It’s official, SlideRocket has been nominated for the 2008 Best Design Crunchie! Thanks to everyone who nominated SlideRocket and got us this far.

Now is where the spark ignites, where the fuel explodes and sends the rocket skyward, where we find out who has the right stuff and we separate the men from the boys. Now is when we need your vote to get us on the winners podium.
Vote for SlideRocket
(vote before midnight Jan 5)
What Winning a Crunchie Means To Us

• It means you voted, thanks, that means a lot
• The judges like us, they really really like us
• We tangled with the competition and came out on top
• We get some free PR
• We raised awareness about SlideRocket
• More and more people find out that SlideRocket is a better way to make great presentations
• We continue to improve SlideRocket and help you make great presentations
• You make great presentations and win more business, kudos from your peers, and your competitors tremble every time you launch SlideRocket

See what good your vote can do?
Thanks from everyone at SlideRocket.

We’ve got a couple new additions to the SlideRocket family we are excited to announce!  First off, the shiny new home page.  If you’ve logged into SlideRocket in the past few days (which I hope all of you have!), you may have noticed this bright new holiday treat.  If you haven’t logged in in a bit, you should do that now.  Don’t worry, I’ll wait…

Great.  So, what can you do on this new home page, you ask?  Well, since it is SlideRocket’s goal to make your life easier in every way, that is just what we’ve done here.  You’ll see that you land on an “All” tab.  This is essentially a quick snapshot of everything that is happening in your SlideRocket account.  Here you will find presentations that have been recently modified, presentations that have been recently viewed, new presentations that have been shared with you, and announcements from SlideRocket.  Too much information at once?  No problem.  You can click on the “Announcements” tab to find out what is new at SlideRocket Mission Control, hit up the “Shared Items” to find out what has been shared with you, or if your permissions have changed on a presentation, and you can also check out the right rail to quickly and easily find presentations that you’ve modified and checked out.  Pretty cool, eh?  We’ve gotten a lot of feedback that as you have started to work with groups and people within your organizations that you wanted a fast way to see all the SlideRocket changes, and we hope the new home page does just that.  As always, we relish your feedback, so please leave it in the comments, or post a feature request in our UserVoice forum.

And the second addition to SlideRocket is me, actually, and I wanted to introduce myself properly.  I’m Tracy, and I’ve recently joined the SlideRocket Crew to lend a hand to our community efforts, as well as do some product marketing work.  What that means to you is that I really really want to hear from you.  All of you.  Really.  (OK, maybe not all at once…).  You’ll be hearing from me on this blog, on Twitter, and on our FriendFeed, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and Flickr accounts, and the more I hear from you the better SlideRocket can be.  And I’d love your help getting the word out about SlideRocket – hopefully together we can stop the world from having to deal with Death by PowerPoint!  So please, let me know what you love, what you don’t love, what you want, and what you need.  You can reach me in all the places I just talked about, and you can email me at tracyf at sliderocket dot com.  I look forward to getting to know all of you.

Picture this: You’ve just built a presentation that contains very sensitive information.  You need for some people to see it – what it says is important, and you have put time and energy into the creating something you believe is the best way to get your thoughts across.  But (and this is a big but), it would be very upsetting if this presentation was seen beyond its intended audience.  What to do? You put “confidential” in the template, hoping people will get the message, and you email it where it needs to go. As you hit “Send,” you say a little prayer that it is only seen by the people to whom you are sending it.  And then you’ve done your best, right? There’s no way for you to know if it gets passed around, unless it happens to end up on the Internet. Which, sadly, seems to happen pretty often. Sound familiar?

At SlideRocket, we’ve seen a number of examples where this very thing has happened (here’s one, for example), and it would not be surprising to any of us to know that it has happened to you or within your organization.  This was part of why we built security into the SlideRocket application from the beginning – we think this is hugely important for any presentation, sensitive or not.

So now, imagine this: You’ve built the same presentation as above, but this time you’ve built it in SlideRocket. You can choose whether your presentation is publicly available, or you can opt to share the presentation via an email link with exactly – and only – the people you want to see it.  You can select a  password that is needed to view it.  You can further choose whether your viewers are allowed to print and/or embed your presentation or not. You can even set an expiration date on your presentation, so that it can only be seen for a certain period of time. Now, having set the security to exactly how you want it, you can hit “Send” with confidence. And even better? Once it is sent, you can track who has looked at it, when they saw it, and exactly how long they spent on each slide. You can KNOW that your presentation has stayed where it was meant to.

Your Information + Confidence + Knowledge. This is something you just can’t achieve using most presentation software, but SlideRocket helps you get there. Can you picture that?

We’d love to hear if you’ve used this feature, or stories about times you wish you had.  Please tell us about your experiences in the comments!

TechCrunch is ramping-up to the 2008 Crunchies and it’s time to think about what happened in technology this year. While the Crunchies are an awards ceremony the process of getting to the awards is actually about customer and peer recognition.

This year has been great for SlideRocket. We raised money to build a company, won some awards, ran successful private and public beta programs, signed up thousands of users who’ve had great SlideRocket experiences, launched SlideRocket to the public, launched the SlideRocket Marketplace and established ourselves in the Software-as-a-Service, Rich Internet Application, productivity software landscape. More importantly we sincerely we hope we’ve done enough to earn your nomination in one of the following categories. We’re entering the 3 categories that make the most sense for us:

- Best Design – Recognition for best user-interface design

- Best Enterprise – For a company focused on enterprise or business-to-business applications and services

- Best New Startup of 2008 – Product must have launched in 2008.

Click the link if you would like to nominate SlideRocket for a Crunchie. We thank you for your consideration and your nomination. We hope to see you on the winners podium so we can thank you properly

The SlideRocket Team.