Free Software Linux

SlideRocket is a online presentation solution that provides a very compelling user experience and an interesting total solution. From their web site: "SlideRocket is a web application that provides everything you need to design professional quality presentations, manage and share libraries of slides and assets, and to deliver presentations in person or remotely over the web." What enables it to be even considered as an option is the interactivity of the user experience. Their recently added demo shows some great features:

• the UI comprises a WYSIWYG editor with a standard menu-bar and a powerful sidebar from which all formatting options are selected
• the UI design is elegantly simple and clean
• formatting changes made in the side-bar can be viewed in the editor in real-time; no switching back and forth between popup dialogs and the main view, no need for Apply or OK buttons
• secondary popup dialogs are small, deliver focussed functionality, and relatively unobtrusive

However, a monthly subscription online app has to deliver a lot to beat the market dominance of buy-once Microsoft Powerpoint, or the free single-user features of OpenOffice.org Impress, or the free ease-of-access and sharing capabilities of Google Documents. Aside from sheer in-your-face usability, the features that make it interesting are:

• the ability to manage presentation assets (graphics, templates, etc.) and to leverage free assets on Flickr and Youtube
• the potential to build a marketplace for new assets

In the future, I suspect that SlideRocket will have to offer free service to end users (supported by advertising that will be shown to users and less obtrusive advertising when presenting) and significantly cheaper service ($12 per month) to business users. But its real money-maker could be the marketplace, especially if it supports raising requests for other users to create assets or to forward matching free assets. Update: Google Docs just pushed out over 300 new templates, including a lot of attractive and modern business-oriented documents and presentations. Whoever said starting an online business was easy?

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