A new screen-sharing app launched today from drop.io, which keeps adding features to its private file-sharing service. The new product is called present.io and it lets you set up a screen-sharing presentation with multiple participants in just a few clicks. Present.io has a lot in common with drop.io’s chat feature which it added last month, except that it looks like this scales to hundreds of participants and is designed specifically for webinars and group presentations.
Present.io requires no downloads or installs and pretty much instantaneously tracks whatever the presenter is doing on his computer with all of the watchers see on theirs. He can go through slides, open documents via a Scribd embed, play videos, show photos, play music, and move his cursor around, and everyone logged into the presentation sees the same thing. When he is going through slides, he can expand them into full-screen mode to show greater detail, and text chat is integrated into the app at the bottom so everyone can chime in. The service also includes a live conference call line.
It looks pretty slick. Try it out here. One downside is that it appears to be a one-way tool. Participants can’t take control of the presentation to add their own media or drive the presentation, unlike other free screen-sharing apps such as Adobe’s Acrobat.com (which is my personal favorite). Unlike Acrobat.com or WebEx, you don’t see the presenter’s desktop, only the files he chooses to show within present.io. So this would not be something you would use to show something in a browser, which is unfortunate because demos often default to the browser when the presenter wants to go off on a tangent or forgot to add something to his deck. Other than those concerns, present.io is a solid addition to drop.io’s ever-expanding set of features. Below is a demo video describing present.io.
God, I love drop.io.
What does this have to do with twitter?
WOW….pretty cool!
Also it’s been over 24 hours since our last daily anti-facebook fiat. I am really grateful for that!
I think drop.io is making some great apps out there.
those guys are on fire! you can practically do anything with Drop.io now! who needs blogs?
Totally confused, how does this integrate with twitter?
It doesn’t share the screen but it shares only what you drop.
Just last night i read about onlineseminar.nl … there you see both the presenter and his presentation. Seems quit a few contenders in that market? Don’t know of any plans for these Dutch guys to go international…
Very cool…
this is steve from drop.io and thanks for sharing present.io with your readers – we at drop.io are really excited to add this functionality!
while we totally understand the use case for ‘full screen sharing’, we decided that the benefits of a simple 100% web-based solution with no software to download and no registration required outweighed providing the additional functionality that would have forced users to download software to use – that said, let us know your thoughts!
thanks again,
Steve
Wow. I just uploaded a pptx to presentio, it is amazing! And simple to use. No login required. The in-line viewers are very very useful. Way way better than Google Doc’s “View Together” mode in presentations. “View Together” essentially offers the same basic functionality as presentio, but lacks the support for media (audio/video) files and does not feature “free teleconferencing”. Also, to use the “View Together” in Google Docs, the attendees need to sign-up for a Google Account.
However, I would be more comfortable with storing confidential data in Google Apps than in presentio. For e.g. I would never upload a presentation containing Intellectual Property to presentio
Anyone wanna guess how long before Google Doc catches up with presentio?