The first thing you'll probably notice about the new web-based presentation creator, 280Slides, is that it looks an awful lot like Apple's Keynote. As great as Keynote is, 280Slides has a few advantages: it's free and it's web-based. It's got all the features you would expect from good presentation software: you can present in full-screen mode straight from the web, download your slides, or share your presentation to SlideShare. Vimeo and Youtube integration let you add video to the mix, too.
We can already see 280slides saving numerous butts at conferences. Equipment failure? No big deal, just borrow a computer (any platform will do!) and pull your stuff from the web. Presentations were a good candidate for the next desktop function to hop aboard the "cloud computing" bandwagon and go web-based, and the folks at 280 North have pulled it off with style and functionality. Frankly, we're a little relieved that we'll never again have to ask, "Hey, does this machine have PowerPoint?"
Sharing your portfolio or a gallery can be done a number of ways, from building an HTML or Flash version to hosting a presentation gallery online at Google Docs. ViewBook makes it easy to create professional looking web presentations.
ViewBook's presentation toolprovides a photo album and slideshow at a custom domain. Users can create galleries and portfolios with images, titles, descriptions and custom background colors. Works can be then embedded on a website and viewed at full screen. ViewBook offers a public page with a listing of the presentations you have available, with a bio or profile. As for uploading imagery to use, there are a few different options, from a batch upload tool to a drag and drop feature with a minimal toolset for editing.
If you have a portfolio or presentation that is constantly changing, or want an easy way to make and share one and you aren't too comfortable fiddling with HTML or Flash files, this could be the tool to check out. The embedding feature makes it easy to embed display your works on the comfort of your personal website in a clean and professional manner. The free beta account does have some limitations: 250 images and five portfolios. Check out a sample of what you can do.
Google's long-rumored and eagerly anticipated PowerPoint clone has finally shipped. Although we've only had a chance to have a first look, here are some impressions:
Google has done a very good job of making this new Presentation application (based on code from Zenter) fit in with Docs and Spreadsheets. It looks right at home, and the functionality is about what you would expect from another Google App. File versioning and collaboration functions work exactly like they do for Docs and Spreadsheets, which is to say just fine.
A leading worldwide IT consultancy and outsourcing business with control of over 1 million corporate desktops has added Google Apps to its technology arsenal.
CapGemini[PDF] will start to target the desktops of over a million corporate workers with Google's spread of online office applications that consist of Email, Calendar, Docs and Spreadsheets. Slashing IT costs, and saving corporations countless dollars. CapGemini is currently a Microsoft Vista and Lotus Notes partner, but given the search giant's efforts with their "accessible anywhere" applications and storage, CapGemini's clients will have yet another option for the most appropriate technology that fits into their business goals. With Google's applications, users can allow for complete collaboration watching changes in real time.
Google is rumored to be launching a Presentation application into its suite of applications shorty, rounding out its professional offerings. Something for Microsoft to watch out for. CapGemini will collect a £25 license fee charged by Google for the use of its applications.
Google announced at the end of April that they had acquired a Swedish company called Marratech. We all expected that they would eventually add that into the Google Pack, Google Apps or at least into Google Talk.
Marratech is a downloadable application for PC's and Mac's that apparently Google has no plans to develop. A tipster wrote into Andy Beal and and forwarded a link to the Marratech forums, where ex Marratech employee, now with Google, Rikard Stenberg stated that Google has the rights to the application but there will be no further developments of the old Marratech products.
That is all the information that came through. And it does seem a little disturbing. Hopefully Google does have a nice plan for this application, but if it doesn't and decides to let developments slide, things could end up like Dodgeball.
Developers are jumping on the new Facebook API, creating sometimes 'useless' add-ons for the social network. Zoho has stepped in and added the ability to GTD while peddling through Facebook.
Zoho tries its best to stay on top of wherever their users might be, they were the first online office productivity toolset to announce they had an iPhone compatible application ready to go for Apple's newest users, and now users of Facebook are able to see the light. Facebook can get a little distracting at times, whether it's at school or work, so why not build in the ability to create and work on documents directly through the application that you spend the most time on throughout the day. 30% of Zoho's users are students so it's a perfect fit, chat with friends and get work done at the same time.
Zoho's new integration to create documents, spreadsheets and presentations directly from Facebook accounts is a simple add on available here. Creating a new document or viewing one opens up another browser tab, or window, allowing you to do your Facebook thing while working in another tab.
Google has added yet another document preview button to Gmail. You could already preview Word documents and spreadsheets sent as file attachments using Google Docs & Spreadsheets. Now if you receive an email with an attached PowerPoint presentation, you can view the slideshow in your web browser with no need to download.
The PowerPoint viewer is pretty simple. When you click on "View as a slideshow" a new browser tab opens up with the first slide. You can click back and forth, but you can't organize the slides or edit them in any way.
Google does plan to add presentations to its online office suite this summer. In April the company purchased Tonic Systems, a company with experience in document conversion and presentation applications. The email preview option is probably just a sneak peak of things to come.
It's still pretty useful. Most computer users can go their whole lives without ever needing to create a slideshow presentation. But it's pretty handy to have an application that can read them without shelling out the big bucks on Office. Of course, there's always Open Office, but if all you need is a presentation viewer, installing Open Office is sort of like swatting at a fly with a shotgun.
Nothing is better than easy access and the ability to find things quickly online. Zoho stepped up this weekend and upgraded your access to information through Show, one of their popular web based applications.
The Zoho team added tag clouds, tag search, and the listing of public presentations among others. Zoho Show was once only viewable through an embeddable presentation, not it can be viewed on its own page with places to comment on each slide. Show still has the embeddable code available and adds stats to check out how many times the presentation was viewed.
Could Google be developing a PowerPoint and Keynote killer? Looks like it might be in testing mode from the code that both the Google Operating System blog, and TechCrunch have reported on. It's a perfect choice for Google to add to its "non-office" suite of products. The code name appears to be Presently, and could have possibly been in the works by Writely before it was purchased by Google. We can only guess what it would look like today. Simple navigation, basic structures, the ability to store, share, and collaborate presentations online with friends. Maybe one day Google will come out and just say they are developing a Microsoft Office killer.
The project codenamed "Orcas" is now available for download. The developer tools release is Microsoft's September customer technology preview (CTP) for the .net framework 3.0. You must have the .net framework and September CTP software development kit (SDK), not to mention a non-express version of Visual Studio 2005 already installed to run the tools in this release. At under 4MB (not quite a whale), the development tools include XAML intellisense support, project templates for Windows Presentation Foundation and Windows Communcation Foundation. The dev tools also features the Visual Designer (codename: Cider) for Windows Presentation Foundation, but is sadly not supported by the express editions of Visual Studio 2005. If you understood anything I just said, and it interests you you will be happy to know that it is now ready to be downloaded and I suppose anything else you want to do to it.
Apparently there was a little chatter around the blogosphere lately about how Google supports click fraud. Well, then business product manager for trust and security over at Google cleared some things up on Google's corporate blog.
Shurman Ghosemajumder, the business product manager for trust and security at Google spoke up about the issue at hand, and stated that a blogger quoted Eric Schmidt a little twistedly when he recently spoke about the click fraud issue.
When asked about click fraud at a Stanford economics event in March, Schmidt said there has been some talk about click fraud being a potential threat to the entire advertising business model, and he was wondering what people thoughts were, and if there was an economic solution, instead of a technical one. Eric was answering hypothetically, and was not describing Google's approach to click fraud. Eric went on to discuss the economic issues that can slow down fraud, dropping the price that the advertiser is willing to pay for potentially bad clicks. Thus, self correcting the actual real ad price.
The whole time during the presentation, he kept stating that Google does not take this approach.
While I'm not nearly convinced by the claim that Empressr is "the first web-based application that lets you create, share and store presentations online" (did it come before Thumbstacks?), it does indeed let you do that, and does it pretty well. It's a Flash-based app, which makes it smooth and responsive, and has most of the features you need to make basic presentations. PowerPoint users will find Empressr familiar when navigating slides, editing text, and so on. You can upload images and, more impressively (Empressvly?), audio and video that will be streamed in your slideshow, though currently only FLV video is supported. You can share your presentations over the web or print them out, but currently there's no way to export them (not even to PDF), though the Empressr FAQ says export is in the works. Right now Empressr is in open alpha testing, and you can go play with it without even registering (though you must register if you want to save and share your presentations), but the FAQ hints that it may not be free in the future.
This is a very simple application for
making very simple presentations. Seriously, it's a simple tool. Don't go making anything crazy with it. Powerbullet Presenter just makes simple SWF files with bulleted presentations in
it. You can make gradients, insert text, and some pics, but that's about it. The great part is, it's free, and will
pretty much do a lot of the heavy lifting for you. The bad part is, it's not much to look at. Personally I'd rather
just export the bad HTML from PowerPoint. But if you're really needing a SWF, maybe this will do it. One odd item is
that you can dig around in the Powerbullet file
format and find that it uses twips for X and Y parameters.
After finally kicking the Visual Basic habit, seeing twips on a computer monitor gives me hives. Perhaps I should have
saved this for a Freaky Friday Find... Not that it isn't useful (for some), just a little odd.
Who needs GUIs to create
presentations? Not you, if you have Pylize. At least, that's
the premise. Pylize is an app written in Python that will take a bit of HTML written by you and turn it into a
PowerPoint-style presentation that can be viewed in any web browser. You define your presentation's slides and content
in an HTML file, add a bit of style using its built-in CSS classes (or your own), then run Pylize and you'll get back a
full-fledged standalone presentation. Interesting
project and great for those who really want to get down into the guts of their presentations.
Flash is wonderful, Flash is good, not everyone uses it, but everyone should. And if you can't afford Flash I found a little app that lets you create presentations that turn into those nifty little SWF's. It's called Wink, by the good folks over at DebugMode. I've seen it used on several sites to demonstrate software. Not only does it grab screenshots (complete with cursor movement), you can also add simple buttons, textboxes, and titles. Just the thing for simple training videos. Did I mention it's Windows and Linux compatible?
This is a very simple application for
making very simple presentations. Seriously, it's a simple tool. Don't go making anything crazy with it. 
Flash is wonderful, Flash is good, not everyone uses it, but everyone should. And if you can't afford Flash I found a little app that lets you create presentations that turn into those nifty little SWF's. It's called 
