The Hindu Business Line : Power your presentation

Remember the time you tried to email your PowerPoint presentation to yourself and it took about five hours to get attached and two days to deliver to your ID?

Now, with user-friendly Web sites pitching in, such nightmares could be a thing of the past.

www.authorstream.com says it is especially designed to help anyone trying to make, attach or share heavy PowerPoint files on the information highway.

An online presentation sharing engine, it not only allows users to upload PowerPoint presentations online for free, but also assists sharing them with friends or co-workers located across the globe, says the site.

It gives access to numerous presentations on varied subjects uploaded by community members where people can find presentations on any topic, rate them, post a comment and even embed them in blogs. authorSTREAM currently supports PowerPoint files like PPT, PPS, PPTX and PPSX formats.

Products head, AuthorSTREAM, Umesh Sharma, says, “authorSTREAM’s aim is to keep the impact of the original PowerPoint file by retaining its animations and sounds and letting users share them online or on mobile devices such as iPods, which, in return, will give their content maximum exposure.” Besides uploading, you can browse through various presentations and select slides to use in work you may be doing.

Flash 8 or above

What your computer needs to view the presentations is Flash 8 or above installed. For now, most of authorSTREAM’s products are free.

The site aims to make money in the future by offering premium services that will have branding options for people who want to share and sell their content and services using the site, such as promotions of various services or a corporate putting its training or policy material for sharing inside its community and online advertisements.

Future plans also include enabling more sharing options, such as directly sending stuff to YouTube and creating online communities to share powerpoint presentations.

Sharma says, “We also aim to create Developer API (Application Programming Interface) that will help others build more products of their own around authorSTREAM’s PowerPoint sharing platform.

Anyone then can create a product that plays a YouTube video and a powerpoint presentation on authorSTREAM, in sync with each other, thereby creating an altogether different kind of a presentation for sharing.

It’s like allowing other software vendors to use our service by leveraging its functionality programmatically.”

If you have suggestions for improvement and more, mail them to the site.

Support executives promise to get back within one business day.

paromita@thehindu.co.in