SlideRocket Archive

Online presentations service SlideRocket has announced that they are adding a variety of social features today. Nearly one year ago, SlideRocket announced their first set of partners and today they continue with a new set of social partners.

The partners include:

• Live Twitter stream – you can push Twitter searches and hashtags into your presentations live as you are delivering the presentation.
• Stock tickers – you can pull in live, real-time stock quotes
• RSS feeds – if you list a feeed in your presentation, SlideRocket can keep updating the feed during the presentation
• PollEverywhere – this service will allow you to add a live audience poll to your presentation. The PollEverywhere service uses text messaging to allow your audience to participate.

One of my most popular posts on CN, “I’ve Had Enough of Live at Conferences” looks at presentations, presenters and when “going live” is appropriate. I get why SlideRocket added these new social features, they make sense to add. I just hope presenters use them effectively and attendees still walk away with new learnings.

As a side note, apparently SXSW is using the NASCAR business model — SlideRocket is listed as the “official presentation software” for the conference.

Continue reading “SlideRocket Goes Social Just in Time for SXSW” »

SlideRocket, the Flash/Flex-powered web-based presentation creation software, is today announcing a major overhaul of its Marketplace to include new content partners, a brand new services directory, and a a cleaner, portal-style user interface. The Marketplace was launched in November of last year, when SlideRocket came out of beta, as an additional way to earn revenue on top of their software as a service business.

SlideRocket employs a freemium business model, offering a stripped down free version of their very slick presentation software, and paid versions that include additional features like more storage space, versioning, and collaboration. Paid subscriptions are their main source of revenue, and SlideRocket’s Senior Director of Community and Product Marketing Tracy Pizzo Frey tells me that they’re converting free to paid users at an impressive 10-15%.

The Marketplace is a very smart source of additional revenue for SlideRocket. It allows users to purchase assets for their presentations — photography, icons, music, etc. — directly from within SlideRocket, automatically securing the appropriate digital rights. Because the Marketplace is available to both free and paid users, it acts as a way to bring in revenue from free users of the product. According to Frey, SlideRocket has sold “thousands of credits” and is averaging 35 per user. Use is spread evenly across both free and paid customers, so the Marketplace has been successful so far in monetizing use on both ends.

Until today, SlideRocket’s only offered assets from Fotolia (stock photos) and Mimeo (printing services). They’ve added two new partners, PresentationPro (templates, icons) and Andertoons (cartoons), with others on the way, including Fotolia (videos), AudioMicro (stock audio), and Ascender (fonts). In addition, SlideRocket is releasing a services marketplace today, with 11 providers at launch offering design and authoring services to the app’s users.

According to SlideRocket founder and CEO Mitch Grasso the Marketplace, “greatly streamlines the creative process and helps our users save time and money while delivering the best possible presentations.”

It’s also a very smart way to bring in additional revenue and monetize free users.

Josh Catone is the Community Manager at DandyID and the co-founder of Rails Forum.

The online office market continues to heat up. Everyone wants a piece of the Microsoft Office pie from Zoho to Google to SlideShare along with hundreds of other startups. SlideRocket is a Powerpoint replacement and is moving into public beta today.

SlideRocket launched in private beta in March and you can check out initial reviews on Techcrunch and ZDNet. SlideRocket offers free and paid versions of their presentation application. Phil Wainewright notes regarding an additional component to their business model:

One innovative extra that will help SlideRocket make money is its plan to offer a marketplace of data and asset services for paid use in presentations — for example, market sizing data and other material from analyst firms, or stock images from photo libraries. It’s the sort of money-making add-on that Microsoft ought to have done long ago with PowerPoint — it’s the classic ’software plus services’ play.

As startups continue to realize that there’s money in them hills – those hills being small to enterprise businesses, we will slowly see a shift to useful utilities instead of yet another social network.