Heads up! Session is still in private beta. Please do not use, post or share about Session publicly.

Reminders:

• Continue to submit product feedback in the Slack channel #jm-session-feedback (thank you for the great feedback thus far!).

• Keep sending us companies in #jm-session-early-access! Use the Slack workflow in the channel to submit an organization for the Early Access program.

Okay, onto the new features! The following and more are now available in your Session account.

• Recommended: Create a new room with the "Webinar" theme or "Presentation" theme. Session defaults to the "Meeting" theme, but there are a lot of fun features in the other themes to use with meetings.

😍 Webinar "crowd" emoji bursts are here

Now you can know how engaged your webinar participants are in real-time for the entire time.

Problem it solves: In a typical webinar experience when attendees are not on camera, it's difficult to "read the room" and see how everyone is reacting to your presentation or content.

Solution it gives: Session Webinar lets attendees react with emojis that animate at the bottom of the screen for everyone to see.

Why it's really cool: Emoji bursts from the "crowd" deliver a real-time visualization of the energy in the room, whether there are handfuls or hundreds of people.

👌 Customizable name labels

Hosts now have the ability to add an extra touch of visual customization by changing the way names are displayed on the video tiles of the people on stage.

Choose from four options: Default, Pop, Edge, or Corner. Find them in the customize room menu, select Stage, and scroll to the bottom.

Note: these labels animate smoothly and take the same primary color that you can customize in the "Colors" panel.

😎 Smooth animating transitions

Session's new animations are subtle but they add a layer of polish to the product that turns the expected experience into an exceptional one.

You'll notice the app animating when:

• You first join a room.

• Any participant joins the stage. (The music fades now instead of cuts.)

• You exit the lobby.

✌️ Attendee data and export (PoC)

As Session gears up to ship its webinar offering later this year, the team released an MVP of a signup page, where hosts can collect basic data about attendees in their session. Right now, the options are name, email, and sign-in required but more on the way.

After the session, this data is exportable as a CSV in the History page of your Session account. Click "View all participants" to open this view:

Then select "Export participants list as .csv" to download.

🖤 Countless bug fixes and improvements

The engineering team has been pumping out more bug fixes and polishing tweaks than Elon tweets, but a few to mention:

The "chyron" button in chat looks like this now (for hosts):

Better, right?

That's not all for the chyron — all hosts can control the chyron collaboratively. Also, the chyron doesn't timeout anymore (you have to remove it).

A few more:

• More webinar theme controls: only hosts can take the stage at will, only hosts can start/stop recording, and only hosts can initiate breakouts (by default).

• You can see participants' names in the gallery of the presentation theme.

• Removed "this message was deleted..." message from chat.

We look forward to your feedback on not just the above features, but anything about Session at all. We LOVE your feedback.

Thank you for using Session and helping us make it better and better as we prepare for launch.

More to come soon.

Thanks for reading.