I found the “less is less” message though made me hyper picky because that suggests that there should be no missing features. The first feature I looked for, the one I personally use the most is linked arrows. There were only 1 style in SlideRocket vs the 12 or so in Powerpoint and they didn’t stay linked. if I moved something the arrow didn’t follow. Hopefully that’s a beta issue.

I’m not sure about the paying part. I’m not saying everything should be free but personally I’d like to use SlideRocket to make presentaitons for diagrams for my blog. But I doubt most bloggers would be willing to pay for that.

I’ve got 20 SlideRocket invites to give out. Yup, a whopping 20. Hell, after getting featured on TechCrunch today I figure these 20 are a hot commodity. To get an invite check out the presentation below (which uses SlideRocket of course).

The 20…

lens flare + page curl = awesome presentation.

The true value in SlideRocket is that you can do things that aren’t possible with a desktop tool like PowerPoint. It’s a lot more than just authoring.

I believe that, beyond any other productivity tool, presentations are most suited for migration to the web. People want to collaborate on their presentations, synchronize slides and assets across an organization, control and track who can view and redistribute their presentations, dynamically mashup data from other sources, and integrate community resources and services. All of these things are difficult or just not possible with PowerPoint. SlideRocket was never about just duplicating PPT on the web.

But we honestly don’t mind if people choose to author in PowerPoint. That’s why we’ve spent a lot of effort building import/export capabilities into SlideRocket.

I agree with DirtyAndy that these feature driven complex web app might need some time to get to the main street. To me, a more consumer oriented, easy to use web presentation tool is more attractive. It may lack some of the rich features but it’s easy for regular people to make and present stories. That’s why we go a different approach with http://www.showbeyond.com.

Most people that read blogs like this love playing with things. A lot of these products (Coghead and all the other similar online tools) seem great. But most people, the business people out there that pay for tools, they are just not going to be interested in things like this. They will think it is pretty if you show it to them, but how do you market it to them. They struggle to use Powerpoint as it is. They are not going onto Google and searching for “something like Powerpoint but web based and cooler”. They will just struggle through with Powerpoint.

I think there is a huge market for “software as a service” products, but I don’t think that market is in products which already exist on peoples desktops. If they can do it in Word, Excel, Powerpoint and to some degree Access then they will, people wont go searching for other tools.

Products that truly need to be web based, where people need to be able to view (and possibly edit) changing information from remote locations, those are the types of products which will work in this model (SalesForce.com, BaseCampHQ etc etc).

Private beta invites: Read the article again…

“While SlideRocket doesn’t plan to launch publicly until this summer, it officially enters its private beta period today and we have 500 invites available for our readers (claim your’s here).”

http://www.sliderocket.com/techcrunch/

The fact is, I just can’t share my Google presentations like this. With SlideRocket, it leverages Flash technology, objects are easily placed, manipulated and it supports VIDEO.

Simply awesome, thanks for the private beta invite.