SlideMagic Blog

The recent post on the Google blog about an update to the search algorithm is an excellent example of how to explain technology:

1. No apologies or “I will not bother you with the detail”, or “this is kind of complex and only an engineer (read someone more intelligent than you) will understand”. No instead, explain things clearly, but without oversimplifying.
2. A simple graphic supports the verbal/written explanation

In case you missed, an earlier post on how Google uses cartoon characters to explain why its Chrome browser beats the competition.

Mary Meeker is a well-known Internet analyst. Every few months she updates her presentation about the state of the online world. Usually, dense slides are boring and fail to communicate a message. Not when every slide is packed with interesting data like in Mary’s decks. This presentation will not fit a Steve-Jobs-style keynote address, but it contains a wealth of insights well worth digesting.

Internet Trends 2010 by Morgan Stanley Research

Microsoft is quietly rolling out its office applications in the cloud. They announced that the web-version of major Office applications are live, at least in a number of countries/languages. In Israel I could get it to work. Try for yourself here.

I have been following these in-the-cloud initiatives closely, and must conclude that Microsoft stands a good chance to be the winner. I chose Microsoft over Google docs for a recent project that involved collaboration in multiple countries.

It looks like the world is dividing into 2:

1. Consumers and freelancers using Google Docs, iPhones, prezi, SlideShare, Windows 7 or Apple OS, gmail, freely sharing stuff over social networks and insecure internet connections
2. Corporate workers using Blackberry, Microsoft Office 2003, Windows XP as a result of strict security guidelines and cost cutting in IT budgets (i.e., delaying upgrades of software). These people are struggling to find stuff in their bulging Outlook 2003 inbox.

The learning curve of switching user interfaces of Office applications is huge (read: costing a lot of money in downtime and helpdesk support), and for a big corporate to switch means that everyone is required to change habits: the 25-year old tech savvy analyst, the 60 year old secretary of the CEO, the CEO herself, to name a few. It’s just hard to move them out of the Microsoft world.

Ultimately, the big corporates will move Office applications/data into the cloud, there are significant benefits to collaboration and simply finding stuff. They will go with Office Live though, and not with Google Docs…

The BP logo was a very powerful one: an environmentally green flower/sun beaming with lots of positive energy. (Apparently it is based on the symbol of Helios, the personification of the sun in Greek mythology).

The fact that it was so good is proven by the enormous number of logo redesign contests that are being conducted now after the oil spill disaster. See this Google search.  Here is one that offers a $200 bounty (still accepting entries), and here is a Flickr page with the entries from a contest organized by Greenpeace. The illustration below is taken from Draplin Design.

It is good to see that graphics design can spark so much emotion. Just a shame that is not a more positive one.

When you pick a color for a shape, PowerPoint gives you the option to set its transparency. However, when you select a color for your font, this dialog box does not appear. How to recreate this effect

in PowerPoint? Here is the work around (PowerPoint 2007).

1. Select the text
2. Right click
3. Format text effects
4. Text fill
5. And now you can change the transparency!

We offer quality because we control the entire supply chain.

A bullet point on a presentation that I came across last week. This statement could have come out of any presentation. People hear it, but do not internalize it.

The real story is that competitors are small players working out of tiny factories in emerging markets stitching together poor quality products that just, but just, meet regulatory requirements. If that is the story, tell it.

One of the new slides I included in my presentation lessons for entrepreneurs deck: talk about the elephant in the room. Some issues are just so obvious that you have to address them (Mark Suster gives a few examples here).

OK, you can decide to ignore them. The potential investor will say “thank you very much” and mentally shelf your pitch already while shaking your hand on the way to the door (peaking over your shoulder to that enormous animal standing in the corner).

Image via David Blackwell

I never saw this before: infographics on food packaging. Nice work by Audree Lapierre.

More pictures here. Found via FFFFound.

A nice video based on a speech by Daniel Pink about what makes us tick. It is being drawn for you live.

Thank you Orli Naschitz.

Many presentations are about ambition: “we want to double in size in 5 years”. That’s basically creating another company exactly as the one you have now. You can use the concept of a biological cell division to visualize this.

The stretching of the circle is done using the edit points function in PowerPoint. The text is stretched using the function “text effects” in the format ribbon of PowerPoint.