SlideShare vs Prezi

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:

We continue to find new interesting ways of how iPad (and other tablets) can be used in the Enterprise. We have already mentioned that for executives and sales persons who often go to business meetings iPad can serve as a cool accessory to impress the client. But frankly speaking, nobody will demonstrate presentations on the iPad at these business meetings. Projector or laptop with bigger screen are much more appropriate for this case. But at different exhibitions and conferences, where you can meet many partners and customers, iPad - is an ideal solution to show presentation on the go. Besides, now the spectacular presentation tool has appeared - Prezi for iPad. We have already reviewed Prezi - it's one of the most original and exciting services for online presentations. And on the iPad it looks impressive. It's interesting that presentations are not saved on the tablet, but broadcasted from the Internet. Besides this first version doesn't support video, animation and PDF files. It also doesn't allow to edit presentations - only to demonstrate.

When it comes to presentations, the minimalist style, that is usually more appropriate to business applications - not works so fine. Because you want your audience (potential customers) to say "WOW!". That's why besides the classic presentation apps, such as PowerPoint or Google Presentations, there is number of quite succesful alternative services such as SlideRocket with its incredible flash effects or Second Life with its virtual 3D auditories. The Hungarian start-up Prezi also belongs to this group. It has already gathered a lot of excited reviews, awards and investments. It's coolest feature is that the entire presentation is placed on one large virtual board, and its demonstration - is navigation on this board with dynamic scaling.