Sometimes the simplest ideas are best. While a number of startups are working to bring the whole process of creating presentations online, SlideShare recognizes that many people are mostly satisfied with PowerPoint or Keynote. They just want an easy way to share their traditional presentation files with others.

The company, which launched in 2006 and later added audio synchronization, took the YouTube strategy of creating a place where people could upload, share, and embed their media. And now they’ve raised a $3 million from Venrock and a handful of notable angel investors in its first major round of funding, which should help them pursue that strategy further (i.e. build as massive user base as possible). Oh, and fight off future denial of service attacks and increase capacity.

Individual investors include Dave McClure, Ariel Poler, Mark Cuban, Jonathan Abrams, Hal Varian, Yee Lee, and Saul Klein. Many of them actually came to know SlideShare as normal customers and only decided to invest once realizing how handy it was. David Siminoff will also join SlideShare’s board.

SlideShare is using some of the money to relocate from Mountain View to San Francisco, where they’ll have a larger office. It will also grow its team from about 10 people to 18, mostly with local hires even though the bulk of its development occurs in India.

Of course, we’ve been given a press release in the form of an embeddable slideshow, inserted below. Way to go on the blatant self-promotion, Dave.

| View | Upload your own

SlideShare, a Mountain View-based startup that lets you upload and embed PowerPoint presentations on the web, appears to have stirred the red dragon last week.

About ten days ago the company began receiving anonymous requests to delete slideshows that were deemed “illegal” by the requesters. The SlideShare staff checked out these slideshows and discovered them to be quite innocent. While some described ways to fight corruption in China, none of them violated the company’s terms of service, and so SlideShow did nothing to fulfill the requests.

SlideShare soon began receiving a different type of request from the same people, who could now be identified by their email addresses. This time they were pretending to be users who had lost their passwords. Once again doing nothing, the company got a very demanding, and almost threatening, call to its Indian office on Wednesday, one that insisted that the company grant access to an account.

After these three failed attempts, SlideShare experienced a massive distributed denial of service attack starting at 10pm on Thursday, one day before the CNN website was attacked by Chinese instigators in apparent backlash to its coverage of the Tibetan protests. We’ve been told that the attack reached a peak of 2.5GB/sec and consisted entirely of packets sent from China.

Not long after the first attack subsided, SlideShare was hit a second time on Friday and the site went down again until Saturday morning. Since then there have been no more attacks, but the company continues to receive fake password recovery and illegitimate takedown requests at a rate of about 5-10 per day (it has accumulated about 50-60 total).

There’s a lot of speculation around just what has happened here since no one knows for sure who is behind the requests and attacks. However, it seems likely that they were from the same hacker groups – possibly linked to the Chinese government – that attacked the CNN site (and later called their attack off after getting too much publicity). Some of the slideshows with takedown requests have been viewed many times recently, so their popularity seems to have landed them on the Chinese government’s radar.

SlideShare insists that it will do everything it can to protect its users’ freedom of speech. As such, it has no plans to remove any of the content in question.

The Sports Network was also recently taken over by Chinese hackers who mistook it for CNN sports.

Update: Just as I finished writing this post, I received word from the company that a third attack had begun.

We first wrote about Slideshare when it launched last October. It provides a useful service by allowing users to upload and share powerpoint presentations. Tomorrow they’ll announce a much-requested feature – synchronization of audio files with slides.

This is a great additional feature. We’ve had lots of requests to upload presentation decks to Slideshare after I’ve spoken at conferences. Now, if I can get my hands on a MP3 file of the talk itself, I can add that too.

An example is embedded above. More examples are here.

SlideShare is a new service launching this morning that lets users upload PowerPoint or Open Office presentationi files and share them online through a You Tube-like interface.

Power Point documents (or any office documents) stored on the web with a permanent URL are a valuable resource. No need to email the file to recipients, or carry a copy around on a USB drive. The presentation can easily be shared (and with permission controls, kept relatively secure).

The potential uses of online Power Point documents are numerous – from making sales pitches, lectures and conference presentations much easier, to having a permanent record of these and other presentations available on the Internet for easy access and reference.

Today, WebEx and its competitors fill some of the market demand for remote presentations, but they do not provide for online storage and archiving. We’ve covered two startups in the remote presentation space, DimDim and TeamSlide.

Online Power Point/Presentation solutions are also tackling this problem, from a different direction. They provide basic tools for creating presentations (and sometimes allow uploading of Power Point files). They also place a permanent URL on the file and allow archiving and sharing. See our profiles on Zoho Show, Empressr and Thumbstacks.

A problem, though, with the online presentation services is that the tools for creating presentations are difficult to develop within the limitations of Flash and/or Ajax. In our reviews, we’ve seen a lot of development effort go into producing these tools, which still fall short of what’s available from desktop software. Less attention is given to the actual presentation interface, and as a result those products are, so far, less than perfect.

SlideShare seems like a perfect solution, at least until online tools like Zoho rival the desktop applications. I uploaded a test Power Point presentation in a few seconds, and after a few seconds more of processing time it was available for viewing. I’ve also embedded the presentation immediately below.

There are a number of limitations on the service. Files cannot be larger than 20 MB, there are no sharing or privacy options, and the original presentations cannot be downloaded by the publisher or by viewers. I also was unable to edit the file after uploading (even though the feature exists, I could not make it save the changes properly). The company says they’ll increase file size limitations soon, and privacy, sharing and download options will be added shortly.

On the plus side: Files can be tagged, and comments left by viewers. Each slide has its own permanent URL for reference. For example, the second slide of my presentation above can be viewed here (simply add /page# after the presentation URL). If you are using unsupported presentation software (such as Keynote for Apple), simply export the file to PPT format before uploading to SlideShare.

SlideShare is clean, fast and functional and supports various copyright claims, including creative commons. I’ll be using it to post presentations I give at future conferences for archiving purposes. In addition, if any company requesting a profile on TechCrunch would like to send a presentation deck for public viewing, I’ll show that presentation in the TechCrunch profile using SlideShare.

Thanks Ross for the introduction and for the idea of showing company pitches on TechCrunch using SlideShare.

Update: Tonicpoint is another online PowerPoint application that we’ve recently heard about.