the end, competition is always good.