PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

myBrainshark Pro Trainer: Conversation with Andy Zimmerman

  Andy Zimmerman is the vice president and general manager for myBrainshark, Brainshark’s free site for creating, sharing and tracking multimedia presentations. Andy oversees strategy, marketing, partnerships, and sales for myBrainshark and has been a driving force behind the launch of myBrainshark Pro Trainer, an eLearning offering that the company is announcing today.

In this conversation, Andy talks about myBrainshark Pro Trainer.

Geetesh: What exactly does myBrainshark Pro Trainer do, and how can it help existing myBrainshark users?

Andy: myBrainshark Pro Trainer is the latest in our ‘Pro’ series of offerings on myBrainshark. This new offering is geared toward individual trainers, consultants, and instructional designers – as well as any businessperson who needs to train a particular audience – and provides powerful and affordable eLearning functionality. Free users of our myBrainshark site can upgrade to a monthly myBrainshark Pro Trainer subscription.

As you know, our myBrainshark user base currently has the ability to upload pre-existing content, such as PowerPoint presentations, and add voice narration, videos, attachments, and more to create trackable, online, multimedia presentations – all for free. A myBrainshark Pro Trainer subscription includes all this – plus the features in myBrainshark Pro – as well as advanced features, designed specifically for eLearning.

These features include the ability to incorporate test questions – including multiple choice and true/false – and provide instant feedback to students based on the accuracy of their responses. Other benefits include the ability to easily create SCORM-compliant courses that integrate with your LMS, and to issue certificates of completion for students – giving them a formal record of the courses they’ve taken. Another feature we think myBrainshark Pro Trainer users will appreciate is the ability to copy and merge content – letting them “clone” presentations or courses, as well as mix and merge specific slides, audio, and/or attachments from one course to the next… so there’s no need to reinvent the wheel.

Since its inception last year, myBrainshark has always had a large audience of training professionals – many of whom are in our registered Learning Provider community, which enables them to price and sell content on myBrainshark. We expect this audience of training providers, as well as individuals within companies that need to quickly produce eLearning content, to benefit greatly from these new features.

Geetesh: What sort of pricing are you looking at for the myBrainshark Pro Trainer?

Andy: myBrainshark Pro Trainer is priced as a monthly subscription, and subscribers can apply any or all of the Pro or Pro Trainer features to any presentation they’ve created for a monthly fee starting at $19.99 per presentation.

You can check out the pricing chart here – you’ll see there’s a 10% discount applied when you create and store five or more presentations with Pro Trainer features, and a 20% discount for 10 or more. Also, you can “turn off” a presentation’s Pro Trainer status at any time, and apply the features to another presentation at no additional charge. And, of course, myBrainshark users can still create, deliver and store an unlimited number of presentations without Pro or Pro Trainer features for free.

You May Also Like: myBrainshark: Conversation with Andy Zimmerman | myBrainshark Pro: Conversation with Andy Zimmerman

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: Andy Zimmerman, Brainshark, eLearning, Interviews, Online Presentations, PowerPoint

Concept Slides: Feature List Layout

Feature List Layout comprises three sample PowerPoint presentations — one each to create a visual list for 4 features. 5 features, and 6 features. Scroll down to see a small presentation on how you can use these concept slides in your next presentation — as you can see, all the work is done for you. All you need to do is change the text and optionally change any Theme elements you want. All these concept slides are being made available in the PPTX file format that can be used within PowerPoint 2007 and 2010 for Windows, and PowerPoint 2008 and 2011 for Mac.

Download the files here.

Filed Under: Presentation Bank
Tagged as: PowerPoint, Presentation Samples, Shapes

Concept Slides: Triangle Cycle

This is a triangle formed out of three small triangular shapes that overlap each other — it successfully denotes a process or cycle within the constrains of a triangle and works great for any sequential process that has three steps or concepts. It also works great to illustrate three concepts that work together, thus creating a sort of triangular matrix. Text can be superimposed on all individual shapes and each shape can be filled with PowerPoint’s fills.

Download the file here. This file can only be downloaded by Indezine members, and membership is free.

Filed Under: Presentation Bank
Tagged as: PowerPoint, Presentation Samples, Shapes

Concept Slides: Horizontal Credits

Having seen the vertical credits screen, inspired from the end-of-the-movie credits so often in PowerPoint, I wondered why no one did a horizontal credits animation? Yes, it is a little more difficult but you only need to do the task once as you can see in the downloaded presentation. Feel free to use the content in this slide – all you need to do is change the words in your credits screen, and the entire text formatting is Theme friendly so it should work within whichever presentation you add the slide to.

This file can only be downloaded by Indezine members, and membership is free.

Filed Under: Presentation Bank
Tagged as: Animation, PowerPoint, Presentation Samples, Shapes

Brainshark Mobile: Conversation with Joe Gustafson

Joe Gustafson, CEO of Brainshark, Inc., founded the company in 1999 to help knowledge experts accelerate the flow of information to their audiences in a highly effective format. Under Joe’s leadership, Brainshark has become a leader in on-demand business communications and a successful Software-as-a-Service company. Joe has been instrumental in the development of Brainshark Mobile, which Brainshark is launching today.

In this conversation, Joe discusses Brainshark Mobile.

Geetesh: What is Brainshark Mobile, and how does it make viewing and delivering presentations easier for smartphone users?

Joe: We’re excited to be launching Brainshark Mobile today – which enables Brainshark-delivered communications to be viewed on mobile devices and platforms, including the BlackBerry, iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, Palm Pre and Android. Now, with Brainshark presentations automatically mobile-enabled, it’s easy for our users to create content that can be viewed anywhere, anytime and on just about any device.

With video and other rich media playing an increasingly important role in business communications – and with business becoming ever-more mobile and geographically dispersed – being able to provide ubiquitous availability of Brainshark multimedia content is an important capability for our users. They can reach their on-the-go audience instantly, and let that audience choose the most convenient and productive way to experience their content.

This means salespeople can view a Brainshark presentation while walking into a big meeting, and employees can view training materials and other content while killing time at the airport. Companies can also take advantage of Brainshark Mobile to improve mobile marketing, as well as HR, corporate and in-the-field communications. Plus, with Brainshark’s analytics, they can see who viewed their content and when, as well as what type of mobile device was used.

For Brainshark’s customers, Brainshark Mobile is included at no extra cost as part of our core platform. The new mobile capabilities are also available to users of myBrainshark.com, our site where you can create, narrate, share and track multimedia presentations for free. Users can share a link to a Brainshark presentation via e-mail, text message, mobile IM, etc., for viewing on the mobile Web. And, with one Brainshark presentation already viewed every 3.5 seconds in locations all over the world, this is exciting news for our company as well.

Geetesh: Apple products like the iPhone and iPad don’t support Adobe Flash – so how does Brainshark Mobile get over that limitation?

Joe: Good question. As you know, when people upload PowerPoint slides and other content to Brainshark to create multimedia presentations, we do convert the file to Flash for playback on PCs. The final product – which is shared as a link – can include voice narration and/or other audio, slides, video and more.

However, when viewed on a mobile device, Brainshark presentations appear as streamed video files, and it’s not necessary that the mobile device support Flash. When you access a Brainshark presentation, Brainshark detects the type of device being used and serves up a compatible format. So for Apple products including the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, Brainshark delivers an MP4 file.

As I mentioned, the platforms and devices supported by Brainshark Mobile currently include the Blackberry, iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, Palm Pre and Android, and all must support streaming video.

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: Brainshark, Interviews, Online Presentations, PowerPoint