Flashy presentation tool SlideRocket is easily one of the best-looking services I've seen.
CEO Mitch Grasso's presentation at this afternoon's Under the Radar session about the virtual worker (using SlideRocket to present) got several oohs and ahhs. In many ways it takes a cue from Apple's Keynote product with great use of fonts, reflections, transparencies, and transitions to put together presentations that use hardware acceleration and cutting-edge design templates to impress clients, co-workers, and potentially your boss.
The app uses Adobe's Flex technology and has an offline client meaning users can create and edit presentations while away from a connection. There are perks to being online however, as you can grab live-updating data from Google Docs and Spreadsheets, photos from Flickr, and slides from the media pool shared by your collaborators. When it's actually time to view presentations, you can run them right through the app or share them with others as a Flash embed.
SlideRocket lets you keep slides from old presentations in a media pool in case you want to reuse them.
(Credit: SlideRocket)Many were hoping Google would offer something as pretty and functional as this when its presentations service launched late last year--but the company underdelivered. SlideRocket has much more ambitious plans with an integrated theme and font marketplace that would end up as a community of people sharing their work.
While the service is in private beta for now, paid plans for both individuals and small businesses are already in the works. The app will run off a subscription at $12 a month for a single user, all the way up to $50 a month for business clients looking to hook up their entire team with an on-the-go replacement for Microsoft's PowerPoint.
We'll be getting a hands-on soon and possibly invites. For more information, check out the live demo here.
SlideShare, which lets you share PowerPoint presentations with the world, today added the capability to match audio tracks to slide shows. This is a cool feature that podcasters could exploit to show and tell a story at the same time. Professors, marketers, and other storytellers might give this free tool a whirl to provide remote access to their work instead of using software such as Adobe Captivate or TechSmith Camtasia. You could even use Slideshare to narrate a PowerPoint-based photo gallery of your vacation. Come to think of it, why don't more photo-sharing sites follow Zooomr's lead (more here) by letting you add narration to pictures?
SlideShare makes embedding a file from PowerPoint or Keynote into any blog or Web page cut-and-paste painless. The site attracted more than 3 million unique visits last month, with slides in more than 11 languages. Who knew cruising through PowerPoint files could be fun? You can find slide shows on nearly any subject; popular topic tags include "Web 2.0" and "humor." The site's social networking lets you interact alone or in groups, tagging and commenting on each others' presentations. SlideShare will add privacy options later.
To use the new feature, just upload a PowerPoint to Slideshare, then upload an MP3 file to the Internet Archive or elsewhere. Next, Slideshare's Create Slidecast feature will sync the sound with the slides. You can match chunks of a speech or song to precise slides, or create a freeflowing soundtrack instead.
If you're trying to mimic some experimental Andy Warhol film, you could create a dizzying effect by embedding a bunch of slideshows onto one Web page and then playing them all at once. More practical, however, are SlideShare's Facebook app and its API for developers. Check out this open-source slidecasting sample below (more examples here). If the audio doesn't play, you might be an early bird, so try again a bit later this morning:
Gmail users who get Microsoft PowerPoint attachments in their in-boxes can now view them without having PowerPoint installed on their machines. Google appears to have flipped the switch to allow this feature as of last night. We originally reported on this last month, although at that time it appeared that only a handful of accounts had access. This option now shows up on all accounts.
Also, somewhat related: today is the unofficial "Day without Google," a challenge that asks people to try doing their searches on alternate search engines outside of the "Big 5" which includes Google, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, and Ask.
Users can now view PowerPoint files in Gmail without having PowerPoint installed on their machines.
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