Anyone who’s ever seen me do a presentation will most likely have seen Prezi at work as it is an old favourite of mine that is fun to use and delivers really stunning results. With a few clicks you’ll be building a cascading, zoomy-mind-map (yes, that is the official technical term) – although be careful not to get carried away with the effects or you might end up making your audience feel seasick. I can almost guarantee people will come up to you after your presentation and ask about the tool you used (which is a perfect excuse to swap cards with them if it’s a good contact for your business). You can drop in slides containing text, images, video, graphics and even bullet pointed lists if you really want them – then set the path for your presentation and watch it fly. Presentations can be delivered online, through the iPad and iPhone apps, or you can download a standalone executable file – although bear in mind that online video won’t work if you don’t have a connection. The free account gives you 100MB of space to upload images (enough for a few presentations to try it out) and lets you create Prezis that are open to the public; if you want privacy and a vanity web address for sharing you’ll have to pay the subscription (or apply for an education account).
The big news from the company this week is it has integrated collaboration features that let you work in real time on the same presentation with up to 10 colleagues and contacts all over the world (or up to 30 people can watch a presentation online at the same time). To celebrate they have made a neat global map that shows who is collaborating in real-time. If the Prezis on this map are public you can click to open them, so it’s a brilliant way to get some inspiration and see what can be achieved with this powerful presentation tool. To polish the new release off Prezi created a time-lapse bideo of collaboration over 3 days, which is rather pretty. Enjoy!
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