SlideIdea, A New Presentation Tool To Get Audience Engaged

What is the most important thing for events? To get the audience engaged. If you ever hosted any event, spoke at conference or moderated panels, you might find that for a long time there’s NO easy way for speakers and audience to interact with each other. There were some ‘traditional’ ways, e.g. audience sends question in text message to certain gateway number, then the text could be picked up and projected to the screen. It sounds easy but remember the organiser should talk to SP to get a number set up which could be quite annoying. What if you wanted to do a ballot? Asking every audience to send keywords to the gateway number maybe. The set-up would be even more complex and you may also suffer a long delay if there is a large crowd.

Beijing-based startup SoftCompass developed a new Windows 8 based application called SlideIdea which might bring a good solution for the issues addressed above. SlideIdea is a new presentation tool designed for the new mobile era. It’s different from old tools like Keynote or Powerpoint in that sense that it focus on the actual showing of the presentation and include cool features where the audience can engage in voting or send speakers a message or post question simply using their mobile phones.

Since SlideIdea is based in Windows 8 which runs on both PC and Tablets, it is designed to enable you create presentation easily and smoothly on both PC and mobile devices. Like other presentation tools, SlideIdea comes with some handy functions for presentation, such as whiteboard, highlighter and pen. But the uniqueness in SlideIdea is the features which allow the audience become an important part in your presentation. Even there is a huge crowd, the audience can still ask questions, post comments or participate in surveys arranged by the speaker via their mobile phones or other connected devices (by accessing m.slideidea.com). The result will pop up on the screen so that the speakers are able to know what the audience think and wonder during the presentation.

You may question on how many users will actually use SlideIdea to create presentation as MS Powerpoint and Apple’s Keynote are very popular. Kristin, the lead of product & marketing for SlideIdea thinks it would not be an issue. “In our formal release version you will be able to use your ppt’s in Slideidea, as well as the other way around. The same with keynote, with the exception that you will not be able to use your Slideidea presentation in Keynote.” She said.

The iOS and Android version of SlideIdea will be available by end of this year. I asked Kristin why they decided to work on Windows 8 as the first platform. She told us that Slideidea was one of the first developer team in China to received a developer token from Microsoft for their new Windows 8 platform and saw this as a great opportunity to create something fresh and innovative for a new platform.

SlideIdea is a re-invented presentation tool for the mobile era. As a startup company it’s a challenge to release a product into a mature app store and your marketing activities needs to be really intense. To be one of the first apps into a new platform like the Windows 8 can therefore be a great opportunity for us and our app to get publicity and users attention.

The mission of SlideIdea, the new PowerPoint or Keynote of this new era where Share, Interact & Mobility is key works.

 

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