I was genuinely amazed when I first saw a demo of Prezi at the most recent The Next Web conference, and wrote that it was simply the coolest online presentation tool I’d ever seen. I still stand by that statement, and I’m apparently not the only one impressed with what the Hungarian company is doing.
The startup just secured an undisclosed amount in Series A financing from Scandinavian VC firm Sunstone Capital and is adding Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey to its roster of company advisors.
Sunstone Capital partner Christian Lindegard Jepsen says Prezi is “addressing a huge and bored market” with a unique product and I agree wholeheartedly. What the tool does is enable presenters to wave goodbye to classic slide-by-slide presentations and create stunning non-linear, story-telling visuals to wow their audience instead. It’s hard to explain without showing you what these visualizations look like, but you can see example Prezi presentations here and here.
Prezi has roots in architecture. The startup was founded by computer scientist Peter Halacsy and renowned artist and graphic designer Adam Somlai-Fischer, who has just won the World Technology Award (WTA) for Arts together with his partner Usman Haque (other awards were given to people like Mark Zuckerberg, Lawrence Lessig and Paul Kagame, President of the Republic of Rwanda).
Adam and Peter had been creating digital navigation tools for achitecture companies and needed to create a lot of presentations in that regard. Tired of the visual language of slideshows, they developed a simple workflow for their talks which ultimately led to a Flash-based editor for those presentations and the startup Prezi back in May 2008. The startup got seeded by a $160,000 investment from Magyar Telekom and claims to have grown cash-flow positive quickly.
Thanks to the injection of the new capital by Sunstone Capital, the company is going to set up an office in Silicon Valley. It’s also conceivable that they’re looking to raise another round of financing, since the press release mentions that Jack Dorsey will sit on the company’s advisory board to assist in matters ranging from “fundraising to technological development”.
Prezi is probably the online application or tool that I have become most excited about in the last 6 months. It’s absolutely killer. And damn cheap. Screw off PowerPoint!
What’s really cool about it is that it completely transforms a stale, old application niche, and is an application that happens to use the web as its platform. This is the future.
Not sure what weight gaining Jack Dorsey as an advisor would have, especially after what we all read here.
LOL!
Advisor FAIL!
I believe the expression is “brilliant”
I’m tripped out by this.
Reminds me of when Macromedia Director was fun. I think you’ll still need a good design eye to make it pop, but what a great tool set to make that happen.
Looks good. Now if this will be only adopted by the people in the suits (which are known to be pretty resistive when it comes to adopt new ways of doing things – I suspect they’ll stick with Powerpoint for a little long time).
I think SlideRocket is better
That link you provided doesn’t work, and when looking at the product, it isn’t recreating the market like Prezi does.
Prezi is an absolutely amazing tool as presentations are no longer sequential. It lets you dig down into topics of interest and discover more and more, or skip over other areas easily.
Try doing that with a sequential presentation tool, and you’ve got nothing. You’re skipping slides, or spending too much time explaining a slide that should have existed but doesn’t.
Not everybody can design great – but can surely write and provide images.
One of the challenges Prezi will face is lack of high quality, design rich templated building blocks.
One way to accomplish that is to let designers contribute to the “Prezi library” and make money off it.
Adobe recently updated their tooling (InDesign, Photoshop) to be able to export swf’s – that should help.
Kapil
http://twitter.com/ktundwal
Oh yeah prezi is surely great when you are in the audience… But it’s really a pain in the *ss when it comes to watch the slides on your computer.
I agree that an important step is going to be ability to have a ready library of presentation elements that help non-designers make killer presentations. Kinda like what inkd.com is doing with providing presentation templates to Microsoft Office. Or what Moo and Scrapblog do with their Designer lines.
Prezi is a killer app, my students will see a lot of this in the fall.
Great presentation tool. Ive used it some already.
It’s missing the ability to add live content via any type of scripting, XML/HTML content. If prezi is thinking long-term, that should be a consideration.
I could see prezi pushing out the cheap and easy zui that we all want to play with.
Kapil, I’ll have to respectfully disagree, because the vast majority of presentation users don’t take advantage of most design rich features. It’s very rare that I ever see anything particularly visually interesting in a Powerpoint presentation, though it is possible.
I tried out Prezi for a presentation I was giving on alternative fee deals for services procurement at a convention (you can see it here: http://prezi.com/37972/). I observed the following:
(1) Prezi was difficult for me to fully understand, as I struggled to figure out the main navigation tool and how to upload files.
(2) The demonstrations and faqs didn’t offer key guidance on a number of critical areas.
(3) My presentation did not look anywhere near as good as the Prezi samples.
(4) I spent way too many hours figuring Prezi out.
(5) And yet, despite it all, my presentation absolutely blew my audience away. People came up to me afterwards and asked how I did it, and said it was the most visually arresting presentation they’d seen in a long time.
I do think that the ultimate challenge for Prezi is the network effect issue. When I showed up to give the presentation, the laptop to be used was set to go with Powerpoint, but, sadly, was not connected to the Internet (luckily they paid an extra fee to the hotel to go on-line), and, of course, lacked the Prezi client software. Prezi will need to figure out a way to overcome this issue. Perhaps an integration tool that would slap Prezi steps into Powerpoint slides would be a nice conversion solution to the problem.
Ultimately, I’m a big fan of Prezi and expect them to be a serious player going forward if they can grapple with these issues successfully.
FYI – you can export a Prezi as a flash file that you can distribute without an internet connection or the desktop software. In fact, this is how I distribute my worl to my clients.
Thanks, Kevin! That’s a useful tip.
Can you tell me if you were able to export a single flash file that you can send to people and, if so, how you did it? I see the export feature but it exports a zip folder with a lot of files/folders and if i send just the swf file I get an error message across every image. Thanks!
Some good points above, but when you remember they only raised $160K, i think they absolutely nailed it – imagine what these guys will do with several million.
congrats to Prezi and Peter. i think i can testify i was the one responsible to make the intro to some people at Twitter, maybe it landed to Jack this way.
You’re probably also significant in many other ways too! Kudos!!
I’ve used it and had excellent reactions and positive feedback. It’s a bit of a pain to master the editing aspect and takes a few sessions for a few hours to get a handle on it. But once you do, it’s visually impressive, and like I said, produces very good results.
The ability to download the file for display w/o a connection is very helpful, too.
well deserved, Prezi is indeed an amazing tool. I did a presentation about it (and using it) at college and everybody got impressed.
Show us the money too
I’m pretty sure SlideRocket is working on a similar feature to let you pan around your presentation rather than slide to slide. Great to see innovation in the presentation space!
It would be pretty cool to use this on the MS Surface.
Fantastic! Can’t wait to try it!
Congratulations to Peter, Björn and the whole Swedish-Hungarian crew at Zui Kft! It’s been a sincere pleasure working with you and we wish you all the best on your continued journey!
For me, Prezi has been a real game-changer in two ways. First, as someone who works with large flowcharts, I’ve always had a problem – break the flows into multiple PPT pages, fit them on one page (too small to read), or kill a few trees printing large flowchars on plotter paper at the local Kinko’s. Prezi changed all that. Now, I embed the large flows as PDFs in a Prezi side by side by side. During the presentation I can zoom in on each, fly across them, etc. I makes the presentations far more effective.
The second use I’ve found is as a “demo” or product tour tool. We spent quite a bit of time building a video tour of our product and were never quite satisfied with the result. So we tried Prezi. The result is (we think) pretty nice – a web-based tour that allows the detail we want without looking like a traditional commercial. Here it is for anyone interested: http://www.next...rmance.com/tour
I think this demo is pretty successful, and enjoyed the 360 degree rotations coupled with your “360″ trademark. It might be neat to use screen capture software to grab a video of you clicking through the presentation so the user could lay back and just watch it as well.
A demo such as this one goes a long way in showing the performance jump Prezi offers over Powerpoint.
Oh no, the secret is out, Prezi allows you to visualize your thoughts and ideas in a brand new and very engaging way. See my Assemble your Tribe: http://prezi.com/58961/view/
I agree that it takes quite some hours understand and being able to use Prezi’s functionality to the fullest. You also have to be careful not to get carried away by the bells and whistles, which I think I did at the beginning.
People raved about it afterwords: https://www.sdn...=/pub/wlg/14351
The current design and font selection possibilities are very limited, which leads to Prezi presentations getting old very fast. After you have seen a couple it wears off.
I love the idea of putting flow charts out in Prezi, or I am surprised, that the flowchart software folks have not yet created the capability to lay down a track through a flowchart including zooming.
Now that the genie is out, I guess I have to think of something else to wow the audience at my next presentation ;-(
Zooming presentation tools have been done years ago, but they sure seem to have done it better than anyone else this time, maybe because they also master the design aspect of it, not just the technological one. I wish them well. I have one concern, though. Right now, everyone who sees such a presentation thinks that it is really cool, and rightly so, then wants to know how it was done, etc. But what did they remember from the actual content of the presentation, which is obviously the essential aspect of the presenter’s message? Then, once people are used to see such presentations, and everyone and their grandmother is using the tool to do theirs, are audiences going to be bored with it, and beg that the zooming effects be please turned off? How soon will the novelty aspect wear off? Do not get me wrong, I am a huge supporter of animated visual tools, and I have designed a few myself. I am just playing devil’s advocate here to try to corner more exactly what will define the staying power of this tool. Comments are thus welcome.
Uh…http://prezi.com/553/view/ doesn’t make any sense (in Firefox). There’s a Javascript error in IE7. What is it supposed to do once you click?
I agree with much of the excitement surrounding Prezi and am really pleased to see a new viable kid on the presentation block. I would, however, add a couple of caveats:
- Jean-Michel is right – the zoom effect is exciting now but for how long? It’s the equivalent of “spin” in PowerPoint – lots of excitement when it first came out, followed by the world and it’s mother using it inappropriately followed by derision when we all recognised it to be crass and inappropriate.
- What does excite me is the non linear way that Prezi forces the author to think. It’s not necessarily the blizzard of bullet points or crappy artwork/animations that have damaged PowerPoint’s reputation – it’s the lack of planning and real storytelling by the presentation authors that has done the damage. Prezi will at least force people to think fully about the audience, content and structure before composing their next presentation.
- To echo previous comments, interactivity is nothing new and can be easily and effectively in lowly old PowerPoint. As an agency, we’ve educated a large number of our clients to use PowerPoint as a “toolkit” rather than a standard linear presentation tool. It’s not a huge shift, uses their tried and trusted buddy PowerPoint and can be edited by them on the fly.
To sum it all up, Prezi is exciting because it’s forcing people to think differently. It faces many of the same challenges as SlideRocket – acceptance as a “grown up” tool and integration into the thousands of PowerPoint decks their target market have stored on servers across their business. SlideRocket chose to ignore the dominance of PowerPoint and have struggled since…I hope Prezi don’t make the same mistake.
I used it for my presentation at The Next Web and it got a good response, and was planning on it for the State of the Word in San Francisco, but haven’t used it publicly since then because of bugginess in the authoring tool, and the difficulty of editing existing presentations.
Prezi is wonderful for presentation but sometimes get a little seasick!
At Zoomorama we feel what more important is giving the tools to create web content including presentation of all sorts.
For example, the new US Federal Budget that can be found on: http://wallstat.../deathandtaxes/
was done in a morning using XML and CSS only (left side Menu!)
End of September will publish the new authoring tool that will work on Mac/PC!
hi, felicitacion to my favorite bro in law and the team!!!