DME ResourcesWe've all been there. Sitting in a dimly lite room watching someone read the text off from their PowerPoint presentation. Responding to email under the table as we listen to the monotone disseration, looking up only during the brief breaks which occur between slides. Glancing around the room just in time to see one of your colleagues bounce their chin off from their chest. How many foreheads need to hit the conference table before we put an end to this senseless mid-day slaughter? I can tell you this, SlideRocket clearly doesn't want to find out.
SlideRocket is a rich internet application (RIA) being developed by a privately owned, venture funded, San Fransisco based company. The application is developed using Adobe Flex and Amazon's Simple Storage Services (S3), and it's sleek, user-friendly interface is entirely Flash based. It's not browser or platform dependent, so regardless of where you or your team may be or whether you're running the local player from a PC, Mac or Linux box, you're all good. While the presentation authoring tools are impressive, there are a plethora of other features and capabilities you won't find in related desktop apps that I personally find even more exciting.
| The presentation to the right is the sample SlideRocketpresentation provided on their site, and I merely created a new title slide and theme for their content. At the end of the presentation is a link to sign-up for their private beta program, which understandably so has an extensive waiting list. Click the play icon, click each slide to advance, and check it out full-screen using the expand icon located in the bottom-right corner.
Nat Robinson, SlideRocket's VP of Marketing, recently took a few minutes out of his busy schedule to answer a few of my questions. Nat also hooked me up with a limited number of invites for Media-Geek.com members to participate in SlideRocket's private beta! |
Interview with Nat Robinson, VP of Marketing
Larry:The team build functionality coupled with the anywhere/everywhere accessibility of a feature rich Internet application immediately makes me think of enterprise-wide deployment. Will a site or organizational license be offered, will the service be seat/user based or will pricing be related to storage/bandwidth?Nat: Because of the breadth and depth of functionality offered in SlideRocket we do think it's a natural fit for businesses but we're also getting a lot of interest from individuals who are looking for a viable and innovative alternative to PowerPoint. We've opted to offer a free account with a reduced set of functionality and then two more tiers of pricing, Solo and Team. For Solo users the price will be $12 / user / month but with a 25% discount introductory price of $9. For Teams the pricing will be $24 with the same introductory pricing discount of 25% bringing the price down to $18 / month / user. Most users will be able to sign themselves up through the web site but larger accounts will probably want to work through our direct sales organization.
Larry: Has network installation of Adobe AIR and the SlideRocketplayer been packaged and made ready for prime time?Nat: Today you can download the AIR player (we're calling it Satellite to jibe with the rocket / space metaphor) from http://www.sliderocket.com/airinstall.
The install process includes the Adobe AIR installation so it's all bundled together as seamlessly as possible. Later this year we'll release an AIR version of the SlideRocket editor with all the functionality of the online client.
Larry:The plug-in architecture and community marketplace really throw the doors wide open. As someone who'd be interested in developing for both, when and where can developers & designers find out more about participating?Nat: We're not quite ready to embrace developers but the intent in the near term is to have both a SlideRocket API and developer guidelines for plugins. With the SlideRocket Marketplace we'd love to talk to interested providers for content and services, really everything from cartoons, themes, illustrations, clip art, audio, video and of course services like graphic desing, copywriting, copy editing, voice over, printing (think FedEx Kinkos or Mimeo) etc. If it's relevant to making or delivering great presentations it should be in the marketplace.
Larry:Love the blog post from the 16th about increasing the upload file size limit. When do you expect the next build to be pushed out?Nat:We usually push builds weekly as we remedy bugs and add enhancements. However, we are currently testing a large set of changes including collaboration, presentation versioning, playback buffering, autorecovery, and a ton of other fixes including the file size limit increase. We don't have a firm date for when we push this build out but it should be within the couple of weeks.
Larry:As a multi-media junkie, I'm totally cool with the acceptable media file formats as I have the tools to convert formats; many users don't. Have you considered building in a media file conversion tool so that people can easily use all of their existing content such as AVI, WMV, MOV files, etc...? They upload, you convert to FLV and ditch the original. Even if there was a lenghty cue and sometimes significant delay it would probably be a handy service to provide, and the best part is there's software to do it at the server for free. ;-)Nat: It's a great idea, one we like, it's probably just a matter of how soon we can offer this type of transcoding inside SlideRocket. The initial focus was to make Flash video and animation very easy to implement and use in SlideRocket and we think it is. It's also probably the most pervasive format on the web today so clearly folks aren't having too much trouble figuring it out. Our first big customer The Weather Channel used SlideRocket to deliver their upfront presentations a few weeks ago and the Flash HD video they embedded in their slides looked incredible.
Larry:When will the rest of the world be able to ditch PowerPoint? Are you still looking at a public (beta) release in June?Nat: The nice thing about SlideRocket is that you don't have to stop using PowerPoint for authoring. You can import your PowerPoint slides into SlideRocket and take advantage of all the additional features in SlideRocket that aren't available in PowerPoint, or Keynote for that matter. One thing we hear consistently is that folks are really happy to find a serious alternative to PowerPoint, especially one that takes advantage of the web and offers you some new ways to think about, create, manage, distribute and measure your presentations.
We're expecting to be able to deliver a public beta this summer. Right now it looks like July but we're really focused on delivering an application that exceeds expectations. It's kind of like a company's quarterly results you can't just beat the street any more you have to blitz it and that's what we're working on, blitzing every other presentation tool you've ever seen. Just try it and let us know what you think.
I've been impressed with SlideRocket from the get-go, and that last paragraph provides you with some insight into their development mindset. This company is focused on revolutionizing the way we create, manage, share and analyze presentations. They started with a great concept, a good product, and open minds. It has been quite some time since I've come across any company that listens as intently as they to do. While there are still many bugs to be flushed out and there's lots of work to still be done, based on my experience with the product and their staff so far, I'm extremely confident that they're more than capable of meeting their goal and exceeding user expectations.
Private BETA Invites
If you're a registered Media-Geek.com member, log-in and come back to this article; you'll find a link here to grab one of the limited number of private beta invites.
Click Here To Participate in the SlideRocket Private BETA
