SlideAware to Add New Features to Presentation Management Platform

These new features finally add some uniqueness to this tool. SlideAware is quickly becoming the number one collaborative presentation tool.

http://www.ebizmba.com

Duncan. You are on fire. Post after Post after Post. That’s the way to blog.

Man, you guys really like Office Space.

E Fall
rule of numbers: eventually someone will find something they like

Duncan,
The rule of numbers is working!! For some reason, I really like this one.
Vijay
CEO, SlideAware

Excuse me, I do believe you have my powerpoint….

Very cool. I’m keeping my eyes on SlideRocket.com. I think they give you the ability to import/export PPT files and have multiple people collaborate on a file.

Yeah seems unique - but doesn’t anyone worry about what Google is doing? with their upcoming power point?

-rb

Vijay, are you guys going to sell to Google?

Jack,

Google’s focus is a little different. They are trying to provide a complete online replacement for PowerPoint, whereas SlideAware enhances the existing Powerpoint experience.

This is a key difference when you think about it.

It is not clear to me what incentive there is for existing corporate users to switch to an online version of powerpoint:
- they have already been trained (for years) on ms office
- they know the tool inside out
- they have their own plugin/macros installed
- they have already paid for ms office
- and even though it’s not the perfect app, it’s a very responsive desktop app

Instead of trying to re-invent the wheel, we are simply leveraging existing skills and solving some key pain points around content creation, collaboration and distribution.

Didier
CTO, SlideAware

Isn’t this a bit late? Slideshare.net has been out there for a while and has a fairly large userbase. I’m not associated with slideshare, but i like their site a lot.

-rabble

I can appreciate the ability to leverage an existing app/knowledge base…working in the US for a European-based company…nobody wants to have to factor in a new learning curve in order to swap/collaborate on a few slides for an urgent presentation…Thanks for making this tool available!

Cheers,
A:)

AArrgghhh! I guess I should read the fine print. This is exactly what I need for a global customer and then when I try to load the add-in, it doesn’t recognize PPT2007. It says coming soon-how soon?

@Alastair,
Thanks for the compliment.
We have highlighted our reasons for leveraging existing app/knowledge base in our blog as well.

http://slideaware.typepad.com/.....roach.html

I do believe there are strong synergies with Google’s product/other online offerings.

1. We dont want to reinvent the wheel implementing the equivalent of a powerpoint UI in a browser, but we will enable collaboration on top of multiple sources in a presentation context - whether it be Google/Zoho/others, openoffice, keynote, powerpoint etc. Obviously those are longer term plans — in the short term (next two months) we will be releasing some more functionality that we think will add significant value in the current presentation management context.

2. Online API integration directly into PowerPoint (like what we have done for presence and notes management) has some other interesting implications - GData, Flickr api integration directly into PowerPoint has some very strong implications.

3. We see powerpoint, web browsers, apollo apps. etc. all as potential clients consuming web 2.0 services. If you think about the natural functionality that each of these is strong at, you get something like:
a) Powerpoint for authoring
b) Browsers for other parts of the lifecycle (collaborative review, live presentations etc).
c) Other potential clients — we are still investigating these (Apollo is a good one, we plan to allow people to carry their flash + sound presentations with them in apollo briefcases — more on that later)
Regards,
Vijay

Rabble,

I think Slideshare.net is targeting a different audience. Tying to be the ‘youtube of powerpoint’, they are geared towards non corporate content (that’s where you would find all the ‘funny’ powerpoints that some ‘friends’ feel they HAVE TO forward to you on a regular basis

SlideAware, on the other hand, is geared towards more of a corporate audience with features such as fine grained security (protect your confidential content and control who accesses your presentation) and analytics (track who viewed your presentation and how long people spent on each slide so you can adjust your marketing message/presentation accordingly) The same goes for the new live review features we just introduced.

I hope this helps clarify things a little bit.

Didier,
CTO, SlideAware

@Brian
There are a few problems (we believe) with 2007 implementation of VBA (we have a working plugin but it seems like there are a few memory leak issues on the vba side, especially in the shapes and charts area). We are hoping to resolve these as soon as possible, most likely if we dont find a workaround we will need to file bug reports with Microsoft and wait for them to fix some of these issues.
Vijay

I’m a little confused by the sign-up page, after a 30-day trial, can I still make up to 5 presentations per month?

@GeoActive

With the ‘SlideAware Free’ plan you will always be able to store up to 50 presentations and be able to share them using links.

You will also get a 30 day trial of the live presenter led presentations, collaborative review, analytics and branding features of the ‘SlideAware Professional’ plan.

John Dismore

Duncan and other crunchers,

This post and other recent posts have caused the last two TechCrunch newsletters to appear in wiiiiiiide format in both GMail (using IE6) and Outlook Express, forcing horizontal scrolling to read every paragraph. (It shows up fine when I read it in the standalone browser.)

I believe the culprit is several IMG tags in quick succession without any spaces between them.

Could you please insert a space between IMG tags when you have two or more big images right next to each other?

Thanks!