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We've written before about Brainshark's mobile slide show app and today they have announced the availability of SlideShark Team Edition. It adds admin controls, team-wide content sharing, and usage analytics to the individual features found previously.

With Team Edition, sales teams for example can share their slide decks as they tote about their iPads around the countryside. Individuals can still upload PowerPoint slides for their own use too.

We have written earlier about ways to dress up your PowerPoints
with Zurb's Reel and Arctic Fox. There are several other players getting into the game with presentation apps and add-ons that go beyond just making your slides more attractive. New this week are tools from Zoho.com, and Trivantis' Snap by Lectora.

Brainshark, the online presentation provider that we've covered previously, today announced a free new Android app that connects to both its free MyBrainshark service as well as the paid corporate service. This is in addition to their existing iOS app. The Android app is available today from the Android Market and will also work on RIM's Playbook.

If you're one of the people who shudder at the thought of PowerPoint, but know you still need to make slide presentations, then you probably know (or you should know) about Prezi. Now the company has released a Prezi app for the iPad, that will give users the ability share their Prezi presentations via the device.

The free app lets you access your presentations via the iPad, and the device's pan and pinch motions work perfectly with the visual presentation style that Prezi is already known for. Rather than flipping through a series of slides, Prezi zooms you in and out of the appropriate portions of a presentation, creating a much more animated and visually-appealing experience.

Whether they're for clients, customers or colleagues, visual presentations are an unavoidable part of doing business. For years, Microsoft PowerPoint has been the standard bearer of slide presentation applications, but several Web-based alternatives have emerged.

For the most part, the alternatives offer similar functionality to PowerPoint, sometimes more, sometimes less. One obvious advantage to Web-based presentations is that they're stored in the cloud, eliminating the potential for nightmare scenarios involving lost or corrupted thumb drives.

The makers of Web-based presentation builder Prezi yesterday announced Prezi Meeting, a new feature that enables up to 10 users to collaborate on presentations in real time.

Prezi touts their offering as a new approach to slide-based presentations. Instead of standard, PowerPoint-style slideshows, Prezi generates one giant slide containing the entire presentation, and each important element is zoomed in and out of in sequential order. It takes the often boring experience of a slideshow and turns it into a more dynamic, 3D-feeling one.

Multimedia presentation company Brainshark just launched a new feature that lets the company's users stream their multimedia presentations to mobile devices, including Blackberry, iOS devices, Android phones and the Palm Pre. The company, which allows its users to create narrated versions of their PowerPoint presentations and mix these with additional video and audio content, now offers live streams of these presentations that are compatible with the major mobile platforms. Mobile streaming is available for users of Brainshark's free myBrainshark service, as well as Brainshark's enterprise customers.

The idea that PowerPoint is evil is not new. But on Monday, the New York Times rekindled discussions about the pitfalls of its use during presentations when it published a story on the U.S. military titled "We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint."

The article details both the complexity and the duration of the slides the military utilizes for its briefings, and contains the rather damning quotation from General McChrystal, leader of NATO forces in Afghanistan, who when shown a particularly convoluted graphic (see below) during one briefing said, "When we understand that slide we'll have won the war."

In the ancient times before the internet, a business plan was what you wrote to appease the Gods of private equity and venture capital. It was a thick document, full of scientific analysis, market data and of course, a J-curve shaped projection of sales. The problem was that few investors would make it through your epic masterpiece. Instead, they'd skip to the juicy parts. Former CEO of Elance and current founder of Roach Capital Partners, Eric Roach, shares what he's kept in the business plan to raise $55 million dollars in venture capital in two months.

If you want to be a great public speaker, your preparation has to be more than just blasting gangsta rap and shadow boxing in front of the mirror. Whether you have to videotape yourself speaking, join a presentation club, or rewrite your PowerPoint deck 40 times, it's important to be able to tell your own story. Few of us are born with the gift of public speaking but with a little preparation we can learn to persuade, sell and inspire.