Let’s Blame Powerpoint (or Rethinking Powerpoint: The New Wave of Presentation Tools)
Gideon Hayden covers several potentially disruptive approaches but:
Faruk Ateş has been a public speaker for a few years now. He started off using Keynote but began to feel that sharing them was very difficult, and they could not deliver the story he was looking to tell. With this pain in mind, he sought out to create a tool that would solve both of these issues. Ateş and his co-founder created thepit.ch (not the company name, but a demo), a stealth startup that aims to provide the tools to create an amazing presentation, and the ability to share it while still getting the point across. According to their research, there are over 75 million desktop users of presentation software, and 20 million users of cloud-based presentation software, so they believe the potential market is huge.
caught my eye in terms of a potential market. Yes, the market is huge. +1!
The software featured in Gideon’s post, while answering important questions, fails to answer:
What makes a good narrator for a narrative?
If you are not a good narrator, no software will make you one.
There isn’t anything wrong with Powerpoint that having a gifted presenter would not cure.
For that matter, a gifted presenter can use chalk + blackboard, overhead slides, or electronic media.
A close friend of mine is a gifted presenter. He recorded and timed a Powerpoint presentation that included video of himself. And he “interacted” with the presentation. To the point that the audience was trying to answer questions looking at the presentation instead of the person in front of us. 😉 His point was that we get captured by video to the exclusion of real people.
The point is that we blame Powerpoint for our poor presentations when a mirror would do a much better job of isolating the point of failure.
Nothing against new tools and capabilities, but you can get as much, if not more, return by learning to be a good presenter.