July 23, 2007

Slideshare Adds Audio Synchronization

Michael Arrington

14 comments »

We first wrote about Slideshare when it launched last October. It provides a useful service by allowing users to upload and share powerpoint presentations. Tomorrow they’ll announce a much-requested feature - synchronization of audio files with slides.

This is a great additional feature. We’ve had lots of requests to upload presentation decks to Slideshare after I’ve spoken at conferences. Now, if I can get my hands on a MP3 file of the talk itself, I can add that too.

An example is embedded above. More examples are here.

Sphere It

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Comments

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gettit

July 23rd, 2007 at 9:03 pm

That is a lovely interface. Seems like it works pretty well with this presentation too, although he needs to work on his public speaking if he’s fronting this technology. I’m way worse, just saying…
BeingParents

July 23rd, 2007 at 9:11 pm

The web has come a long way;yet, it returns to its humble beginning. I am not bumping Web 2.0 but simplicity is the key to success. PP was popular before web 2.0 and it will remained popular after web 2.0( and after the semantic web). Score one for MS.
Jonathan Boutelle

July 23rd, 2007 at 10:27 pm

We’re pushing out final changes over the next couple of hours … so by tomorrow morning everyone should be able to make their own slidecasts.

Thanks for the kind words, gettit. And I DO need to work on my presentation style (for the record, I wasn’t planning on showcasing this particular talk quite so publically). ;->
Bas Timmers

July 23rd, 2007 at 11:21 pm

Another good application is http://www.voicethread.com. You insert images to your own desire and add audio commentary to it. Works really simple and smooth!
Alex Linhares

July 23rd, 2007 at 11:45 pm

I remember asking them for this feature when I became a user. I can’t quite point out why, but I’ve always preferred their service over zoho. Many of my courses are available there, some in English. It works beautifully, students download what they want without bothering you (!), it’s embedded everywhere, etc.

I think that now they have a real chance of taking off big time. The only thing better than that for a Univ. Professor is Buzzword (BTW, when is techcrunch going to mention that it’s finally “out”?).
Alex Linhares

July 23rd, 2007 at 11:51 pm

Now if only someone (APPLE?) will come up with a gadget to let me take my slidecasts with my iPhone/iPod, and I don’t have to bring along my laptop for every single presentation out there… all it needs is to plug into power, VGA, and a remote control.
rashmi

July 24th, 2007 at 12:04 am

Alex,

Audio has been our most requested feature. And we do have plans to do a mobile version. Just wait!
Matthias Zeller

July 24th, 2007 at 7:06 am

Rashmi and Jonathan,
congratulations on getting this important feature completed! I know audio synch is a hard problem and I will definitely try to add some voice-over to my existing slide share presentations.
Arnab

July 24th, 2007 at 7:13 am

Nice feature, I’m sure a lot of people will find it really useful. Good to know Slideshare is innovating beyond the conventional presentation/slideshow space.
Dan York

July 24th, 2007 at 9:23 am

As a beta user, I’ll mention that the audio sync tool does work extremely well.

When I speak at conferences, I usually record the audio (if allowed to do so) and make that available later as a podcast recording (typically “Blue Box: The VoIP Security Podcast” if I am speaking about VoIP security). I’ve also made slides available for my listeners to download… but listeners have always asked if there was some way that they could easily know when I moved to the next slide.

This new “slidecasting” interface now makes it VERY nice to be able to mesh those slides and the podcast audio so that listeners can view the slides in sync with the audio. From a producer’s point-of-view, it’s also great because it reuses my existing podcast MP3 file and in fact each time someone listens to it in the slidecast it pulls it from my server, which results in me seeing stats for those downloads as well. All in all I’m so far quite impressed!
Hunter

July 24th, 2007 at 6:50 pm

Be careful when viewing their site. The blog portion appears to be badly infected with “Backdoor.PHP.RST.H”.
Agoracom

July 24th, 2007 at 6:55 pm

Michael, we have used articulate to market our services and our sales have skyrocketed ($1.5M) thanks to these slick presentations. We’ve been using it for over 2 years now, so it appears they are far ahead of Slideshare.

Best,
George