Focus on Narration

As Brainshark's CEO Joe Gustafson and David Klein, the company's product director, pointed out when we talked to them last week, today's presentations at conferences or business meetings either include too much information per slide or consist of nothing more than just a few words and images per slide. While it is great that a lot of speakers make their presentations available after a public talk, most of these slides mean very little without the narration of the presenter. By giving presenters a wide range of options to add narration to their slides and to add videos and other documents, myBrainshark hopes to bring this context back to these disembodied presentations.

In comparison with Slideshare, myBrainshark is more flexible when it comes to how a presentation can be organized. Inside your presentation, you can easily switch back and forth between documents (Brainshark supports Office 2003 and 2007) and videos, for example. A Brainshark presentation doesn't even have to include a PowerPoint file - you can also use the service to voice-annotate a whitepaper, for example, or to narrate that exciting Excel spreadsheet you worked on all weekend long.

Focus on Professionals

While the company is mostly targeting business users - something that's clearly in Brainshark's DNA - users can also easily create a photo slideshow with the service. While Brainshark is marketing this feature as an opportunity for real-estate agents to showcase their offerings, nobody is going to stop you from putting up a narrated slideshow of your latest family picnic, either.

Selling Presentations

MyBrainshark also gives professionals the ability to sell their presentations. While anybody can register for a free account, Brainshark will give professionals the opportunity to go through a vetting process and then sell their presentations on the site. One example currently available on the service is a presentation about sexual harassment prevention for managers, which is selling for $15. These professionals (Brainshark calls them 'Learning Providers') can set their own prices for these presentations.

Verdict

Overall, the fact that Brainshark has been in this business for 10 years clearly shows in the product, which is very polished. Even though it only offers a subset of the features available in Brainshark's enterprise product, myBrainshark still offers more features and flexibility than most other online presentation services.

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.

Using the SlideShare Ribbon, users gain the ability to share presentations from within PowerPoint, update existing presentations with new content, search existing SlideShare presentations for examples, download SlideShare content for remixing, and view presentations from contacts and groups. User can also check their SlideShare statistics from within PowerPoint.

In short, SlideShare makes PowerPoint social.

That's what makes this release so interesting. SlideShare has taken the opportunity to move beyond browser development - the traditional home of social features - to work on a different piece of desktop software. And in PowerPoint, SlideShare has chosen an app that, by and large, has not been seen as a venue for social behavior, at all.

The idea of using PowerPoint to access Web resources isn't earth shattering. Microsoft has provided the ability to dynamically download PowerPoint clip art for quite some time. But that has always been within the realm of delivering Microsoft content to the user. This is the first time that those types of Web-based interactions have taken on more of a social-networking context - by delivering and sharing content from a variety of users. And that suddenly casts all desktop software in a new light - no matter how "unsocial" a particular app may seem.

No doubt this is just the first of many such add-ins that will imbue our most used applications with social features. And that will make even the most tedious of applications increasingly valuable to us.

To install the SlideShare Ribbon, you'll need to PowerPoint 2007, Windows XP Service Pack 2 or later, and .NET Framework 3.5 SP1.

The SlideRocket editor in action.

SlideRocket has everything you'd expect from a presentation app -- powerful slide and presentation authoring tools, pretty transitions and image and video manipulations and animations, charting and table creation, and the ability to import PowerPoint files (export is coming soon). It also has some features you wouldn't necessarily expect in an online application, like the ability to import your own fonts, a plugin architecture that will allow third-parties to create their own transitions and effects, and an offline Adobe AIR-based player (a full AIR-based version of the editor is also planned).

But where SlideRocket really shines it in its approach to community, sharing, and collaboration. Already active in the application is the concept of an asset library, where you can pull in assets (images, video, etc.) from any source, as well as directly from the web. Right now, SlideRocket searches Flickr and Yahoo! Images from inside the app and can add images it finds to the user's asset library.

Users can pull images from Flickr directly from within SlideRocket.

According to Grasso, the company plans to create a repository of assets from third party partners that users can draw from or purchase. SlideRocket intends their asset marketplace to include more than just stock photos and videos, but other types of data as well. What's more interesting, that is that this data could potentially be dynamically updated. So, for example, if you create a chart using statistics from an outside source, for example a Google Docs spreadsheet, if the stats are updated later in the spreadsheet, the changes are made dynamically and automatically on whatever slide they are included.

SlideRocket also sports great collaboration and versioning features. All presentations and slides can be shared with permissions set by the user, and slides can be updated and have updates pushed live to any presentation they're included in. So, for example, if marketing creates a presentation for the sales department and some key piece of collateral changes, the sales team can go in later and update the presentation and have it pushed directly to the marketing guys.

SlideRocket's stats let you see who has been looking at your presentations and how long they've been viewing each slide.

On the community end, SlideRocket hopes to create an ecosystem around presentations where assets, templates, and plugins can be shared both globally, as well as privately within a single company.

SlideRocket intends to hold a public beta in the next couple of months and officially launch sometime in June, at which time the company will offer a free version as well as a couple of paid versions of the software. SlideRocket is already being used by the Weather Channel for some of their internal presentations.

Until the June launch, the best way to get into the private beta is via one of the 500 invites for ReadWriteWeb readers. Grasso told me that there are about 19,500 people on the waiting list to get in, and so far only about 2,200 have actually used the app. So your best bet is to snag one of these invites while you still can.