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November 14, 2008

Sliderocket – Make Great Presentations

ss-sliderocket

There are a fair number of presentation websites online, but none better than the site Sliderocket, which pretty much sets the standard for web-based presentation tools. This is a pretty dramatic statement, given that Sliderocket is a fairly new start-up and faces competition from monoliths like Google, but Sliderocket is sleek and highly functional: a good combination of both form and function.

Built on Adobe’s Flex platform, Sliderocket has the same functionality as popular desktop programs like PowerPoint and Keynote. Because it is web-based, it allows users to gauge the analytics of any presentation—the number of hits a presentation is getting and how other users are interacting with the presentation, much like how they’d interact with a website. This is instrumental in helping people improve a presentation in the future.

Also, because it is web-based, it allows for more seamless collaboration between different parties—whether they’re inter-office or across the world. Additionally, users can upload data from Google spreadsheets, Flickr photos, or other web-based applications.

Practical Uses:

  • You’re going on a business trip without your computer and you want to be able to access your presentation from anywhere you go
  • You need to collaborate with co-workers in disparate places or who might not own expensive desktop software
  • You need to share a presentation in a number of different platforms, including embedding the presentation on a web page
  • You’re a manager who wants to see a project’s effectiveness by monitoring the presentation’s views

Insider Tips:

  • Import a PowerPoint presentation. The two platforms aren’t mutually exclusive. This is what makes Sliderocket so powerful if you need to take a presentation on the road
  • Use the built-in images and video. Great thing about Sliderocket is that it’s fully functional right out of the box (so to speak)
  • Tag presentations just as you would tag a website or photo, so you can organize your presentations, or presentation components
  • Track revisions on presentations so you can see how revisions are working or revert to a previous version if the revision is unsuccessful
  • Password protect or limit invitees to presentations if need be

What we liked:

  • The ability to track the presentation’s performance. Revolutionary for presentation programs, but really pretty obvious in this day and age of checking a website’s performance
  • It’s relatively cheap. Not free, but a low monthly fee for what you get
  • Sleek and user-friendly. It’s just fun to use, without sacrificing any professionalism. It can be used by both novices and experienced presenters
  • Great marketplace for buying additional backgrounds, video, animation, and other things to add to a presentation

What we didn’t like:

  • It’s new. It came out of beta in the fall of 2008 so there are still some glitches: tags not saving and a lag in uploading.
  • Preservation of PowerPoint presentations leaves a lot to be desired: formatting and linking is off

Alternatives:

Company Info:

  • Launched: September 2008
  • Privately Held
  • Headquarters: San Francisco, CA
  • Founded by: Mitch Grasso and Mike Lingle
  • Web site: http://www.sliderocket.com

Costs:

  • $12/month personal user – $50/month business

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