LeadShare is a self-service tool that businesses can use to capturing leads from documents and presentations. To capture leads, companies currently have to work with third-party vendors to set-up complex and sometimes costly lead generation campaigns. And traditional lead gen services require end users to first complete lead information before downloading a whitepaper. LeadShare’s process takes a different twist by asking businesses to share content and then letting users choose if and when to get in touch. SlideShare’s CEO Rashmi Sinha says that the quality of leads is actually better because users who input their info are genuinely interested in the service or product.

LeadShare lets businesses setup a simple campaign in minutes and control exactly how they capture leads and the depth of information they want to capture. For example, you can ask for email addresses, names and phone numbers or capture information that is customized to your presentation or service. Leads cost between $1 to $22 for the business depending on the how in-depth the questions are. So if you only want to capture email addresses, SlideShare will charge $1 per email address. But if you want to capture a more detailed question such as geographic locations, this will cost a business more money. You can capture leads on SlideShare.net, on your own site and anywhere the content gets embedded. Leads are captured in a dashboard that SlideShare creates for each LeadShare campaign.

The second service for businesses, AdShare, lets users promote their content on SlideShare’s platform. SlideShare will place a “sponsored content” box next to presentation and documents that are contextually relevant. The platform will charge businesses $0.25 per click. If content is clicked more often, it gets promoted more and vice versa. Similar to LeadShare, AdShare is a self-service product that businesses can manage on their own. And of course, the two services are complementary to each other—you can use AdShare to get more views and potentially capture more leads.

This is SlideShare’s first play at premium services, and both seem compelling to businesses who are looking not only create leads but to find a cost-effective way to market presentations and documents while harnessing social media. According to Quantcast, SlideShare gets over 20 million visits per month and is steadily growing. Currently, the platform only makes money through advertising on the site. Sinha says that the new features are aimed towards the business community; enabling both small businesses and individuals get the message out about their products, services and content on a social media platform.

Competitors Scribd and Docstoc both make revenue from content selling models. Docstoc also lets content owners share revenue from Google AdSense advertising alongside the document.

Over the past year, SlideShare has unveiled a mobile-friendly site, launched a free Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 plug-in that allows for one-click publication of your presentations to the cloud, and support for embedding YouTube videos in SlideShare-hosted presentations.

The company is based out of San Francisco and raised over $3 million in capital to date, from VC firm Venrock and a number of prominent angel investors like Dave McClure, Mark Cuban, Saul Klein, Jonathan Abrams, Hal Varian and more.

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Note that the mobile version is in beta at this point and was hacked together at Open Hack Day India last month (using Yahoo’s Blueprint platform), so there may still be some technical issues, warns the company.

At the mobile site, you can take a look at the latest, featured and popular presentations if you’re using any smart phone and/or on all phones that have Opera Mini installed, and you can also search for slidedecks. There’s no requirement to download or install software on your phone, and it lets you log in to your account to view your favorite slidedecks and messages from your contacts. Comments are currently not displayed yet, and it doesn’t support upload from mobile phones, but other than that it works like it should; on my iPhone at least.

Update: here’s a short presentation about SlideShare Mobile from … SlideShare

To the best of my knowledge, this is the only mobile website that does this at this point, and considering SlideShare is one of the most popular cloud-based presentation sharing services there’s bound to be a heap of great content you can watch on the go. If there are any others, speak up in comments.

SlideShare’s been doing some cool stuff lately, like launching a free Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 plug-in that allows for one-click publication of your presentations to the cloud, and support for embedding YouTube videos in SlideShare-hosted presentations.

The company is based out of San Francisco and raised over $3 million in capital to date, from VC firm Venrock and a number of prominent angel investors like Dave McClure, Mark Cuban, Saul Klein, Jonathan Abrams, Hal Varian and more.

(Thanks to Christian Heilmann for the tweet tip)

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Back in 2006 when we first introduced SlideShare, we called it a mix between PowerPoint and YouTube. Today, that statement gets even more accurate.

SlideShare will now allow users to embed YouTube videos into their Flash-based presentations – an oft-requested feature that has countless potential uses. Users will now be able to include personal introductions to their slideshows, offer video that supports the contents of the rest of the presentation, or (in the case of startup pitches) include demonstrations of a website’s features. In the past users wishing to include video in their presentations have been forced to include links to separate video files, which sort of defeated the point of having a dead-simple way to share PowerPoint presentations.

The feature seems to work as advertised, though I have a few gripes. It isn’t currently possible to make a video auto-play (though CEO Rashmi Sinha says this will be coming soon), and users will also have to deal with YouTube’s standard ‘feature’ of linking to a video’s YouTube address whenever you accidentally click outside of the ‘play’ arrow. Other than that, it’s a great addition to the product. We should also note that while this is the first time SlideShare has supported embedded video, the site has allowed users to embed audio alongside their slideshows since 2007. You can check out a sample slideshow with YouTube video embeds below.

Last month SlideShare also launched an impressive new cloud-based feature that ties your native PowerPoint client your SlideShare account.

Other players in this space include SlideRocket, DocStoc, Scribd, SlideSix, and SlideBoom.

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SlideShare, a startup that we’ve likened to a YouTube equivalent for PowerPoint presentations, has released a new plugin for Microsoft Office 2007 that allows users to edit and publish presentations directly to their SlideShare accounts. You can download the free plugin here.

Beyond publishing new PowerPoint documents to the web, the SlideShare plugin can import SlideShare files from the cloud (both your own and those that are shared by others), which can then be modified on your native PowerPoint client. The plugin features an integrated search so you can browse through files from your SlideShare contacts and groups, as well as support for Twitter and FriendFeed so you can broadcast a new presentation without leaving Office, adding a social component to PowerPoint that extends beyond typical group collaboration.

SlideShare’s plugin offers a peek into where cloud-based document editing is probably ultimately headed for most consumers. While most online-only services like Google Docs are free (Office isn’t), the vast majority of computer users have been using the Microsoft suite for years, and aren’t keen on learning a new interface loaded with new quirks. Even with the offline capability afforded by Google Gears, Docs still feels foreign. Expect plugins with functionality similar to SlideShare to emerge for all of Microsoft Office (Microsoft already offers its own similar service) as consumers desperately look for familiarity as they make their first steps into the cloud.

Other players in this space include Scribd, DocStoc, and SlideRocket (a cloud-based PowerPoint alternative).

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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