Teamslide is a service that lets presenters show online slides to audiences while talking on the phone. It’s like WebEx, but for slides instead of full, live screen sharing. There’s a one click conversion tool to make PowerPoint slides usable in TeamSlide. Mike Arrington reviewed the service when it launched in April and said that the very low cost could threaten players like WebEx, but the fact that TeamSlide required server-side software installation was a major problem. That problem is no more. Though it’s been available for the past few weeks, Teamslide is formally announcing today the availability of a hosted solution.
Other players in this space include ZohoShow and Thumbstacks (our comparison of these two). See also DimDim, an open source unhosted web conferencing service in Alpha and watch for another free web conferencing service launching next week. Teamslide focuses on one task, has a clear business model and has a more solid, stable feel to it that any of the above other options.
For roughly $10 per month, give or take a few dollars relative to the length of your subscription, Teamslide Hosted users get the following features:
- Unlimited number of presentations uploaded, file size limit of 20MB. Competitor ZohoShow limits files to 5MB.
- Up to 50MB of storage for your presentations total.
- The ability to highlight parts of a slide with a rectangular marker or arrow. ZohoShow just added a number of Flash drawing tools for their presentations.
- Presentations for up to 10 participants.
Since Teamslide Hosted is browser based (PHP and ajax), there aren’t cross platform compatibility issues like there are for many web conferencing services. In some ways, keeping it simple like Teamslide is a real advantage. You can’t share desktops or do live demos, but at least it’s easy to use. I regularly participate in web conferences that could probably have been replaced by a light weight slide show and a phone call.
This is a great example of why Web 2.0 Apps are successful. The creators of TeamSlide were persistent in the light of their difficulties. I believe that they should have given a free trial period because we like to try out web apps before we pay for them. It seems like a great product.
KISS is and will always be important when we built new apps.
(keep it simple stupid)
What about Vyew?
So you mean its like WebEx. Not like WebEx but for slides instead of full, live screen sharing.
WebEx, before it had full desktop share, had one click upload of PowerPoint slides and converting them to… yeah, same thing. It had all the pointers, annotation tools, etc. too. And all that 2-3 years ago.
Now, this is less expensive, but not innovative.
It will be interesting to compare some of these services with Macromedia’s Breeze product. Check out http://nextgenrtc.blogspot.com to get more details on the RTC space.
Hi, I am Patrick and with teamslide.com. If screen sharing, e.g. for support purposes, is what you need -> check out http://www.copilot.com.
We felt there is no point reconstructing what others like the Fog Creek guys have done extremely well and to prove again, that you can do screen sharing by launching an external application through the browser (ActiveX, Java, Flash, Exe you name it).
teamslide needs none of this and is 100% browser-based. Therefore it is geared to do only one thing really well: live web presentations, primarily for sales purposes. We believe that technology is never an end in itself but merely a supporting means to enhance the power of people communications.
> (keep it simple stupid)
Thank you. Lets see where we can take teamslide and it’s upcoming companion application(s) in the coming months. Whats for sure, is that an affiliate program and a blog is next.
> free trial period because we like to try out
> web apps before we pay for them
Yeah, we offer a no-registration online demo but you cannot upload your own slides, yet. Lame? You may be right. Sign-up for our teamslide newsletter and we’ll see what we can do