SlideRocket Presentation Web App Enters Private Beta; Get Your Invite Here
Mark Hendrickson
24 comments »
SlideRocket is another Flash-based presentation app that wants to recreate PowerPoint in the browser and take advantage of the web’s sharing and mashup capabilities.
There are a handful of companies striving to be the presentation tool for the cloud era, including Google, Zoho, Empressr and a Y Combinator startup called 280 North that we covered last week. Ask the guys behind SlideRocket, though, and they’ll tell you that they’ve gone much further than their competitors in building a real business class app, one that’s worth paying for like other SaaS offerings.
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).
Overall SlideRocket is a very attractive and capable product that does indeed match and exceed the expectations set by PowerPoint. There’s a slew of impressive features I could mention: the ability to import your own fonts, the many different layouts, the special effects for objects such as videos and photos, and the asset library that can be searched by keyword, to name a few. SlideRocket also has pretty sophisticated analytics tool that let slideshow creators track who and how many people have viewed their shows, as well as how long each spent on particular slides.
A heavy emphasis has been placed on community, with users encouraged to share assets like images, themes, and templates with each other. You can also import images directly from Flickr or Yahoo, and spreadsheets from Google.
SlideRocket has been designed with extensibility and portability in mind as well. Third party developers will be able to build components into slideshows using the app’s APIs. The application itself can also be integrated into other online services. The company has already worked with Salesforce to create a version of SlideRocket that operates within Salesforce and makes it easier for sales people to create and track the slideshows they send to clients.
When SlideRocket launches publicly, there will be a free version for single users and two business versions that satisfy the needs of small and large corporations.
SlideRocket raised $2M from Hummer Winblad Venture Partners and First Round Capital in December 2007. (Correction: it was their first round of capital; they didn’t raise it from First Round)
SlideRocket is a web application, which performs like actual software. I finally have an online presentation tool which rivals my Keynote application experience.
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.
Would love a private beta invite
I’ve used SlideRocket before — it blows away what others are doing in this space. For instance, having the capability to track who views/spends time on your preso is a killer (and often over-looked) feature. Other solutions, in my opinion, simply replicate the PowerPoint paradigm through a website. The SlideRocket team has done an excellent job of taking presentations to the next level. Integration with salesforce.com and the sharing of assets (community) is awesome too. Way to go!
I would love an invite also. There doesn’t seem to be any details in the post on how to receive one.
@ Sheetal, Brian
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/
Very interesting. I checked out the app, and its really nice. SlideRocket seems to have pretty much the same vision (as us) on where presentations on the web would evolve to. Our focus has been slightly different (search and assembly) as opposed to authoring, since we believe most enterprises will still author in PowerPoint. However, the rest of the stuff (our rich slides functionality — any flex widget can become a slide element), our ability to track presentation consumption (both in real time via adobe air, or later via our google analytics integration), etc. are very similar in vision.
Just had a look at their demo and signed up for the beta. It looks fantastic, and it could be very useful for some people, but I’ll be amazed if it ever brings in the revenue to cover the amount of capital it has just had injected.
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).
I saw this app a long while back at lunch event at adobe and it looked phenomenal. I’m sure they’ve improved by leaps and bounds since then too.
You guys forgot http://www.slideshare.net .
Sliderocket got some great features especially the tracking features sounds awesome. However, I couldn’t get it to work after the registration. I’ll try it again later.
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.
Hey #7,
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.
They must have a great UI team. The interface is well designed with details. Thumb up!
Sliderocket is presenting at Under the Radar tomorrow (3/20) - well worth checking out. The differentiator to me is about data - Sliderocket lets you pull in dynamic data from online sources - when the data changes the preso gets updated. Imagine a huge national salesforce sharing the same presentations - and never having to manually update data - or have two presentations out of sync. It’s extremely flexible and well-thought out. And the UI is gorgeous.
What all these “PowerPoint….bu,bu,but on the web” apps really don’t address is the issue of creativity. 99% of all presentations are made by marketing wanks, and they all look almost identical. 20-30 boring slides overloaded with information. I’m sure the market is screaming for a web-enabled way to make sucky presentations.
lens flare + page curl = awesome presentation.
I would love an invitation too
Very impressive.
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 would also like to have an invite !
I would like to try SlideRocket.
Does anyone have any invitations?
Regards,
Francisco Costa