Sliderocket should help cure Powerpoint paralysis

I think it was a presentation referenced on Presentation Zen where I first caught a look at a presentation created in Sliderocket.  Perhaps it was the 16×9 looking orientation or the better looking images (over what I’ve seen in Slideshare), but I immediately thought that this is a tool I’d like to have in my bag of tricks. I forgot about it until recently subscribing to Scobleizer.TV and caught the episode interview of Sliderocket’s co-founder and CEO, Mitch Grasso.  I’ve seen smoother product demos before but one thing came clear — Sliderocket tackles what I think may be two big problems in presentation creation, and the cause of Powerpoint paralysis.  Those are:

1. Dependendence on slideware being the birthplace for presentation content
2. Getting the preso content beyond the meeting you just had

I kinda like giving presentations and part of that comes from using presentation tools (powerpoint, keynote, etc.) at the very end of the process, after I’ve gotten my source information and a story arc.  Too many times I’ve been on presentation teams where they want “your slides” two days after first hearing about the meeting.  In the typical desktop presentation software usage, as it’s widely used in the corporate environment today, the conventional thinking is that the presentation doesn’t exist until it’s within the .ppt or .key file.  That’s like a surgeon worrying more about the scar they’ll leave more than the part of the body they’re trying to fix.

Sliderocket makes it easy, if not more fun, to build or obtain your source information from outside the presentation.  You can pull from Flickr in real time or data kept in Google Docs, including charts.  This is just the beginning as you know someone will take advantage of an API coming down the road to work with other external content.  It’s a great core feature of Sliderocket but which can help rid its users of the dreaded Powerpoint paralysis.

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Tags: flickr, google, Google Docs, Microsoft PowerPoint, Mitch Grasso, Portable Document Format, Presentation, Sliderocket, sliderocket slideshare powerpoint keynote microsoft app