TechCrunch today reported on the success of Prezi, claiming that the highly dynamic SaaS presentation tool is now at 30 million users and over 90 million presentations. Does it matter, really? Is the ability to zoom and add soundtracks what makes a great presentation or are those gimmicks that miss the real point?
I’ll help you with that one…those are gimmicks that miss the real point.
It’s about the content, stupid
We wrote a while back about bunkr.me, a presentation tool that works atop a repository of content, allowing presentations to draw from a horizontal store of text, images, video and more. What makes bunkr interesting isn’t its presentation feature set, which a small subset of PowerPoint and not nearly as visual as Prezi. Bunkr shines for its concept of content management…it allows you to, “Collect and store content from the web which can be used later on your presentations.”
What are presentations if they’re not summaries of what we’re interested in or working on? If content marketing is the new advertising. Bunkr is about curating content discoveries, snippets of thoughts and emerging or fully-baked ideas. That’s exactly what powers a presentation, not whirling graphics or pan and zoom special effects.
No more searching through many PowerPoints to find that image or snippet of text. Curated content means the presentation is merely a reflection of the underlying material and not a published book, sitting on a shelf until someone opens it. As content evolves, presentations evolve.
…or something like it
Bunkr is new and there’s no guarantee that it will lead the charge into the next generation of presentation software. But the ideas that it brings of curation and management are the future. As Amazon’s launch of WorkSpaces yesterday showed us, we’re moving away from a world of having an electronic filing cabinet under our desks and toward a world of cloud everything. The things that allow us to curate content ‘out there’ in the cloud will be the tools that win the next round.
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Jeanne,
I very much agree with you. Slides, panning and zooming, static content are all limited in their ability to inform. It’s common knowledge that there’s much hate for PowerPoint. A big cause of the hate is the ability to just make stuff up or what I call vapor-ware with presentation tools. Too often answers to questions about the content presented don’t reflect real data. In other words, some of the bigget lies are told using PowerPoint.
We’re working on a new product that will launch within the next 60 days that will go well beyond Bunkr and WorkSpaces to enable curation and management.
Keep up the great blogging (Chris too).
Jeanne, I just checked Bunkr and it is non intuitive, relying only on images and contents. It still has slides, but no way to who summary structure of whole presentation it is even worse than Powerpoint with only flexibilty to copy contents. Powerpoint is strong in contents and presentation, and Prezis offcourse structures the whole information very nicely. Bunkr is a piece of … I have to use strong words because I read thru your article and trashing Powerpoint and Prezis for bunkr which looks as a raw product.. My personal opinion offcourse.
Ravi, thanks for your comment. I don’t feel I was trashing PowerPoint or Prezi, but instead pointing out that those are document-based skeuomorphs that will be replaced by the presentation media that takes into consideration content curation, not merely publishing. For a great blog on that topic, see Seth Godin’s Skeuomorphs = Failure.
The truly groundbreaking changes in technology come when we leave behind the skeuomorphs of the past. Excel is based on a lined paper, PowerPoint on an overhead transparency projector, and email on the ancient memo. These forms worked well for the digital age because they made people comfortable, not necessarily more productive. The next great phase of the Internet is moving beyond the prison of our comfort and into the form factors and ways of thinking that digital life allows for. This is why kids adapt first today…because they’re not limited by experience. This is why BYOD arrived and consumerization of IT.
As I said, bunkr may not lead the future, but it’s premise will.
It is NOT about the content, it is about the connection.
It is not about sharing what we are working on. It is getting the audience to “think, feel, do”.
It goal of any presentation is to get the presenter to connect with the audience and achieve an outcome. Anything that get in the way of that needs to be eliminated.
Sure you may need something to support your presentation - but that could be a prop, video or the odd slide.
Sadly this discussion about tools and presentations is exactly why most corporate presentations completely miss the mark.