The Future of Presentations?

[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by ronfriedmann, Kate Simpson. Kate Simpson said: RT: @LawyerKM The Future of Presentations? [This is really cool] (LawyerKM blog post) http://ow.ly/3M24x. On FUMSI too: http://bit.ly/gUWhsA [...]

ho hum

Meh.

I’m with-holding judgement until I play with Prezi a bit, but I’ve used Power Point alternatives in the past and keep going back to, and upgrading, Power Point. Power Point presentation sins are sins of the users. Most presentation apps that try to keep presenters chaste tend to force you into a particular model. They always feel limiting. If Prezi’s format takes off, all that zooming around would get stale fast.

Maybe we should be focusing on our presentation skills, and own styles, rather than our presentation tools and templates?

As for pricing I have to pay 160 a year for offline capabilities. That’s more than PowerPoint 2010. Again, I’ll need to play around with it, but it better offer A LOT more than zooming and jumping around a text cloud to justify paying 160/year.

Yes, there is a cheaper 60/year version, but you can’t take the presentation off line. As for the free version, it doesn’t keep your content private, so I’m not interested in that for anything more than playing around. The 60/year cloud-based version doesn’t interest me, not only because the price seems high compared to ownership costs of MS Project and the availability of good free, opensource presentation tools, but also because I have enough to worry about when making a presentation. I don’t want to also have to worry about whether the venue will have broadband and what I’ll do if they experience a service disruption.

Moreover, if you travel outside of the United States to give presentations, I would think twice about using the cloud-based version of Prezi. Your presentation took much longer to load than it should have. I’m in Taiwan. Granted, I was not on a corp. network when I viewed your presentation, but I can stream YouTube from a restaurant WiFi and over 3G on my phone. A presentation like that should not taken so long to load.

Few cloud-based tools have the infrastructure to provide an excellent experience internationally. Another reason to have the option to download, which means 160 USD a year. That’s more than buying a new license of MS PowerPoint every year and a whole lot more than Open Office.

I’m seeing a lot of sizzle and not much steak.

Great points, Paul. I agree that most people just need to up their presentation skills in general (me included). By the way, for that, I love the book The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs (see my KM Library Link at the top of the page). Prezi is an interesting new tool I can certainly see this being a good tool for certain things. But I can also see it losing its novelty after seeing a few Prezis.