Prezi.com

Going back to the basics and then beyond them.
As promised I wanted to post my initial reactions to the very promising new presentation tool Prezi.com. This quote from their intro presentation is a great place to start.


To be clear, despite any new technology the fact remains that it is much easier to ruin a good speech with a bad PowerPoint (or other visual aids) than it is to make a good presentation better with good visual aids.

Here in a great clip from the great show Mad Men on AMC Don Draper gives an inspiring presentation to the Kodak engineers who are shopping for a Marketing company, this is good presenting 101:


Key elements he used:

1) Emotion
2) Story
3) Images
4) Little to no text on the screen.

When we add all of the glitz and glamor to what we can do with PowerPoint today, it is easy to forget what makes this medium so powerful in the first place. Think back to the last presentation you gave, better yet the last presentation you had to sit through. What was the most memorable part? The long list of bullet points or was it an image, or diagram? The easiest change we can all make that makes the biggest improvement is to use more images and less text.

I will save other ways to improve presentations for later posts.

There are two fundamental concepts that prezi.com introduces.

1) It finally breaks the rigid linear paradigm of having one slide after another, from beginning to end.

2) It adds the ability to display meaningful visual structures of information, that remain in tact both on the screen and therefore in the viewers minds.

Once I have had a chance to build and deliver a few presentations using prezi, I will share more.

SeaDragon

I first saw this concept almost two years ago in Blaise’s Ted.com presentation . I knew this whole paradigm was going to totally transform how information is presented and consumed.

The part of the demo when he shows the mock issue of the Guardian I think does the best job of showing how this will change the general way we think of organizing information. One of the most important elements of effective communication is quickly establishing context. Context is terms of the mental models and structures through which we understand and make sense of new information. The problem lies in that when the sender fails to establish the appropriate context, we the receivers do it ourselves. And we all think we are much better at doing this on our own than we really are. (Mostly because we aren't really aware that we are always doing it.)

The current model of using hyperlinked text can be really effective. However, any visual mental model of related information and concepts is usually very week. For example, tt is easy to forget how you ended up where you are, and still understand the related information as part of the greater structure from which you linked out of...

Well almost two years later, and wrapped of course in Microsofts silverlight.. Seadragon is finally available in Microsoft Live Labs

Microsoft gets credit for releasing things like this in their Labs section... I think it will help with thier branding issues. (everyone hates Vista) With the complexity of new software and the speed at which we demand it, bugs or inevitiable. So with a few bugs aside, and lacking any core marketing message, SeaDragon is here.

The iPhone app is pretty cool. Photosynth is equally impressive from a technical perspective, but less practical.

Be sure to check out the infinite zooming concept applied by Prezi.com for making really cool looking presentions. I will post more about it my next post.