I attended my second presentation camp last weekend and thought I’d share some notes and resources from the day, this time in LA at Blank Spaces.

Presentation Camp LA - Agenda

Presentation Camp is an event based on the barcamp model of ad-hoc unconferences where people share and learn in an open environment. Find out more about barcamp. My experience so far is that while there are a basic set of guidelines for barcamps, every event is different and very much determined by attendee ideas, voices, votes and (generally) consensus. Presentation Camp L.A. had a $10 registration fee but most barcamps are free. I must say that I’ve paid considerably more to attend events and been less satisfied so I consider it money well spent. Presentation Camp L.A. also had corporate sponsors so we had food and beverages all day and a mountain of appropriate give aways and prizes.

There were some top notch presenters at Presentation Camp L.A. including the organizers Cliff Atkinson, Lisa Braithwaite and Colleen Wainwright but the sessions I enjoyed the most were led by Olivia Mitchell (from my home town of Wellington, New Zealand) who led sessions on Presenting With Twitter and Handling Hecklers, Andy Goodman who presented his “Why Bad Presentations Happen To Good Causes” (if you’re dong ANY kind of presentation I highly recommend you get a copy of his book and review his research on what audiences want and don’t want) and Terrence McNally presented some great guidelines for using narrative in your communications.

There were plenty of other excellent presentations at presentation camp LA, these are just the ones that resonated with me. If you haven’t attended a presentation camp yet I highly recommend it. I’m 100% sure you’ll meet interesting people, learn how to make and deliver better presentations and very likely have fun in the process. You can subscribe to the Presentation Camp Google Group to find out when an event is coming to a location near you or to find like minded folks who’ll help you organize one. See you there!

With the price of gas on the rise we’re here to help you reduce your reliance on fossil fuels and embrace your green self by using SlideRocket to make great presentations and win new business from the comfort of your office. No more airport security, missed connections or odorous cabs. With our HD web meetings and multiple publishing options, it can be just you, your SlideRocket presentation and your customers.

Collaborate with your peers in real time, easily publish and share your presentations online, conduct HD web meetings from your desk and save the planet in the process. All in a days work.

From now until the end of the June we’re letting you go green and save some green in the process. Buy 2 or more business annual subscriptions and we’ll give you 3 free months for every user. 2 users nets you six free months, 3 users gets you 9 and so on and so on.

So how do you get in on the deal? Just do one of the below:

• Call us at (415) 436-9134, select option 2 OR
  
• Email sales at sliderocket dot com
  

to get started.  This offer expires midnight on June 30th, don’t miss out!
Note: Free months are not transferable.

Our latest addition, which you may have read about already, is the inclusion of AudioMicro in our marketplace.  Check it out if you haven’t already, especially since research shows that the addition of audio to your presentations can keep your audience watching 2-3 times longer than those without. There’s a ton to choose from, including music, sound effects and more, so go give your presentations some audio love!

In addition to AudioMicro, we also released a bunch of bug fixes:

• Some folks were getting an AS error when sending meeting invites - this has been fixed
• Invite statistics now show the email address the invite was sent to instead of first and last name
• We fixed a few Mimeo bugs (our Marketplace printing partner):
  • Mimeo now prints using FLV and SWF poster frames
  • Vertical aspect ratios are no longer being cropped when printing with Mimeo
  • Page numbers should now print correctly
• The Desktop Presenter is now officially called the Desktop Presenter, both in and out of the app
• You should no longer see an AS error when adding an image to a slide in picture layout
• Slides from shared presentations no longer show “Created by Unknown” in the “Group by Presentation” view. They should now show the name of the person who created the slide
• If you use an asset in a custom theme, it now gets recorded in the “where is this asset used” dialog
• If you are given the capability “Can Create Shared Folders” by your account admin, you can now edit permissions on folders you create
• If you attempt to delete a slide or asset from your library which is in use in a presentation, you now get an alert before you delete it
• When using a linked Google spreadsheet, rows no longer duplicate and data refreshes correctly when the Google spreadsheet is refreshed
• 8.5 x 11 documents should now print properly
• When conducting a Remote Meeting, you now get a nice summary of whether each audience member has loaded the current slide
• All audio now ends when a Remote Meeting is ended

Please let us know if you have any questions, and of course, keep submitting any bugs you find and suggesting new features for us! We really love your feedback.

“One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain.” - Bob Marley (1945-1981)

AudioMicro brings music and sound effects to the SlideRocket Marketplace

This week we added music and sound effects to the SlideRocket Marketplace via our newest content partner AudioMicro. AudioMicro provides an extensive library of user-generated micro stock music, sound effects, production music, production elements and music cues for incredibly low prices and we’re very happy to offer this content, tightly integrated into SlideRocket, to help you make great presentations.

As with any communication media, presentations (especially ones delivered sans presenter) are greatly enhanced with the addition of appropriate audio. Music can help determine the mood or character of your presentation and compliment or accentuate your message, while effects can be used to grab attention or create highlights. More importantly audio can create an emotional reaction to your presentation communications which makes them far more memorable for viewers. The combination of these is perhaps why presentations with audio are on average watched 2 to 3 times longer than those without. To see AudioMicro’s library of audio just login to SlideRocket and click on the Marketplace button at the top of the screen. You can search across genres, preview tracks and then click to buy and add your selected audio files to your library, it’s that simple.

“SlideRocket’s beautiful design and powerful communication capabilities made a natural fit for the AudioMicro music and sound effects library”, said Ryan Born, chief executive officer, AudioMicro. “50% of the entertainment value of visual media comes from the audio.  With over 125,000 tracks to choose from, SlideRocket users are now able to create more compelling, attention grabbing presentations, using AudioMicro music and effects to engage their audience.”

At SlideRocket we’re embracing the use of audio in our own corporate communications. Here’s an example of a presentation news release we created that uses an ambient music bed to a produce a futuristic, upbeat mood for telling our SlideRocket Marketplace story. This presentation auto-runs for 82 seconds but has an average viewing time of 4m 52s, roughly 4 times longer than the programmed length. In addition our SlideRocket presentation metrics tells us that viewers stayed on the last slide for an average of 2m 46s just to listen to the remainder of the audio track. Impressive. If you have SlideRocket presentations that use audio, we’d love to see er… hear them. Please send your published presentation link to community at sliderocket dot com.

Music and effects adds another element to our vision of a complete content and services marketplace for you to use as you build your multimedia communications but we’re not stopping here. Stay tuned for more marketplace updates and if you have either content or services you’d like to offer via the SlideRocket Marketplace please send an email to marketplace at sliderocket dot com and let us know how you’d like to get involved.

We’re really happy to announce our preferred pricing for education which provides an incredible discount on our list pricing and a great set of value for for schools.

SlideRocket announces preferred pricing for K-12 Education

Naturally you can watch a SlideRocket presentation about the news or you can read the press release and if you want to submit your education credentials to qualify for K-12 education pricing you can go to our registration page which will guide you through the process. If you’re an educator from a higher education school please email sales at sliderocket dot com to find out about pricing for your organization.

We’ve been working with educators in a number of schools around the United States and abroad since the beginning of the year to understand how SlideRocket can facilitate communication skills learning. Here’s what we found out:

Classroom Collaboration - SlideRocket’s collaboration features really help teachers manage their class presentation projects, from delivering assignments to visibility into who’s doing what to reviewing and assigning grades and showcasing student work. For students, SlideRocket gives them the ability to work both independently or in groups to achieve project goals and make great presentations.

Accessibility - With SlideRocket there’s no software to install, no files to transfer, no resource files to manage or assemble, all you need to do is sign up, log in and start making great presentations. This means that any student can complete a communication skills project using SlideRocket in a school computer lab, internet cafe, or on a home computer where their work is always available online.

Ease of Use - SlideRocket has an intuitive user interface that presents a short learning curve in order to achieve productivity. This helps teachers and students can focus on the assignment without the concern of technology distractions and limitations.

Sharing - SlideRocket makes sharing presentations a breeze by offering a variety of publishing options. Presentations can easily be shared as an online link, sent as an email or embedded into a blog or web page or published to Twitter making it easy for teachers, parents and other family members to view presentation projects.

Transitions and Effects - SlideRocket offers a variety of slide transition, builds and effects to add dynamism and identity to a presentation. This helps students make presentations that express their personality and ideas in a style unique to them.

It’s Fun - We heard from our group of teachers that SlideRocket makes learning communication skills fun and many of the students like it so much they use it in other classes too. What more could we ask for!

Thank you to all the educators who participated in our evaluations, we look forward to helping you, your peers and all your students make great presentations.

We’ve had a couple exciting releases recently I wanted to be sure to tell everyone about.  There’s some fun new features to explore, and a whole bunch of bug fixes.  Since we are a beta product, we really value all your feedback about things you may uncover while you are using SlideRocket, so we wanted to start telling you more about the issues we are finding and fixing.  This isn’t an exhaustive list of recent bug fixes, but highlights some of the bigger ones from the last couple of releases.  We will be posting these kinds of updates regularly from now on, and we hope you find them helpful.

First off, let’s talk about new features:

• Folders: The biggest thing we’ve pushed out recently is our new collaboration folder structure. You can read all about that here.
• Recycle Bin: A bunch of you have requested (in UserVoice and beyond!) a recycle bin, where you can put items you no longer want in your library without deleting them completely.  Well, now you have one!  When you drag and drop presentations/slides/assets into the Recycle Bin, they will no longer be visible but will be available for 30 days should you decide you want them again. One of the nifty things about our Recycle Bin is that there is actually one for each library (Presentations, Slides, Assets, Themes).  When you drag a presentation to the Recycle Bin, the various Slides, Assets and Themes in that presentation will automatically be put in their respective Recycle Bins.  This way, if you want to restore any part of your presentation, you are able to do so without having to restore the entire presentation.  Of course, you can also drag individual Slides, Assets and Themes into your Recycle Bin.
• PowerPoint Import: We completely overhauled this feature. Previously, our importer had you choose between importing and making things editable (which would not work for things SlideRocket can’t recognize), and importing as flat non-editable images to preserve 100% fidelity.  We’ve made this much easier, as well as improving the overall import functionality.  The default option is now a merged version of the previous importer - everything that we can edit will come in editable, and those things we can’t yet (such as SmartArt) will come in as flat images so the fidelity of your PowerPoint is always preserved.  You can also still choose to import everything in your PowerPoint as a flat image if you like. We will keep improving on this and adding functionality, of course, but we’re pretty psyched with the new importer, and would love to hear what you think. We’ve seen some nice tweets about it like this one, and appreciate any and all feedback!
• Tables: Ditto on these - we did a big overhaul here as well.  While this isn’t technically a new feature, we’ve improved them so much we kinda think it is.  The biggest changes you’ll find here are that it is much easier to work with bigger tables, multi-selecting of cells is also much improved, and manipulating cell size is now super easy. Again, please let us know what you think!

And here are some of the bugs we have fixed in the last couple of releases:

• Keyboard shortcuts in IE are up and running - please let us know if you find any shortcuts that aren’t functioning the way they should
• We’ve dramatically improved our “Undo” functionality, and it should now be consistent. Again, please let us know if you are finding any Undo glitches - we definitely want to hear about them
• We’ve fixed a couple of issues with hyperlinks: “previous” and “next” hyperlinks now work, and duplicating a presentation with hyperlinks in it now preserves those in the presentation copy
• Notes were being copied across all slides in a presentation; this is now fixed
• The “tab” key.  This wasn’t working for everyone before. It should be all good now
• You can now add bullets easily to textboxes that already contain lines of text
• All “Invite” statistics, including time viewed and length slide viewed, are now corrected and shown
• When rewinding a video in a Web Meeting, your attendees are now dropped to the right place
• If your company deletes a user, that person’s folders now get reassigned to someone so nothing is lost
• When a new shared folder is created, a permissions dialog now pops up so you can set folder permissions immediately
• A warning dialog that all permissions will be removed now shows when an item is moved from the shared folders to the private folders
• When a presentation is checked out for editing, it now specifies who is editing it
• Some library slides were missing names; this is now fixed
• A few people were seeing that upon adding a slide to the library from a shared presentation, the slide was then locked for the creator; this is now fixed
• Selecting a folder or search in one library no longer affects folders or searches when moving to a different library
• When changes are made to images, you are now always prompted to save changes when exiting SlideRocket
• You can now delete a theme even if it is in use in presentations
• Purchased images will now immediately show in your Asset Library
• Wipe/Sparkle builds no longer flash before playing
• If the first slide in a presentation has a transition, it now plays correctly in the full-screen player

Again, this is just a smattering of what was in our recent releases.  Hopefully, this info is helpful to you, and we will be doing these posts with every release going forward.  Let us know if you have any thoughts/questions!