We are progressing quickly to our upcoming public beta launch and pushed a major new build last week that fixes tons of issues and adds some often requested new features. Before we get to the new stuff, we just want to send out a huge thanks to the over 300 beta testers who have sent in bug reports. We are a small team (smaller than most of you might think) and your support and feedback has been tremendously helpful. Please keep it up!

So here’s some of the stuff we just released:

Scalability Improvements

The SlideRocket servers have been running beyond our expectations. We’ve let in over 7,500 beta users and had no unplanned downtime this year. But we haven’t sat still and are working hard to make sure that we can handle a large load of silmutaneous users as well as large groups of people collaborating together within a single organization or across multiple organizations. This new release has a lot of changes underneath the hood to make sure things run smoothly as we grow. Most of them won’t directly impact your experience but, one that will is…

Improved Startup Speed

Due to optimizations in how and when SlideRocket loads data, you should now see about an 85% speed improvement in startup when logging into SlideRocket.

Playback Performance

A few people have commented on the lag between clicking to go to the next slide and when the slide loaded. Obviously, this is a big difference between SlideRocket and desktop tools since we are loading data from a remote server instead of your local hard drive. With this new version of SlideRocket, the next slide or video is pre-cached once the current slide has finished loading. As long as you don’t click too quickly, you’ll notice near instant transitioning to the next slide and no longer have to wait for video to buffer.

Auto-Recovery

Probably the number one issue that was frustrating users was losing unsaved work if their connection timed out or they hit an unrecoverable bug. With this release we’ve introduced auto-recovery of unsaved work. We think this is a better solution than just auto-saving all the time since you can decide if you want to recover anything you wasn’t saved the next time you connect. Rest assured, you aren’t working without a safety net anymore. And, if that’s not enough, we also added….

Presentation Versioning

We’ve had the ability to revert to a previous version of a slide for a little while but with this new release, you can also revert to a previous version of your entire presentation. Every time you save the presentation a new version is created that you can revert to. Deleted slides and assets can all be recovered if needed.

Improved Flickr Import

We’ve got a ton of plans for integrating with external content services but we felt that the current Flickr import needed some improvements immediately. First of all, we’ve added options for sorting your results which should help you find the right image faster. We also automatically add attribution tooltips to creative commons licensed-images now. And, finally, now when you import a Flickr image it’s imported into your asset library as opposed to just linked back to Flickr. This takes up a little bit of disk space but saves you from worrying if the image is removed or when you want to work offline.

Collaboration
Some of the biggest changes in this new release were around enabling collaboration within and across organizations. SlideRocket lets you share assets, slides, and presentations with others while setting user and group-based permissions. We’ve got a little bit more testing to do on collaboration features and plan to start letting people use these new features this week.

Presentation Audio
We’ve always had the ability to playback an audio file per slide but, due to popular request, we’ve also added the feature to set an audio file to play across all your slides. Coupled with slide auto-advancing and looping features,  you can now create unattended presentations to run in SlideRocket.

Image Cropping
Another obvious one. You can now non-destructively crop and scale images within SlideRocket.

We hope you like the new features and performance improvements. As always please send your ideas and observations to feedback@sliderocket.com.

We just posted a job vacancy on the web site for a training and support manager and we’d love to hear from you or someone you know if you think there’s a fit. This is a great opportunity for the right person to get deeply involved in an early stage company to define and establish two very critical service components then decide how these parts of the business mature. Like any startup there’s always something to do, we work long hours and we’re all passionate believers that what we’re building will go way beyond the kind of presentation software that’s available today. If you’re into it, come join the team.

Recently one of our beta users (we’ll call her Kelly) was trying to upload a large 42Mb Flash animation file.

“Hi, I am trying to add a flash animation to a presentation that is 42meg and am hitting a limit that you have set for these. I am not sure why you have a limit here as it prevents me from using this animation. Warm regards, Kelly”.

Apparently size does matter to Kelly so we said…

“Hi Kelly, Thanks again for writing to SlideRocket. Our main concern is that viewing presentations with massively large assets will result in a more sluggish viewer experience due to the fact that they will have to download all of the presentation as they view it. We are after all a web application, and the web is the medium we all use for data transfer. With that said, we can understand the need for more upload disk space and are consulting internally on raising upload limits. Hope that helps. Please keep writing in with your suggestions. SlideRocket Mission Control”.

shortly thereafter Kelly replied…

“Thanks for the quick follow up and willingness to make changes. I think the justification for changing this limit is in fact you are not just a web application. From a users viewpoint you are both web and a nonweb application. After all that is what Sliderocket is for isn’t it? I personally cannot be dependent of having internet connection when I am giving presentations and imagine many others would be the same. Thanks, Kelly”.

and so we said…

“Hi Kelly, You’ve prompted some spirited discussion here and we’ve decided to increase the file size uppload limit to 100MB. Due to where we are in our release cycle, it might be a week or two until we are able to push out the new build to our servers. Thanks for your patience and great input. SlideRocket Mission Control”.

and then Kelly said…

“It is always nice to feel like someone is listening… I appreciate it. Kelly”.

We are listening and we absolutely appreciate all the beta feedback. Thanks Kelly and everyone else who’s helping us make SlideRocket into a world class product. SlideRocket is committed to providing you with the best tools, content and services to make your presentations great.

Lately we’ve been pretty caught up figuring out how to communicate all the value that is SlideRocket. Our challenge is that SlideRocket crosses multiple existing categories of software like presentation authoring (PowerPoint, Keynote etc.), collaboration (MS Groove) content management (SharePoint, Interwoven, EMC), online presentations (e.g. WebEx, GoToMeeting) and of course does a few new things too like Plugins, Secure Sharing, Presentation Metrics and The SlideRocket Marketplace. What do we call this new super category? Super Presentations-R-Us? All-In-One Presentation Authoring, Management, Sharing & Metrics? We can’t honestly say that we’ve cracked it yet. Right now we’re just going to go with SlideRocket

To counter balance all this high-level “strategizing” we decided to get back to basics and start a series of demo movies that illustrate how fun and quick SlideRocket is to use and show you some tricks and tips to get you started.

You can view these at the new demo movies page. Pull up a chair, make some popcorn and settle in for some fun and informative viewing.

Well known technical evangelist Robert Scoble recently Twittered that he didn’t feel the need to purchase the latest version of Microsoft Office because all his documents now reside in the cloud on various web based applications / services (one of which is SlideRocket).

I’ve been watching my usage. In two months I’ve only used Outlook out of the entire Office Suite. Everything else? Moved onto online servcs.” - 09:06 AM April 30, 2008 from web. - Robert Scoble

While we’re very happy to hear that, Mr. Scoble is more than probably in the early adopter category for crossing the chasm so we’re wondering what the rest of you think. Take our productivity tools poll and see who else is ready to jump into the cloud.

Your Market Research Here