Teamslide web presentations go hosted

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 I regularly participate in web conferences that could probably have been replaced by a light weight slide show and a phone call.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, September 21st, 2006 at 1:57 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.