SlideRocket vs SlideShare

Virtualization and Cloud market giant VMWare has acquired, perhaps, the best online presentation service SlideRocket. SlideRocket is known for being one of the first presentation tools that neglected the traditional format of business presentations, imposed by Microsoft PowerPoint and turned presentations into the WOW show. SlideRocket lets you create really impressive presentations using a variety of 3D effects and multimedia contents. In addition, SlideRocket provides collaboration tools, the large library with presentation themes and elements, and even the marketplace where you can find help in creating the presentation. Presentation created in SlideRocket can be showed on a laptop or tablet, published on the Web or demonstrate over the Internet using a conference call.

The leading SaaS and Enterprise 2.0 vendors decided to make their business a little more "WOW". In the new show-channell called "I Choose the Cloud" the founders and executives of cloud companies appeal to join the cloud revolution. Because cloud applications mean not only simplicity, usability, speed and cost efficiency. They also mean the new exciting ways of running business. Because these applications are create not by serious gloomy IT-people in ties, but by such cool guys, who enjoy what they do. Guest stars: Aaron Levie (Box.net), Chuck Dietrich (SlideRocket), David Weekly (PBworks), Eugene Lee (Socialtext), Wendy Lea (Get Satisfaction), Clint Oram (SugarCRM), Tien Tzuo (Zuora), Matt Brezina (Xobni)

LinkedIn, the professional social network #1, is doing fine. During two last quarters LinkedIn manages to double its incomes - already up to $188 million/quarter. And the company is already valued at $10 billion. That's why LinkedIn can afford to buy the new users in bulk - for example, by purchasing online service SlideShare for $119 million. SlideShare works like Youtube - only not for video - but for presentations. And its target audience - are mostly business users (like in LinkedIn). You can upload to SlideShare your PowerPoint presentation and publish it anywhere in the embeddable web-viewer (like yuotube video). Besides SlideShare - is itself an additional marketing channel with a large audience, so by publishing a presentation on it, you can get new customers and partners. Will LinkedIn somehow integrate SlideShare into its network - is not clear yet, but at least they have already embedded LinkedIn presentation on the SlideShare homepage.

It seems that the days of Flash as a platform for the Rich web interfaces are really coming to an end. Online presentation services, for which the Rich-interface is most important, are ditching Flash in favour of HTML5. Last year, the market leader, SlideRocket released the HTML5-viewer and today the most popular presentation sharing service SlideShare has done the same. Moreover, SlideShare not just added the HTML5-view option but completely removed the Flash-option. Developers say the new HTML5-viewer is 30% faster and displays presentation on tablets (like iPad) and smartphones. In addition, you can now select and copy text from a presentation with the help of the mouse.

The online office service ThinkFree has launched a new Flash-based document viewer called Uni Paper. It can be embedded to any web page and displays most common office formats: PDFs, Word, Excel and PowerPoint. The max file size is 5MB. The readers can view and search in a document without the need to download it to desktop. And when you edit this published document in your online ThinkFree account, the changes are reflected in real-time back anywhere the Uni Paper has been embedded or shared. Besides the opportunity of publishing documents on your site, you can add it to ThinkFree public catalog, that can attract additional readers. But ThinkFree's viewer is not so advanced as one in Scribd, Docstoc, Slideshare. For example, it's missing the option to view all the pages of a document at once, and the the directory of publicly shared documents contains very little categorization, or genre-based exploration.

Here's a simple formula for a successful startup: find a popular service (e.g. YouTube), remember what you can do best of all (i.e. presentations), put "for" between these two words and probably you'll get an interesting idea. That's what the creators of SlideShare did. And they have already raized $3 million on their idea. So, what is YouTube killer feature? A first glance it's - huge video catalog. But that's only at first glance. In fact, Youtube became so popular, because it allows you to: