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)

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It’s been over a year since we last covered online presentation tool Empressr. Tonight the company releases version 3 of its product, which has been rebuilt completely in Flex.

Much of the improvements in this third version are structural, so you might not see much on the surface. Among the noticeable improvements is a new film strip for viewing the slides in a presentation. Click on the middle button at the bottom of the player and you’ll see thumbnail previews of these slides. The editing tool also has a new interface and drag-n-drop functionality for images, movies, and flash files.

Empressr sports an impressively functional presentation tool accessible entirely through the web browser. The point is basically to bring PowerPoint online so you can easily share and collaborate on presentations.

Currently, Empressr prides itself in the ability to bring content into your slides from around the web. Movies and photos don’t need to be hosted by Empressr to be embedded in your presentations; you can pull them from Flickr, YouTube, etc. Completed presentations can also be embedded and published elsewhere on the web (such as in the bottom of this blog post). The editor provides professional snap-to-grid functionality and the ability to make presentations of varying dimensions, so presentations can potentially fitted to any aspect ratio necessary for page embedding.

Not yet available is the ability for groups to simultaneously work on a single presentation, although the company says it will debut this functionality (perhaps for premium members only) before too long. Empressr has also not yet made the leap back offline but the company will design an offline viewer in AIR for the first quarter of next year and an offline editor perhaps in the second quarter.

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A number of Ajax based powerpoint applications have launched in the past few month - notably Zoho Show and Thumbstacks (Thumbstacks also has a Flash option).

Empressr, headquartered in New York, is the newest entrant into this space. It’s a flash-based application with rudimentary features.

Online office applications are serious business with real acquisition possibilities. Writely, an online word processor, was acquired by Google earlier this year, and Google launched Google Spreadsheets, an online version of Excel, last month. Powerpoint web applications are probably next.

There are three key feature areas that I think must be covered if an online version of Powerpoint is to succeed. First, at least basic creation tools need to be developed. Second, the applications need to import and export in Powerpoint format. Third, the files need to be viewable online via shared or public hyperlinks. A PDF export feature would be nice as well.

Empressr allows sharing of presentations, but the creation tools aren’t there yet and there is no import/export to powerpoint (or PDF) available. Look for future versions to include these features.

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