A long discussion on Facebook started by Heidi Miller about the pros and cons of PowerPoint and Keynote introduced me to another presentation tool, Prezi.
On the same day, I received an email from Michael Kolowich, founder and CEO of KnowledgeVision.
The two tools — Prezi and KnowledgeVision — are not in competition with each other. One, Prezi, is primarily aimed at live presentations; KnowledgeVision is aimed at web-based presentations.
What makes them both similar is their ability to zoom in and out.
Watch a Prezi demonstration and you get giddy and disoriented (well, I did) as you pan and zoom around a large area. But it definitely *is* an exciting new way of presenting information in a manner that will ‘wow’ the audience (assuming you pre-warn them about turbulence and the need to keep their seatbelts fastened [grin]).
Here’s a ‘live’ Prezi ‘presentation’, created by Adam Somlai-Fischer, the creator of Prezi. Click on the arrow at the bottom of the presentation once to load it, then again to move around. You can zoom in and out if you like, by first hovering your mouse over the right hand side of the player.
Watch the KnowledgeVision presentation and you see the usual deathly-dull PowerPoint presentation with uninspiring stock images that we usually see on a once-per-fortnight basis. Or at least I do. But what gives KnowledgeVision some of the same sort of ‘wow’ power as Prezi is its ability to have your audience focus on the key element — the slides, the video, the handout material, etc., — when you wish them to. They see them all, but the ‘focus’ of control (pardon the pun, a play on ‘locus of control’) is in your hands.
Alas, you cannot embed KnowledgeVision presentations onto other webpages (at least as how I could see from a quick glance), but click on the screen grab to view ‘In Deep Water’, a presentation from Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences about the BP/Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
Check them both out, if you haven’t already, and see if they can help you deliver your message in a new and exciting way that cuts through the noise of traditional ‘death by PowerPoint/Keynote’ presentations. But judging from the feedback I’m getting from my Twitter peers, I can foresee a Prezi or two in my future…
