« Previous post
Next post »

March 9, 2006

Thumbstacks - Ajax/Flash Web PowerPoint

Michael Arrington

54 comments »

New York-based Thumbstacks is a bare bones but functional application that allows users to build presentations online and present them via a permanent URL. It uses both Flash and Ajax - it uses Flash if its installed, and defaults to Ajax if not. Click here to see a sample presentation. Note: Zoho is preparing a web based power point application as well - I should get a demo in the next week.

Don’t let the lack of design fool you - I’ve tested the product and the core functionality is there. Here’s what’s included now: a nice online interface to create applications (see screen shot), the ability to manipulate fonts (including sizes and colors), drag and drop functionality, image inclusion (including flickr images using the Flickr API).

There are a number of planned features that aren’t there yet: drawing tools (lines, arrows, shapes, etc.), export to powerpoint/keynote/pdf, private sharing on presentations (everything is public right now if you can find the URL), and a search feature for public presentations.

This launch is pretty timely given the Writely acquisition by Google today. Thumbstacks is the creation of Duncan Werner, who was previously an employee of PubSub.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 9th, 2006 at 1:59 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Trackbacks/Pings (Trackback URL)

  1. Digital Backcountry - Ryan Stewart on Building the Web with Flex and the Flash Platform

    March 9th, 2006 at 4:30 pm

  2. Software And Tools - Web Tools

    March 9th, 2006 at 5:13 pm

  3. X-Blog

    March 9th, 2006 at 5:56 pm

  4. LandingTheDeal

    March 9th, 2006 at 7:47 pm

  5. 國生三年才開始

    March 9th, 2006 at 9:17 pm

  6. Venture Chronicles

    March 10th, 2006 at 11:01 am

  7. 3cc

    March 12th, 2006 at 7:16 am

  8. Chrono Tron - 100% » Guess I’m back, Gmail Murders me and G Vs MS>

    March 17th, 2006 at 7:00 pm

  9. TechCrunch » Teamslide could disrupt WebEx

    April 24th, 2006 at 3:00 pm

  10. TechCrunch » Blog Archive » Zoho announces an online power-point type tool

    June 23rd, 2006 at 11:58 pm

  11. Ликбез » Zoho announces an online power-point type tool

    June 24th, 2006 at 6:14 am

  12. TechCrunch Japanese アーカイブ » ZohoオンラインでのPower-Pointタイプのツールを発表

    June 25th, 2006 at 9:23 pm

  13. Zoho,个人Web办公系统 | BiZwiKi.CN - 喧闹 PK 噪音

    June 25th, 2006 at 10:19 pm

  14. Zoho,个人Web办公系统 | BiZwiKi.CN - 喧闹 PK 噪音

    June 25th, 2006 at 10:19 pm

  15. TechCrunch en français » Zoho Show: vos Powerpoints en ligne.

    June 26th, 2006 at 12:32 pm

  16. TechCrunch » Blog Archive » Empressr, A Flash PowerPoint Competitor

    July 12th, 2006 at 11:19 pm

  17. TechCrunch Japanese アーカイブ » Empressr、FlashベースのPowerPointのライバル

    July 13th, 2006 at 6:42 am

  18. 体验Writely at 自说自划

    July 17th, 2006 at 7:37 am

  19. nonsmokingarea.com

    July 21st, 2006 at 2:37 pm

  20. モバイラー魂！

    September 28th, 2006 at 4:27 pm

  21. TechCrunch Japanese アーカイブ » SlideShareはPowerPoint + YouTube

    October 4th, 2006 at 11:12 am

  22. Techcrunch » Blog Archive » Preezo Enters Online Office Race

    October 11th, 2006 at 6:51 pm

  23. TechCrunch Japanese アーカイブ » Preezo、オンライン・オフィスレースに参入

    October 11th, 2006 at 11:33 pm

  24. TechCrunch UK » Blog Archive » Is it bye bye Microsoft or just au revoir?

    November 1st, 2006 at 12:30 pm

  25. nonsmokingarea.com » Blog Archive » office is dead? #4: Thumbstacks.com

    December 8th, 2006 at 9:55 am

  26. student loan consolidation

    March 9th, 2007 at 3:43 am

  27. senkara.com

    March 21st, 2007 at 11:31 am

  28. Blog Behind GFW » Blog Archive » google收writely于囊中

    July 31st, 2007 at 4:08 am

Comments

RSS feed for comments on this post.

  1. Duncan

    March 9th, 2006 at 2:25 pm

    Thanks for the great writeup! I couldn’t have asked for a better overview.

    I’d like to clarify one thing, though: not everything is public. Unless you specifically make a presentation public, there’s no way to access it without logging in.

    Cheers,

    Duncan

  2. web20guy

    March 9th, 2006 at 2:29 pm

    Also, can we tag etc, like numsum?

  3. Tom

    March 9th, 2006 at 2:42 pm

    Why would a company produce a product they have to create twice - once in flash and once in Ajax? I understand the user-experience theory. Flash gives users the “best” experience, while still providing AJAX for users without it, but really how many users are you gaining by providing both methods? Compare that to the amount of work it must be to build the same functionality twice, in two different technologies… it just doesn’t sound like it adds up.

  4. Ted

    March 9th, 2006 at 2:46 pm

    What do you mean by ” interface to create applications”

    Do you mean ‘presentations’ or am I missing something?

  5. Salim Ismail

    March 9th, 2006 at 2:58 pm

    Hey Mike… Duncan was much more than an employee, he’s actually a co-founder and built most of the first version of the code. PubSub absolutely wouldn’t exist without him…

    Power struggles, employees… geez man, get yer facts straight… : )

  6. Duncan

    March 9th, 2006 at 3:06 pm

    Tom: we didn’t really create anything twice. If available, flash is used to do things like scale images, which browsers tend to be pretty bad at. Our aim is to be widely compatible, so there’s no flash requirement; but if you have it, we use it to tweak the experience.

    Salim: you’re too kind, as usual, and overstating it. I’m just one of the guys in the trenches.

  7. Andrew

    March 9th, 2006 at 3:10 pm

    Wow, Thumbstacks was built for Skype, the URI schema skype published, can easily be used to create an AJAX wizard to create group chats, conference calls, File transfers etc.

    Impressive.

  8. Dan Tudor

    March 9th, 2006 at 4:49 pm

    Great post, and an invaluable tool for sales reps of all stripes. I’m going to link back to you at landingthedeal.com and recommend your post.

    Thanks for the great overview, guys.

  9. Saul Weiner

    March 9th, 2006 at 5:03 pm

    Possibly a Google Acqusiition to round-out Google Office?

  10. Sean Bohan

    March 9th, 2006 at 6:31 pm

    Saw these guys demo at NYC Tech meetup in January - outstanding demonstration and very cool.

  11. Brian Breslin

    March 9th, 2006 at 9:00 pm

    :cough: next google acquisition :cough:

  12. Michael Arrington

    March 9th, 2006 at 9:06 pm

    Brian - what was that? I couldn’t hear you. :-)

  13. Jim Grandy

    March 9th, 2006 at 10:34 pm

    Interesting that Thumstacks is to be delivered in both Flash and Ajax/DHTML. Is the Ajax version a “down-level” client without all the interaction or features?

    My team at Laszlo Systems announced this week that OpenLaszlo will target both Flash (our mainstay up until now) and DHTML. We have a demo up on our site (http://www.openlaszlo.org) that shows a highly interactive, full-featured application (including drag and drop) compiled *from the same source code* to both Flash and DHTML.

    Look at Laszlo Mail, consider how much we were able to accomplish with a small team on a tight budget, and you have a compelling argument that the cost of entry for full-featured rich internet applications is about to drop significantly.

  14. Paul Fabretti

    March 10th, 2006 at 9:16 am

    These boys are SOOOOOO going to be snapped up by Google…so far…

    Blogger - Typad/Wordpress blogging
    Writely - MS Word
    Gdrive - storage

    … all that remains is Thumbstack.com for MS Powerpoint and Zohosheet.com - MS Excel and they have pretty much got themselves a complete office suite of online-based products!

    Me going to find a server and hard-drive company to invest in. These boys are going to require LOADS of storage in the next 2 years!!

  15. Brian Breslin

    March 10th, 2006 at 10:35 am

    Mike, I got an idea for this site, a pseudo betting system for fake points. This would let us all make wagers on which companies here will be flipped, etc. (mike I have a friend who has some software to do this if you are interested).

    will this be renamed gpoint?gnote?gpresenter?
    i say this assuming it is a done deal, although i have nothing more than pure speculation.

  16. Jacknut

    March 10th, 2006 at 10:56 am

    Between writely, numsum, gmail, jot, and this… goodbye Office.

  17. DL

    March 11th, 2006 at 5:00 am

    I loved/hated Raindance (bet they’re glad they sold recently) and since about ‘94-’96 wondered what all the yap was about videoconferencing when conference call (now Skype) and a shared ppt (now Thumbstacks) made for a better meeting.

    Just wish it was blended into Basecamp. Wow 37 signals really channeled some evangelical bliss into the net, thanks Chicago.

    WATCHWORDS Loook past google

  18. adam

    March 11th, 2006 at 9:57 pm

    This webapp is google-worthy. Good job.

  19. macewan

    March 12th, 2006 at 6:06 am

    definately Google’s next acquisition - my testing is done on Ubuntu Linux Dapper with Firefox 1.5

    haven’t tested it too much yet, but if it can export to .swf, .pdf or openoffice.org impress that would rock so much more.

  20. Wai Yip Tung

    March 13th, 2006 at 11:08 am

    This is a great idea!

    People show look at CSS more closely. Turns out CSS people already have slide show in mind. There is a projector media type which means you can make presentation with only HTML+CSS. Right now it seems only Opera has an implementation with a feature called Opera Show [http://www.opera.com/support/tutorials/operashow/]. It is really a hidden gem.

  21. e-magine

    March 14th, 2006 at 10:53 am

    נחמד מאד. הגיע הזמן שתהיה כאן גם תגובה בעברית.

  22. Shameel Arafin

    May 10th, 2006 at 7:03 pm

    thumbstacks is impressive! Mike, i guess Zoho never got back you with a demo? i haven’t seen a writeup…

    Wai Yip’s comments are right on track — CSS has a great deal of potential, and specifically for slideshows. in fact, i wrote a little blog piece on doing slideshow fadeout transition effects with pure CSS/javascript (no Flash etc).

    you can check it out here: http://www.exhibitanywhere.com/blog/?cat=8

    cheers,

    shameel at exhibitanywhere.com

  23. xiaoyaoke@gmail.com

    June 19th, 2006 at 7:26 pm

    不错的！

  24. Bryan

    July 12th, 2006 at 9:25 am

    Thumbstacks is cool and so is zoho, but we think that you have to use flash to be able to generate reall cool online presentations, take a look at our solution. http://www.empressr.com

  25. Sujith

    July 13th, 2006 at 2:07 pm

    Congrats on such a good product.
    All I have to say is please keep distance from Google,Microsoft.Find ways to sustain your project.

  26. Dietrich Kappe

    October 11th, 2006 at 7:14 pm

    Right now you do have to build two interfaces if you want to do both Flash and Ajax, but if the OpenLaszlo Legals (ugh, what a name) project (http://www.openlaszlo.org/legals) ever comes to completions, you should be able to write your interface in a XUL like language and get both Ajax and Flash interfaces.

    On the topic of Ajax and Flash PoewerPoint apps, this is the one loser in the office productivity sweepstakes. How many times have you searched for connectivity in a strange conference room. No, presentations are one thing you want to have locally, now matter how nice it would be to let other people view them over the web.

« Previous post
Next post »