ReadWriteWeb

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.

For the last 10 years, Brainshark has offered a very popular on-demand presentations service for enterprises. While most web services today typically start out by offering free services and then slowly move towards offering paid features, Brainshark is turning this model on its head. While the company already offers a profitable paid product, Brainshark just launched a free version of its service today. MyBrainshark, as this new service is called, was built on top of Brainshark's enterprise product. In terms of its features, MyBrainshark clearly takes on Slideshare and similar services head-on, though the company is mostly targeting business customers for now.

Ever wish you had the ear of the employees who work on Microsoft Office? For all those whose work lives and breathes Office, here's your chance to make yourself heard. Two enterprising Microsoft employees have created MakeOfficeBetter.com, an unofficial outlet for ideas that will improve the world's most popular office suite.

Like the White House project that started up in March, the site is basically a clone of Digg's functionality, even if it isn't using that exact software. By logging in with your OpenID or signing up, you can submit new ideas and vote up favorites.

Come July, ThinkFree, the web office provider which first added mobile access in 2008, will unveil the only complete Office suite for the Android OS.

To date, the official Android Market has had slim pickings when it comes to document editing, with the majority of apps being simple notepads. For enterprise users, so many of whom still rely heavily on Microsoft Office, a notepad simply won't cut it.

SlideShare is the most popular social site for presentations on the Web. Microsoft PowerPoint - despite its detractors - remains the most popular presentation software around. What if those two had the power to work together? What if sharing new PowerPoint presentations was as easy as clicking a button?

Now, it can be. Today, SlideShare is introducing the "SlideShare Ribbon" an add-in that makes the sharing and social features of SlideShare accessible without even leaving PowerPoint.

This week has been good for SlideRocket, an online presentation application built on Adobe's Flex platform. The app had an ultra successful public debut at the Under the Radar Conference, where it won 3 out of 4 possible awards, and they also announced a $2 million Series A investment from Hummer Winblad. This morning I got a demo of the application from founder Mitch Grasso and came away duly impressed. 500 lucky ReadWriteWeb users can get a spot in the private SlideRocket beta by clicking here.