SlideShare

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: