We've all been there. Sitting in a dimly lite room watching someone read the text off from their PowerPoint presentation. Responding to email under the table as we listen to the monotone disseration, looking up only during the brief breaks which occur between slides. Glancing around the room just in time to see one of your colleagues bounce their chin off from their chest. How many foreheads need to hit the conference table before we put an end to this senseless mid-day slaughter? I can tell you this, SlideRocket clearly doesn't want to find out.
Interview with Nat Robinson, VP of Marketing
Larry: The team build functionality coupled with the anywhere/everywhere accessibility of a feature rich Internet application immediately makes me think of enterprise-wide deployment. Will a site or organizational license be offered, will the service be seat/user based or will pricing be related to storage/bandwidth?
Nat: Because of the breadth and depth of functionality offered in SlideRocket we do think it's a natural fit for businesses but we're also getting a lot of interest from individuals who are looking for a viable and innovative alternative to PowerPoint. We've opted to offer a free account with a reduced set of functionality and then two more tiers of pricing, Solo and Team. For Solo users the price will be $12 / user / month but with a 25% discount introductory price of $9. For Teams the pricing will be $24 with the same introductory pricing discount of 25% bringing the price down to $18 / month / user. Most users will be able to sign themselves up through the web site but larger accounts will probably want to work through our direct sales organization.
Larry: Has network installation of
Adobe AIR and the Slide
Rocket player been packaged and made ready for prime time?
Nat: Today you can download the AIR player (we're calling it Satellite to jibe with the rocket / space metaphor) from http://www.sliderocket.com/airinstall.
The install process includes the Adobe AIR installation so it's all bundled together as seamlessly as possible. Later this year we'll release an AIR version of the SlideRocket editor with all the functionality of the online client.
Larry: The plug-in architecture and community marketplace really throw the doors wide open. As someone who'd be interested in developing for both, when and where can developers & designers find out more about participating?
Nat: We're not quite ready to embrace developers but the intent in the near term is to have both a SlideRocket API and developer guidelines for plugins. With the SlideRocket Marketplace we'd love to talk to interested providers for content and services, really everything from cartoons, themes, illustrations, clip art, audio, video and of course services like graphic desing, copywriting, copy editing, voice over, printing (think FedEx Kinkos or Mimeo) etc. If it's relevant to making or delivering great presentations it should be in the marketplace.
Larry: Love the blog post from the 16th about increasing the upload file size limit. When do you expect the next build to be pushed out?
Nat:We usually push builds weekly as we remedy bugs and add enhancements. However, we are currently testing a large set of changes including collaboration, presentation versioning, playback buffering, autorecovery, and a ton of other fixes including the file size limit increase. We don't have a firm date for when we push this build out but it should be within the couple of weeks.
Larry: As a multi-media junkie, I'm totally cool with the acceptable media file formats as I have the tools to convert formats; many users don't. Have you considered building in a media file conversion tool so that people can easily use all of their existing content such as AVI, WMV, MOV files, etc...? They upload, you convert to FLV and ditch the original. Even if there was a lenghty cue and sometimes significant delay it would probably be a handy service to provide, and the best part is there's software to do it at the server for free. ;-)
Nat: It's a great idea, one we like, it's probably just a matter of how soon we can offer this type of transcoding inside SlideRocket. The initial focus was to make Flash video and animation very easy to implement and use in SlideRocket and we think it is. It's also probably the most pervasive format on the web today so clearly folks aren't having too much trouble figuring it out. Our first big customer The Weather Channel used SlideRocket to deliver their upfront presentations a few weeks ago and the Flash HD video they embedded in their slides looked incredible.
Larry: When will the rest of the world be able to ditch PowerPoint? Are you still looking at a public (beta) release in June?
Nat: The nice thing about SlideRocket is that you don't have to stop using PowerPoint for authoring. You can import your PowerPoint slides into SlideRocket and take advantage of all the additional features in SlideRocket that aren't available in PowerPoint, or Keynote for that matter. One thing we hear consistently is that folks are really happy to find a serious alternative to PowerPoint, especially one that takes advantage of the web and offers you some new ways to think about, create, manage, distribute and measure your presentations.
We're expecting to be able to deliver a public beta this summer. Right now it looks like July but we're really focused on delivering an application that exceeds expectations. It's kind of like a company's quarterly results you can't just beat the street any more you have to blitz it and that's what we're working on, blitzing every other presentation tool you've ever seen. Just try it and let us know what you think.
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