Giving presentations? Time for an upgrade!
If you (or someone you know) gives presentations now and then, listen up. PowerPoint (from Microsoft) and Keynote (from Apple) have been venerable old stand-bys for years now, but there are two new players that offer things you can’t get with your desktop preso suite. Read on!
The two presentation platforms I’m talking about here are Prezi and SlideRocket. Prezi offers an entirely new paradigm, while SlideRocket is a very familiar approach. They both work “in the cloud” — that is, your presentation is online; instead of emailing an attachment, you can just email a link!
Both platforms can make for compelling presentations, and both can be used to create horrid tripe. 
They’re quite different, though…
Prezi
Prezi took the slide-one, next-slide, next-slide model and started over from scratch. In Prezi, your presentation is a series of waypoints on a single, monolithic layout. The image zooms in and rotates for each point in the presentation, often finishing up with a final zoom-out to “get the whole picture”.
The "bubble menu" gives presentation designers a sense for how the presentations can work
Editing a Prezi presentation path -- showing many different stopping points in the "story arc"
Features include:
- Pan-and-zoom instead of next-slide, next-slide…
- Big-picture perspective, plus fine-detail perspective, all in one view
- Make a story-line “path” to convey your presentation in sequence
- “Live” videos: when your path comes to rest on a video it automatically starts playing
- The help files and tutorials are great
Note that Adobe’s Flash is used in creating a Prezi presentation — this means that IOS fans can’t use their devices to create a Prezi. Take heart! There’s a Prezi-player app for the iPad that allow you to view any Prezi, no problem.
SlideRocket
With SlideRocket , you conjure up a sequence of slides, just as you would in PowerPoint or KeyNote. But you use your web browser, so it’s online — meaning you can send a link and anybody, anywhere, can get to your presentation. No more attaching presentations to email!
Showing the SlideRocket interface -- very familiar!
Features include:
- Familiar interface mimics PowerPoint and/or Keynote — no learning curve
- Nice transitions between slides and during slide “builds”
- Importing your existing presentations — whether desktop versions or Google-docs versions — is a snap
- Your presentation is available online, just send your audience the link
- Analytics for seeing how long viewers spend on your presentation, and lots more
For IOS users, there’s an iPad app; you can create presentations right on your iPad. Otherwise, the browser version requires Adobe’s Flash.
