presents

Business microblog tool Present.ly is smarter than Yammer

NEW YORK--At the Web 2.0 Expo, I got a quick demo of Present.ly, which is another Twitter-alike for business. On the surface it is similar to Yammer, winner of the TechCrunch50 best of show award. Present.ly, like Yammer, lets you quickly set up a private microblog where you and your co-workers can enter short update messages.

I find Yammer's interface a bit simpler, but Present.ly has a few important features that will make it a better bet for some companies.

It supports file attachments. That's a win in the workplace. Present.ly also … Read more

Red Hat: Solve enterprise waste through open source

Red Hat's Jim Whitehurst pounded the pulpit this week about the need to expand open source into the largest software developer market on the planet: The enterprise. Oracle, Microsoft, et al. write lots of software, but their contributions to the software world are infinitesimal compared with the development done at real software shops like Morgan Stanley, Pfizer, etc.

Whitehurst said:

The vast majority of software written today is written in enterprise and not for resale. And the vast majority of that is never actually used. The waste in IT software development is extraordinary....Ultimately, for open source to provide value to all of our customers worldwide, we need to get our customers not only as users of open source products but truly engaged in open source and taking part in the development community.

Exactly. Jim knows what he's talking about: He comes from the enterprise world, having served as COO of Delta Airlines for several years. If Red Hat can become the hub to that development world, it will dominate the market...in a positive way.

All of which made this email I received from the head of public relations at a large enterprise so intriguing:… Read more

Prezenter makes presentations personal

Presentations are easy when you have a large screen and projector setup, but what if you're a traveling salesperson? Should you sit next to your client with your laptop, and potentially make him feel uneasy? Or turn the screen away and hope you have memorized the slides perfectly?

The Prezenter PSR claims to do away with such worries. Unlike conventional laptops or tablet PCs, the PSR has two touch-screen displays. The larger 14.1-inch screen faces your audience while you control the presentation from the smaller 7-inch touch screen. Both displays can be set on "clone mode"… Read more

Make flawless screencasts on your Mac

Have you ever made a screencast? A screencast is when you capture and record all the action that takes place on your desktop so you can view it as a movie. Many people use screencasts for presentations and instructional videos for software, though there are many other uses. Sometimes you probably wish you could make a screen recording for less computer-savvy friends and family so you wouldn't have to have those exhaustive phone calls: "No grandpa, I said Save the file...no...SAVE it."

I found a program for Mac today that makes creating screencasts easy. It'… Read more

More Google Docs available offline: Spreadsheets, presentations

Google has broadened the number of online applications that people can use offline, adding spreadsheets and presentations to the mix.

However, unlike with word-processing documents, spreadsheets and presentations can only be viewed, not edited, according to a post by marketing manager Andrew Chang on the Google Docs blog Friday. That's still useful, though. Chang gives the example of giving a slide presentation without having to worry about network access.

The offline access uses the Google Gears technology the search engine giant introduced in 2007 as an open-source project.

Google is trying to take on Microsoft with its online software, … Read more

Hands-on with SlideRocket, a PowerPoint killer in the making

I spent some of this weekend using SlideRocket, a new service that's aiming to replace your presentation software with its flashy (actually Flexy) Web-based tools. Is it a real PowerPoint or Apple Keynote killer in its current iteration? Not yet, but I think it's off to a great start.

The service has all the flash and fervor of some other Adobe Flex-based apps we've seen like BuzzWord, Scrapblog, and Picnik. The transitions and stock slide templates are enough to distract you from how potentially boring your presenter is and thought has been put into making things look good from the get-go, no matter your design prowess. In many ways, the final results are indistinguishable from Apple's well-known presentation software Keynote, which has been a part of the company's iWork suite for Macs for the last three years.

Let's start by talking about what makes SlideRocket different from presentation software you might be used to. For one thing it's very Web-friendly. As I mentioned last week in our coverage of the company's demo at the Under the Radar conference (coverage), it's been designed to integrate media and information services you're already using. Big names on the list include Yahoo maps, Flickr, and Google Docs; I foresee others being added in the future--as long as the service has a data API.

Linking up to each of these services is handled with some grace, although I found performance to take a hit when adding several Flickr photos to a single slide since the service will check in with Flickr each time you load up the slide. It can be set to do the same thing for Google Documents, but this is actually a good thing in case the source data changes. I've been told local copies of the files will be able to be stored on SlideRocket's servers in the future to speed things up.

Speaking of local storage, SlideRocket has the beginnings of a very smart way to handle shared media. Similar to Keynote, all your files are put together in one place and can be sorted via keywords simply by name. The more time you spend categorizing it, the faster you'll be able to parse it, but the built-in search is instantaneous--which is very helpful. Users get up to 3GB of storage to share photos, music, and videos. These asset libraries are shared in the business editions.

So, how does it stack up against other Web-based presentation tools?… Read more

SlideRocket puts the 'wow' into online presentations

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 … Read more

Save $400 on Microsoft Office: Use Lotus Symphony instead

Microsoft Office is not just overpriced--for most users, it's overkill. That's why I've been increasingly recommending IBM Lotus Symphony, a well-rounded office suite that just so happens to be free. It's built on open-source favorite OpenOffice, but sports a sleeker, friendlier interface.

Symphony (available for Windows and Linux) offers word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations. It supports Office 2003 file formats as well as OpenDocument and others. And it relies on an ingenious tabbed interface that keeps all your documents under the same roof--no switching between apps like with most other suites. I particularly like the sidebars, … Read more

Let viewers set the pace of your PowerPoint presentations

It's your presentation, and you have every right to control its pace by deciding when to move to the next slide. But there are times when you want to let the presentation run itself, or you may want to allow the person viewing it to decide when to move to the next slide (or maybe even a little of both). You can convert any PowerPoint presentation into a self-running slide show, or add controls that let the viewer go to the next slide, with just a few simple settings.

Once you've finished putting your presentation's slides in … Read more