Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Four years ago, FiftyThree—the team of ex-Microsoft creatives who launched a wildly popular iPad sketching app called Paper—was flush with venture capital and full of expansion ideas that they put into action. They started producing hardware: an iPad stylus called (unluckily) Pencil. They expanded the app to work on iPhones as a Post-it-esque idea jotter. They experimented with in-app purchases and a patronage model. They even soft-launched a whole new app called Paste, which lets Slack users pass visual materials back and forth with ease.

But all this activity had a somewhat flailing feel: What was Fiftythree’s core business? Was it about productivity software, or creative apps? Now, with a relaunch of both Paper and Paste, the company seems to have its story straight again. And that story is . . . they’re about productivity and creativity. And making great slide decks....

Zeetings is a unique web app which allows an event present to broadcast his slides to all of the event attendees in realtime without requiring them to install or login into any specific app. Attendees (both at the premises and remotely) can see the slides as they progress in real-time, and can ask questions, provide feedback, vote and be polled as well as take notes and network with other participants.

With the free version it is possible to upload unlimited PDFs and PowerPoints as well as image files and to have unlimited events with up to 30 participants while integrating also unlimited interactive content such as polls, Q&A sessions, videos, embeds, web links and basic analytics reporting data.

Free version available. Pro version info: https://www.zeetings.com/pricingMy 

Comment: Great tool for live events. It allows you to keep everyone on the same page, ask questions, run polls, moderate feedback, and select most voted questions from the audience without forcing them to install anything. 

Try it out now:  https://www.zeetings.com

Check out this introductory presentation to Zeetings features: https://www.zeetings.com/awesome/1861-0001#fullscreen...

When it comes to presentation design, for instance, there's no shortage of avenues you can take. And while all that choice -- colors, formats, visuals, fonts -- can feel liberating, it's important that you're careful in your selection as not all design combinations add up to success. 

We're not saying there's one right way to design your next PowerPoint presentation, but we are saying that some designs make more sense than others. To see some examples of the best PowerPoint presentation designs, check out the following decks....

Wideo is a neat service for creating animated, Common Craft style videos in your web browser. I've been using and talking about the service for a couple of years now. Recently, Wideo added a new feature that allows you to generate presentations from your videos.

When you create a video in Wideo you do so by dragging and dropping clipart and text in storyboard frames. You set the position and animation sequence for each element in each storyboard frame. When you have completed your storyboards Wideo generates a video for you. The new presentation mode in Wideo will allow you to present each frame of your video independently just like in a slideshow....

That said, PowerPoint isn't exactly free, and I suspect most seasoned users would agree it hasn't evolved much over the years. What if you want to integrate, say, a live Twitter feed in your presentation, or move beyond static slides?

Good news: There are plenty of PowerPoint alternatives, some of them free, some of them capable of adding considerably more pizzazz to your materials. In addition to the obvious PowerPoint clones -- Google Docs, OpenOffice Impress, Zoho Show and so on -- make sure to check out these three free outliers...