Mouse Over Multimedia: Add Interactive Content to Your Site with Apture

You may know snaP shots to add a quick preview of outgoing links, but actually snaP was used as advertising more than contextual content, as I know. So the unexpected pop-ups that occur when you accidentally scroll over text links become irritating irrelevant advertising sometimes. Apture is a little different. It gives independent publishers the power to find and incorporate relevant multimedia items, such as video clips from YouTube, photos from Flickr, Wikipedia articles, music, podcasts, and much more from around the web directly on to your site with a single click of a button.

Tablefy has a brief look at the pros and cons of Apture, and we really consider the free service as a unique product and well worth checking out. You may experience with examples or watch the video tour below:

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

On the Meeting: Teleconferencing, Videoconferencing and Web conferencing

Sure, once mostly a face-to-face practice, now executives are increasingly offering their wisdom via teleconference. It’s really more efficient than old ways to facilitate with modern technologies. Certainly teleconferencing is just the live exchange of voice on the meeting, and the videoconferencing has been used widely in last decade. Then now, conducting a live meetings or presentations via the Internet could be easier for anyone. Web conference, or Webniar can be seen everywhere over the Internet.

Right, I’m a techie fan, and here I’d like to review these current technologies for teleconferencing, videoconferencing and Web conferencing.

1. Internet Teleconference, such as Skype
Internet telephony involves conducting a teleconference over the Internet or a Wide Area Network. One key technology in this area is Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP). A lot of commercial VoIP networks available over the world, and Skype is the most popular one for personal and SME uses. Actually Skype offers a series of solution for business to start off such tele-conferencing soon.

One thing left, video conferencing is supported on Skype. And it’s usually my first place alternative for international calls.

2. Videoconference Impact on Education, Medicine and Business
No doubt videoconferencing could be sort of essentials on distance education, and also helps most doctors diagnose any complicated illness. And especially on business, it enables individuals in faraway places to have meetings on short notice. Time and money that used to be spent in traveling can be used to have short meetings. The technology is also used for telecommuting, in which employees work from home.

I ever tried such video conferencing on e-learning, and it works well. And it’s also widely used for any international conference on UN, or most multi-national enterprises.

3. The Boom of Web Conferencing Services
Web conferencing is not just the Internet version of teleconferencing or video conferencing, there’re some other typical advanced features here: slide show presentations, live or streaming video, VoIP, Web tours, meeting recording, whiteboard, text chat, polls and surveys, and screen sharing/desktop sharing/application sharing.

A lot of IT vendors provide Web conferencing service, including Adobe, IBM and Microsoft. But I still prefer another two services: Cisco’s WebEx (http://www.webex.com/) and Citrix’s GoToMeeting (http://www.gotomeeting.com/).

We really have more and more meetings to go, and technologies just make them cost-efficient with our brilliant ideas.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

Project Presentation Essential: Create Project Report Effortlessly in Office 2003

“As a Project Team Leader, how much time have you lost trying to take information from Microsoft Project and drop into to PowerPoint presentation? If you are like me, you’ve probably done a few ‘Print Screen’ and Pastes…”

I’m not a skilled Microsoft Project user, but I suddenly found this old add-in for Project 2003 terribly useful here. Basically, the installation drops a new toolbar within Project with a button labeled “Create Report Presentation…” and it allows you to select which milestones to show as well as which fields to include. Magically, now you get an auto-generated PowerPoint presentation with a slide dedicated to the project tasks. Maybe it’s a little out to use Office 2003, but I can’t find such good add-in with Office 2007. Whatever, it’s not bad trying this for just project leaders.

The Project Report Presentation Add-in for Microsoft Office Project 2003 helps a user to quickly and easily create a Microsoft Office PowerPoint presentation containing user-selected task information from Microsoft Office Project.

Download Office 2003 Add-in: Project Report Presentation Here > >

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

We Must Read More for Making Good Design

I realize that sort of information browsing online is not enough to learn any subjects throughoutly. So I move to reading more professional books like returning the college. Everyone likes better design in its presentation, so we must learn some elementary skills from books at first. And I was recommended to read Timothy Samara’s guidance to enhance my abilities of instructional design.

Here’re two recent books about tips and rules for design starter to make good to better design. Keep these ideas in mind when designing your next presentation or website, poster, and you’ll get excellent design achievement soon.

Timothy Samara is a graphic designer and educator based in New York City, where he divides his time between consulting, writing, and teaching at the School of Visual Arts, Parsons School of Design, NYU, and Purchase College. He is the author of several books for Rockport Publishers, including Making and Breaking the Grid, Typography Workbook, Publication Design Workbook, Type Style Finder and Design Elements.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

Not Late to Send Your Online Christmas Card Today!

Ready to Christmas yet? So I guess you’ll send lots of Christmas cards as usual this year. But for our eco-friendly future we know, online Christmas card is so popular on recent years. Here PresentationHelper.co.uk introduces a simple Online Christmas Card Maker for everyone in Christmas.

With this card creator you can write your own personal message to a friend or loved one on your chosen card, without the need for any design software. You can then send the Christmas cards as an email, a web link or just print it off and send it.

Besides, there’s an old version Christmas Card Generator from PresentationHelper.co.uk, which is also awesome for the holidays.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

Ideas about Showing PowerPoint Presentations on iPhone

These days I was totally hooked with Apple iPhone from a friend. Certainly it’s not that fancy touch screen abuse, but those more and more interesting iPhone Applications from various innovative developers. Then I became wondering, how could I make my PowerPoint presentations displayed on iPhone, since it doesn’t like Windows Mobile to install such applications. After a little research, I got these ideas as below:

1. Export as a Series of Pictures to iPhoto on Mac
As Microsoft announced Microsoft PowerPoint 2008 for Mac last year, getting presentations from Mac to iPhone is relatively easy. PowerPoint exports your presentation as a series of pictures directly to iPhoto, or saves those same slide images as pictures to your Pictures folder. From there, sync pictures to your iPhone through iTunes as usual, then use the built-in Photos or slide show program on your iPhone to show your presentation.

It’s really easy to go and try this way. However, the presentation on iPhone becomes kinda picture slideshow, not with all animations along.

2. Convert as Supported MPEG-4 Video Formats
Since iPhone support MPEG-4 video in .mp4, .m4v, .mov formats, some software vendor offers the idea of presentation to video conversion. You can just convert your PowerPoint presentations to MPEG-4 video first, then import or sync the video to iPhone with iTunes.

This method sounds reasonable, and all animations are here. But please see, video presentation is not slideshow anymore, because you can’t control them easily slide by slide. Right?

3. Remote Control PowerPoint from Computers
So some iPhone application developers find this way to connect PowerPoint with computer via Wi-Fi network. Then you can remote control your PowerPoint presentations wirelessly from your iPhone, with a realtime view of your slides. Show your slides on your PC and use your iPhone or iPod Touch as a clicker.

I haven’t tried this app yet, but the idea seems not bad. If everything goes fine in presentation, that’s the best way so far, if you have a reliable Wi-Fi connection on your iPhone.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

Online Holiday Boom with Stand-Out Sales Presentation

Because of the weak economy, consumers seem to prefer more online shopping with discounts or free shipping on this holiday season. At least, this is good news for most long-waiting online retailers. Based upon sorta great prospect, Abhay Parekh, founder & CEO of an interactive multimedia platform company, is presenting a wiselike guidance for business communicators, on Sales & Marketing Management Magazine:

Five Tips for Creating a Stand-Out Sales Presentation

Looking to create that perfect eye-catching sales presentation to lock in some last-minute Q4 sales? The you had better rethink your strategy and take your presentation to the virtual scale.

1. Show, rather than tell.
2. Ditch your static slide presentations.
3. Go virtual.
4. Survey says?
5. Know when to stop.

Read full article at:
http://www.presentations.com/msg/content_display/presentations/e3i54e0d1d9416e8c7fbf73d212d777bd11

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

No Death by PowerPoint: We Know Its Midlife Crisis

Recently Ms Laura Bergells showed us an interesting research on PowerPoint Death with data analysis. Clearly, more and more people is concerned about the health statistic of our PowerPoint, because we’re still using it well now and gonna use it more in the future.

I agree that PowerPoint is the best ever presentation tool for desktop authoring. And I guess everyone is considering the inevitable threats from so many Web apps for presentation. PowerPoint is experiencing a midlife crisis as everyone does, but we still like it, don’t we?

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

SlideShare Ribbon: Socialize Your Presentation from PowerPoint 2007 Now

No doubt SlideShare has same creative power as YouTube in Web 2.0 presentation, like its LinkedIn App, Facebook, etc. Now, according to SlideShare’s latest blog post “SlideShare makes PowerPoint social”, it is introducing an add-in for PowerPoint 2007 to makes the sharing and social features of SlideShare accessible without even leaving PowerPoint.

SlideShare Ribbon

As the good connection with desktop and Web apps, this SlideShare release is catching and pushing the industry leading of Web presentation. Microsoft finally joined the market days ago, but it seems not easy to be the king here.

To install the SlideShare Ribbon, you’ll need to PowerPoint 2007, Windows XP Service Pack 2 or later, and .NET Framework 3.5 SP1.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

IBM White Paper: The Value of Training and the High Cost of Doing Nothing

Never doubt that IBM’s training is the best business training I’ve ever seen. Recently, IBM published an interesting white paper called “The Value of Training” by consultant David Leaser. It notes that, a company will lose 10 to 30% of its capabilities per year. By year three, an organization has retained only 41% of it original capabilities, dwindling to 24% by year six. Right, that’s the point: it costs more than a better training, if we still do nothing.

When most companies are facing the terrible financial crisis, they cut the budget. Less business trip, less internal expenses, but significantly the staff training should not be ignored.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran