PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Elluminate: Conversation with Rajeev Arora

Rajeev Arora is Vice President of Marketing & Strategy at Elluminate. Rajeev is responsible for establishing relationships with strategic partners and identifying new markets where Elluminate can excel.

Geetesh: Tell us more about yourself, Elluminate, and vRoom.

Rajeev: As the VP of Marketing and Strategy for Elluminate, I’m responsible for building relationships with our partners and finding new ways for Elluminate’s products to break into new and different markets. Personally, I’ve worked in sales, marketing, and product development for the software industry for more than 12 years.

Elluminate is an e-learning and web collaboration company that has a very strong presence in K-12 schools and higher education institutions, as well as corporations throughout the world. Our ultimate goal is rather ambitious. We want to use our enabling technology to transform teaching and learning, providing online access for everyone, especially those who would normally would be deprived, and facilitating communication, collaboration, and education on a global level.

Our flagship product Elluminate Live! is a web conferencing application used primarily to foster collaborative online learning in real time — whether it’s through online classes or corporate training. Elluminate Live! incorporates voice over the Internet with video, application and file sharing, file transfer, and more. What really makes the environment stand out from the crowd is its collaborative features like breakout rooms for small groups, interactive polling, social networking features, and our ESP (Elluminate Sensory Perception) functionality for moderators. ESP allows a session leader to see when others may be lagging behind and automatically adjusts the timing of the audio and visuals to allow them to catch up. Users love that our software can be used on any platform, including Linux, Mac, Windows, and Solaris, and that it works on really low bandwidths. For example, one of our users logged on to Elluminate Live! during a cycling trip, using his laptop and a low-bandwidth cell phone Internet card.

Elluminate created vRoom as a free, three-seat version of Elluminate Live! with all the same capabilities as the original software, except for the ability to record sessions. We have such faith that once Elluminate products are integrated into schools and companies, people will find that the possibilities are almost endless. I like to say that we are only limited by our imagination!

Geetesh: Tell us about typical and non-conventional usage scenarios for vRoom.

Rajeev: Many new customers have already shared how they’re using their vRooms, including for virtual office hours, one-on-one tutoring, mentoring, and small group work. It’s really easy to add vRoom to your email signature and hold impromptu online meetings at any time — with students, teachers, customers, co-workers, and partners. You name it. IT folks use the application and desktop sharing to train co-workers on troubleshooting tech problems on their computers. They can even take remote control of a co-worker’s desktop, and solve the problems themselves.

Some non-conventional uses have also surfaced since we launched vRoom. A professional artist uses vRoom to host open-studio hours to demonstrate her digital portraiture painting. A teacher used vRoom to enable his high school students to view a live surgery and ask the surgeon questions, sort of a virtual field trip. Other innovative uses of vRoom include holding theater auditions, adding a remote participant to a conference panel, assessing reading and writing skills for K-12 students, reviewing course content in preparation for testing, and setting up a teaching cooperative for home-schooling moms.

The views and opinions expressed in this blog are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company.

Filed Under: Interviews
Tagged as: Conferencing, Interviews, Online Presentations, PowerPoint

Focus on Scrapblog

Scrapblog is a site where you can create scrapbook-like, online content that can be adapted to look like online presentations. As of now, the site is free — and you can use visual content and videos from sites like Flickr, Webshots, YouTube, etc.

Take a look at Scrapblog here.

On Webware, Rafe Needleman adds that Scrapblog is an excellent online application. It’s based on Adobe’s Flex and uses a lot of the fancy user interface options available on that platform. Read more here.

Filed Under: Companion Programs
Tagged as: Companion, Online Presentations, Photos, PowerPoint

authorGEN Launches authorSTREAM

authorSTREAM is a new, content-sharing social media networking site open to everyone to upload, share, and view PowerPoint presentations. This free offering comes from authorGEN Technologies, who creates authorPOINT, a multimedia e-learning presentation creator, which installs in PowerPoint and outputs to Flash.

PowerPoint files, when uploaded to authorSTREAM, get converted to Flash and can be accessed by anyone on the website; a unique code and URL is generated for every presentation to enable users to embed or share their presentation with anyone on their own blog or website.

Read more on the authorSTREAM site.

Filed Under: Add-ins
Tagged as: Add-in, authorSTREAM, Online Presentations, Online Rich Media, PowerPoint Flash

NXPowerLite 3: Conversation with Mike Power

      Mike Power is the founder and Managing Director of Neuxpower, a software solutions company based in the UK. Neuxpower custom-build both stand-alone applications and add-ins that enhance existing software such as Microsoft Office. Their commercially-available PowerPoint optimizer, NXPowerLite, radically reduces the size of PowerPoint files.

Geetesh: Mike, tell us more about the new NXPowerLite 3.

Mike: NXPowerLite 3 is a compression tool created specifically for Microsoft Office users. It can dramatically reduce the size of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files — sometimes by as much as 98% — with no discernible loss of quality. It does this by intelligently compressing graphics and embedded documents contained within your files, as well as removing the ‘junk data’ that builds up during the creation and editing of Office files.

We released the first version of NXPowerLite six years ago as a PowerPoint-only product — and it quickly became the de facto standard tool for PowerPoint compression. NXPowerLite 2, which followed in 2005, contained a number of significant improvements. It worked directly on the PowerPoint file (rather than by automating PowerPoint), enabling lightning-fast compression times. We also added new features such as batch processing and an Outlook add-in that automatically optimized email attachments before sending them.

Our customers loved the software but kept asking us to develop something similar to reduce the size of Word and Excel files. We eventually decided to create just one program that worked with Word, Excel and PowerPoint files, in order to offer ease of use and the best possible value for money. We are very proud of NXPowerLite 3, which was released in February. It is currently the only product of its type that works with all three of the main Microsoft Office file formats — and customer feedback has been fantastic!

Geetesh: Tell us more about your plans to support Office 2007 file formats.

Mike: NXPowerLite 3 does not currently support Office 2007’s new XML file formats, as the structures were finalized too late in our development process. But our developers are currently working hard on the new formats and a fully compatible version of NXPowerLite 3 will be available later this year. Our Office 2007 Guarantee means that everybody that has purchased NXPowerLite since Office 2007 was released last December was will receive a free upgrade.

Meanwhile, the current version of NXPowerlite integrates perfectly with Office 2007, but you will need to save your files in ’97-2003′ format (‘compatibility mode’) before compressing them with NXPowerLite. Of course, this will also ensure that your files can be opened and edited by people with older versions of Office.

The views and opinions expressed in this blog post or content are those of the authors or the interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company.

Filed Under: Interviews
Tagged as: Add-in, Interviews, Mike Power, Neuxpower, NXPowerlite, PowerPoint

Articulate Guru Awards: Results Announced

Articulate, a provider of rapid e-learning authoring tools, has announced the winners of its 2007 Articulate Guru Awards.

The competition was introduced to honor excellence in content creation using Articulate software.

The top prize Gold medal was awarded to Prometheus Training Corporation for their “Office Ergonomics” course. This entry was notable in its clean design and effective integration of Articulate Presenter, Quizmaker, and Engage.

Find more info on the Articulate site.

Filed Under: Add-ins
Tagged as: Add-in, Articulate, PowerPoint