Perhaps Jobs needs to add some flare to his next presentation - mix things up a bit. If that's the case, then he need look no farther than SingTel's Bill Chang who used augmented reality to wow the audience at i.luminate, the company's business innovations conference.

Why bother trying to talk your way through such information with slides with flow charts and other graphics. The presentation created with augmented reality does a far better job of explaining how a company's infrastructure can be moved to the cloud with SingTel's help. The animations and interactions are well rehearsed and timed perfectly to feel seamlessly integrated into the speaker's actions and words.

Get This in the Hands of Teachers

Augmented reality's potential in the presentation space goes far beyond pontificating corporate execs. I imagine a future where this technology is used in classrooms to help students better understand complex subjects. Thomas Carpenter at Games Alfresco hints that perhaps local news meteorologists could have fun playing with SingTel's "clouds," but why not use similar models to teach kids about climate and weather?

Or, for that matter, why not any other subject that could be bolstered by visual media? As a history buff, I would have loved to see a digital re-enactment of civil war battles played out on my desk as a student. Forget teachers speaking from notes on an overhead projector - teachers could be educating students with interactive 3D video experiences in the future. The only issue with that, of course, is time and money.

For now, SlideShare is only offering these new channels to larger businesses. This is clearly part of SlideShare's monetization strategy and fits in well with SlideShare's other business-oriented products like AdShare and LeadShare, both of which are part of SlideShare's strategy to position itself as a site where professionals can share their content and connect with potential customers.

According to Sinha, these custom channels - which include all of the standard social networking features of SlideShare - will allow businesses to create communities around their content and help these companies to engage their customers. Besides sharing slides, these companies will also be able to aggregate content from their blogs or their Twitter feeds on their SlideShare pages.

In addition to offering branded channels with company logos and a custom look and feel, SlideShare now also offers enterprises the ability to sponsor topical channels.

Sadly, though, it doesn't look like the company plans to give regular users the ability to create and curate their own channels anytime soon. Being able to curate topical channels would be a nice feature, but for now, if you want to do this, you will have to resort to embedding SlideShare files on your own site.

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.

This year Wikipedia survived the launch of Google's Knol, a product many feared Google would give favorable treatment, served up its pages to nearly 700 million unique viewers and launched its first official mobile version of the site. What's next? Big, tech-centered plans.

Yahoo! announced today that Wikipedia has now been added to its semantic and structured data "Search Monkey" program. Yahoo! searchers will now be served up some nicely organized links, summary information and images from Wikipedia when they are available about a search query. We'd sure love to see Google do this same thing.

A Whole Lot More Media Servers and Flickr Integration?

According to an interview this week by Network World with Wikimedia Foundation CTO Brion Vibber, the organization started 2008 with 2 Terabytes of storage for media like images, music and movies. Today that's been increased to 48 Terabytes with the donation and discounted sale of a pile of Sun servers.

Wikipedia expects to see huge increases in media uploads in the coming months and years. Vibber's goals include support for full length, high quality feature film upload to Wikipedia and integration with 3rd party media sites, possibly including Flickr.

That all sounds really exciting to us. We're excited to see what the next year will bring. Happy birthday, Wikipedia!

1) Jazz Up Your PowerPoint

Just because you're stuck using PowerPoint, that doesn't mean your slideshow has to be boring. Get a professional template, read Slide:ology, then choose one or more of the following plugins to add something unique: LiveWeb to surf the net from within the PowerPoint, the Office Labs pptPlex addin which makes PowerPoints deem-zoomable, the Cooliris plugin which makes slideshows 3D just like their browser plugin does, or Freepath, which lets you mashup your slideshows with other web content.

2) SlideRocket

SlideRocket is an online presentation app built on Adobe's Flex platform. Like any presentation app, SlideRocket offers powerful slide and presentation authoring tools, transitions, image and video manipulations and animations, and charting and table creation. You can even import your PowerPoint slides to get started. However, SlideRocket also offers some unique features 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. (You can read our full review here).

3) Web Slides

If instead of bullet points, you're discussing web content, the application called WebSlides from Diigo, makers of the social bookmarking application (also called Diigo), can help. With WebSlides, you can turn your bookmarks or feeds into interactive web content. The application works with their bookmarking tool to automatically allow the creation of slideshows from a list of your bookmarks. The RSS option may be less useful as it only allows the import of one RSS feed, not an entire OPML file.

4) Agglom

After downloading a browser plugin, you can click on the new Agglom button at any time to save all the URLs from each tab in your browser as a set of links. These links can be shared with others via one URL provided to you by the service. One of the options for viewing the links is to view them as a slideshow. Those you share the URL with can view the slideshow with you, access it later, get any changes made to it by RSS, leave comments and suggest additional links.You can set the resulting slideshow to public or private or even password protect it. However, for use in presentations, you could simply play the slideshow of web content. (Read our full review here.)

5) Flowgram

If you want to narrate a tour through web content instead, the new application called Flowgramlets you create a rich, multimedia tour of your content. However, Flowgram isn't limited to web content alone. You can actually mix together web pages, RSS feeds, photos, audio, custom pages, and Office documents including Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and PDFs. The resulting Flowgram runs as a sure-to-please Flash-based application that's ready for embedding on the company's intranet site later on as further proof of your media mastery. In a way, Flowgram is a lot like the oddly-named MyJugaad.in, which allows for slideshows of web pages, videos, and images sourced from Delicious, digg, Google News, Yahoo, Flickr, YouTube, etc. or from a list provided by you or from your RSS feed(s).

6) Animoto

Ready to ditch slideshows altogether? Animoto blends images and music together using motion graphics, effects and transitions to create videos of your imagery using their patent-pending "Cinematic Artificial Intelligence" software,which analyzes the pictures and music that you input and decides on the proper effects and transitions to match both. The end result is better for sharing your photos and not as good for professional presentations, but we can still imagine a few good business uses for this technology. For example, the Animoto video could be used to kick off another presentation or speech. (Read our full review here).

Now Share Them!

Thanks to online slideshow web apps like  and Zoho Show and Google Docs, slideshows can be created, edited, and viewed online. For sharing with others, though, the popular "YouTube for presentations" web site, SlideShare, is a great choice. Here, you can upload your slideshows for everyone to see, download, or embed, depending on how you set the permissions.

If done well, slideshows don't have to be boring - they can both entertain and inform. And it's a lot easier to get your message across when everyone isn't sleeping through your presentation, isn't it?

Enter Agglom, a simple little service built by Italian developer Enrico Foschi. It's a Firefox plug-in that will make sharing a list of links far easier than it's been before.

Agglom is a remarkably easy way to create a "slide show" of live links that you can share with other people. See the screencast demo we recorded below.
For those who prefer to read, there's a text description after the video.

After downloading the plug-in, you can click on the Agglom button at any time. It captures all the URLs from each tab in your browser. After making some admin decisions, including public/private or password protection, you receive one link that you can share with anyone else. They can then follow through the slide show along with you, access it later, get any changes made to it by RSS, leave comments and suggest additional links.

It's simple but looks quite useful.

Presentation Is Powerful

Earlier this month we wrote about five lightweight apps that are useful for web consultants and trainers. If we had known about Agglom then (we just discovered it today via Marjolein Hoekstra's blog CleverClogs) it would have made a great fit there as well.

The web is changing so fast and there's so much information available that providing accessible ways clearly show people what you're talking about is the best way to help friends, family and co-workers wrap their minds around the powerful new tools now available.

Agglom is simple - that's good. It also looks quite useful. That's a sweetspot for applications these days. Can you imagine using it? We can.

The 30 day trial of ScreenSteps Pro took us just a few minutes to learn how to use and we're already excited to use this service for product reviews and tutorials.

We would guess that many people have different export preferences, so it would be nice to see those options expanded even further. See below for some other examples of presentation type services you might also find useful.

Asset management, or changing the order of the images in a presentation, could be easier to do too.

The video below looks much better when viewed full-screen; hit the TV button to view it that way.

Other Services to Check Out

Last weekend Corvida wrote here about a number of online presentation tools, and readers offered even more suggestions in comments.

A few services that could be of interest that weren't mentioned include:

• Screenflow is the hottest new screencast video capturing tool on the market. It's Mac (Leopard) only but tough luck Windows users, you've had all the good screencasting software for years.


• JingProject is a free, quick and dirty screencasting service from the makers of Camtasia. It's Mac and Windows friendly. We've had it crash a lot and direct access to the files is not as simple as it should be, but when it works it's really easy to use.


• There are probably hundreds of other services that combine powerpoint, video, audio and other media types to let you create presentations. What are your favorites?

The two mentioned above capture moving images, which can sometimes take way too long to get right. We think that ScreenSteps looks like a very intelligent entry into this field as it only captures screenshots and is really easy to use. If you'd like to learn more about the application, check out the interview with its developers posted today at The Unofficial Apple Weblog. Thanks to Jason Glaspey for bringing ScreenSteps to our attention.

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.