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Slideshare made an announcement this morning that is sure to thrill open Web standards advocates and iOS gadget lovers alike. The document and presentation-sharing site has done away with Flash completely and now uses HTML5 for its file embeds.

Not only will millions of SlideShare uploads embedded across the Web now render effortlessly on iPhones and iPads, but the company also launched a new mobile site that renders nicely on smartphones and tablets as well. The upgrade should also make the site and its embeds load faster, since they don't rely on clunky Flash plugins and content to render.

Often in tech reporting, you'll hear a lot about launches, acquisitions and failures. What you don't hear enough about are the makers who iterate in relative silence. For all of the hyped startups of this world (Color anyone?), there are a lot of startups that chug away without the fanfare. So to celebrate those startups building solid and useful products, we're starting a new series called Happy Appiversary. As the perhaps clunky name suggests, we'll focus on startups that are celebrating an anniversary and review their progress.

Lanyrd has been described as a "Wikipedia for conferences," because it aggregates digital content from conferences - such as slideshows and videos. It's also a social network of sorts for conference attendees and enables non-attendees to track events virtually. Lanyrd celebrated its first anniversary last week, according to a blog post by co-founder Natalie Downe. Let's check out how Lanyrd has developed over the past year and why you should use this excellent service.

The smart folks at Zurb have come up with yet another clever app, this time for testing presentations called Reel. Like their other tools, it is free, it is all Web-based, and it involves a quick way to collect up/down votes. Think of it as Prezi with "likes" added.

During yesterday's earnings announcement, its first ever, LinkedIn employed two social Web technologies to help make the presentation more shareable, as well as to give the team peace of mind. Using a combination of free and premium services from SlideShare and StockTwits, the LinkedIn team was able to offer its slide deck as an embeddable window (which we used in our blog post) and live-tweet the earnings call without fear of losing SEC compliance.

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.

Last week SlideShare announced its new JavaScript API for controlling embedded players. The company also added support for the oEmbed API.

The new JavaScript API gives developers the ability to: "access major functions, navigate across presentations, and control the SlideShare embed player via Javascript." What can you do with those features? SlideShare suggests that you could use it to automate multiple players to show random slides one at a time or synchronize slides and video. I'm sure you can find more creative uses, though.

SlideShare, the popular presentation hosting, sharing and perusal website, launched a new feature today that allows users to host a live one-way video presentation right next to the deck they are discussing. The feature, called Zipcast, allows users to do video beside any presentation - their own or someone else's.

The feature is free and ad supported for basic users - SlideShare says it now sees an amazing 45 million unique visitors each month. Premium users who pay $19 per month have ads removed and can password protect the presentations. I just tested it for 30 minutes with between 30 and 40 people, viewing from all around the world. The verdict? Video quality could be a little higher (that might be my connection) but overall an excellent experience.

Today co-founder, president and chairman of Socialtext Ross Mayfield announced on his blog that he is stepping down from his day-to-day duties at Socialtext and joining SlideShare as vice presdent of business development. Mayfield told us about the move: "SlideShare is obviously different but what it has in common with Socialtext is being at the boundary between consumer and enterprise, which is my favorite place to play." Mayfield has been an adviser to SlideShare for the past four years. He will remain the chairman of the board of directors at Socialtext.

Socialtext was one of the first companies in the enterprise 2.0 space, and the first to offer an enterprise wiki. "Whatever your enterprise 2.0 / social business poison, our industry owes a lot to Ross for persistently questioning how we work," Sameer Patel of the Sovos Group tweeted in response to the announcement. We discussed Socialtext's role in the development of enterprise social software earlier this week.

PDFs, love them or hate them, are here to stay as a rich document presentation medium and with the introduction of online services like Scribd, Docstock, even Slideshare and Issuu - static files are getting quite interesting.

Scribd this morning posted a series of year-end Top 10 lists, offering a good view of some of the most interesting and widely-read primary documents on the web this year. As dry stuff goes, this is really interesting. We've embedded those lists below. Keep in mind the company's recent partnership with rich-media lookup service Apture and these docs become not just popular, but also full of multimedia on demand. How many of these hot docs have you read this year?

For many new Internet companies these days, "freemium" business models that hook users with free services and offer extra functionality at a price have become very popular. Today, presentation sharing service SlideShare is the latest to switch to this type of model with the announcement of its tiered PRO plans with new and advanced features starting at $19 per month.