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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