Small Enhancements to Websites for a Small Fee Make a Big Difference

Value innovation is about finding new ways to create and deliver customer value. Value innovation rarely limits itself to the product alone - often it has to do with the pricing and the revenue model that goes with the product.

Enhancing websites is one of those exercises we put off once too often, until the site starts looking like a dinosaur, several pending design changes accumulate, and before we realize what is happening, it is time to look for budget to fund another big web project. To avoid this fate, every webmaster would love to have a site-enhancement tool that enables micro-enhancements - a new widget here, a cool animation there - on an on-going basis.

Last year in fall, SiteJazzer was introduced in the market as a web site enhancement tool. SiteJazzer, presented as a SaaS subscription, generated a considerable interest among website owners who wanted to bring their sites alive with interactive elements. Soon enough, a SiteJazzer desktop license was introduced, this time allowing a one-time license fee. Further along, a pay-per-use option was also introduced, allowing micro-payments as low as $10 per enhancement to your site.

With micro-payments, webmasters have a very convenient option in their quest for site enhancement. They can try out a small enhancement to their site for free: simply sign up and customize any interactive element a.k.a. jazzer. Once they know it is useful and want to keep it, they purchase only that jazzer for a small payment. This keeps the web site up to date with enhancements, avoiding big expenses later.  Small change at a time for a small fee, making a big difference.Take a look at SiteJazzer, if you haven't already.

Playing Flash on iPad - New Solutions Based on Transcoding

There's a lot of Flash content out there, and iPad users are yearning to use it - but unfortunately, Apple won't support Flash on iPad. Is there a way out?

Consider iSWiFTER, a solution that has been around for over six months now. According to their own description, iSWiFTER is the industry's first cloud-based Flash streaming service specifically built for mobile devices including smart phones and tablets, spanning mobile platforms such as Apple's iOS and Android.

How does iSWiFTER play Flash on iPad? It seems their servers in the cloud run abstraction software that converts browser-based Flash content to a form that is optimized for individual mobile devices, complete with multi-touch gesture support for interaction, and accommodating different screen sizes.

ISWiFTER's free client app connects to their  servers in the cloud to download streaming content live to the mobile device.

When I tried it, it worked pretty well for some of the SiteJazzer, YawnBuster and Raptivity interactions that are Flash-based. Of course, the HTML versions run smoother on iPad. Little wonder, since the differences in user interactions with laptops vs tablets (think mouse drag-drop and multi-touch, for instance) make it nearly impossible to replicate the flash experience on iPad without rewriting code at some level.

So, HTML5 is here to stay if you want to replicate the interactive experiences. Other than that, ISWiFTER's Flash video transcoding is the closest thing to having real Flash software on your device.

I was also wondering if Apple would have had some issues with approving the app - it does not drain the battery for sure, but the loading time can compromise user experience, something Apple is fanatic about.

Anybody tried Skyfire?

A Hundred Ideas to Make Your Presentations Sizzle

I am preparing for a press conference scheduled for tomorrow. I'm nervous. No, it is not about what I am going to say. It is about how I am going to say it. I meet this group of journalists - mostly business reporters from local bureaus of national newspapers - quite regularly. They are familiar with my style of presentation - yet I worry about making my slide deck interesting, attention-worthy and entertaining.

All of us have had this experience of butterflies at one time or another. What do most of us do about it? Nothing much. Sometimes we stop by at a bookshop and buy a book on better presenting. Won't it be nice to take some time out and discover the latest in tools and methods of presenting?

A good starting point is a free e-book titled 100 Resources for Presenters. This e-book, brought to you by Raptivity Presenter, is nothing short of a treasure for anyone interested in better presenting. New interactive platforms are deeply impacting the ways of preparing and disseminating presentations.  You can build presentations better and faster using templates, make them interactive, present them online and leave them online for review, discussion and feedback. Leading gurus and thought leaders continue to blog and write articles about new tools and techniques that advance the art of presenting a notch every now and then. All of this is captured in this e-book.

Here is what the e-book gives you.

• 15 Great ways to share presentations online
• 15 Useful blogger websites on PowerPoint Presentations
• 15 Useful tips on effective use of Raptivity Presenter to make presentations interactive
• 15 Well known PowerPoint‐ Microsoft Valued Professionals
• 10 Highly useful presentation tools for sales & marketing
• 10 Websites for PowerPoint templates 
• 5 Great articles on how to make presentations interactive
• 5 Popular presentation conferences & events worldwide  
• 5 Reasons for webinar marketing
• 5 Well known communities & forums for presentation resources

You can download the e-book free by clicking here. Good luck for your next presentation.

Kinect - Microsoft Promises a Platform Shift from GUI to NUI

In November 2010, Microsoft unveiled Kinect, a new type of user interface device for the the Xbox gaming console. Unlike traditional graphical user interface (GUI), Kinect relies on facial expressions, voice and hand gestures of the users - thereby making it a natural user interface (NUI), according to Microsoft. Earlier this year I had seen a Kinect commercial demonstrating how users 'talk' to their Xbox using body language, if you will. It looked very impressive. At a recent meeting at its Redmond campus event, Microsoft revealed that they plan to provide a SDK API for developers to build applications using Kinect. They went on to suggest that there will be ways for developers to build and sell programs based on Kinect through some sort of an application exchange.

In the interactivity space, we see Apple taking a lead and dominating in several categories including media players (iPod product line), tablets (iPad) and smart phones (iPhone). This of course is in addition to the Apple TV and the Macintosh line of computers. Gaming consoles is one area where we don't see Apple yet, and Microsoft has its position there with XBOX.

According to Microsoft, a large number of XBOX sales included the $150 Kinect since its announcement, and the company may see the two bought together a lot in the future.

The parallels between Xbox - Kinect combination and Windows-Office juggernaut of the last century are hard to miss. Microsoft has excelled in creating platforms, building a select number of critical applications and attracting developers to build the rest.

After several forays with mixed results in the spaces dominated by others (think Zune and Kin - for example), will Kinect prove to be a game-changing new introduction for Microsoft? If that happens, we will have another innovation in interactivity to celebrate. Developers will have another platform with fundamentally new interface capabilities to build interactive applications with.

Anybody wants to share insights which way Kinect is going? What kinds of applications can you think of?

Sharing Presentations and Letting Everyone Get on a Different Page

Webinars and online meetings, where you share a screen with other users, do a great job of keeping everyone in sync, no matter which location they attend your meeting from. You flip to a slide, and the whole audience, spread in different corners of the world, sees that slide. Everyone is on the same page.

This works great for the most part. When you come to questions and answers, though, people need to refer back to earlier slides. What one person needs to refer could be different from what another person needs to. This is what brings us to the need for letting everyone get on a different page. This is an example of an asynchronous interaction.

Asynchronous interactions are slow-time, or near-real-time.

There are several tools that support asynchronous interactions of varying depths. A trivial example would be Google Sites,  where you can form a group and everyone updates content at their own convenience. Another example would be online forums where discussions span several hours or days. However, webinars and online meetings need something more structured around the presentation.

A particularly interesting example is the presentation sharing activity in TeemingPod. Here, the interaction starts when someone uploads a presentation to TeemingPod. Once a presentation is on TeemingPod, the synchronous part of a web meeting is accomplished as usual - with a online conferencing software such as GotoMeeting, GotoWebinar, Adobe Connect and so forth. The fun begins when someone has a question. Any person that is a member of that Pod simply  goes to a slide, makes a comment or texts in a question, and waits. The meeting host gets an alert, goes to the same slide, and answers the question. In the meantime, other people's questions are queued on their respective slides. The answers are also displayed on the respective slides.

Recently I used TeemingPod for an online team meeting with over a hundred members, and it worked swimmingly well.

5 Tips for Presenting Graphs and Charts Interactively

Many presentations - in-person or online, real-time or slow-time - tend to involve information that is best shown in graphs and charts. Imagine presenting financial data, sales information, survey findings, employee data, scientific correlations - the list is endless. In each case, you have the daunting task of showing all relevant information, yet focusing the audience on key highlights, findings or takeaways.

One way to make your graphs and charts really talk to the audience is to present them interactively. How on earth does one do that? Well, here are some tips.


1. Plan your content with minimal text
The big value of a graph or a chart is in its graphic content. You don't want to distract viewers with a lot of text in the surrounding areas. Yes, I know there is a lot that needs to go on the slide, but you can use your judgment and prune the content to bare essentials. This enhances the effectiveness of your graphs. For example, let's assume you want to show the negative correlation between product price and quantity sold across the company's product line.  You could do a bubble chart with quantity and price on the axes, and the bubble size would show the revenue of each product.

2. Don't show everything at once
If you can build up a chart part-by-part, do so. Rather than see it all at once, the viewer finds it easier to see what is on each axis, to get the frame of reference, to watch the first series build up and then the next, and so on. Animations are also good attention-getters. A pie chart that shows - slice-by-slice - details of each segment is more catchy than one where all labels appear at once.

3.  Relate the graph to data
If you can afford the space on your slide, show a data table next to the graph. Again, remember rule #1 and #2. Not all the data, and not all at once, but only after the graph builds up, and preferably on-demand. Imagine the rich user experience where hovering the cursor over a row of the table highlights the corresponding line graph, and  conversely, clicking a line graph highlights the corresponding data set.

4. Allow selective viewing
Even after a graph has fully built up, allow the use of filters to turn off some data-sets and view a subset of the graph. For example, in a column chart of quarterly sales in five regions over past eight quarters, there are 40  columns to see. A user might find it worthwhile to select one region at a time and study the sales pattern. Another user may be interested in selecting a recent quarter and study how the five regions contributed to sales in that quarter.

5. Provide interpretation
A graph is only useful if it points to a trend, a historical perspective, a correlation or such other insight that jumps out of a cluster of data points. Since you have prepared the graph, you presumably have such an insight and want to share it with the viewers. This is done easily by providing a hyper-linked annotation on parts of graphs. Each annotation pops up when that part is clicked, and viewers learn more. This will help you explain that dip in revenue, or that outlier in your employee productivity chart much more easily!


Sounds interesting? You can see examples of such interactive graphs built using Raptivity Presenter by clicking here.

Flipboard: A Harbinger of Magazines that Read People?

Early in December 2010, Apple named Flipboard as the best iPad app of the year. Flipboard unpacks the underlying articles and images from your social streams like Twitter and Facebook, and presents them in a magazine-like format. So, you leaf through your Facebook, as it were. The user experience is remarkably rich, due to the aesthetically pleasing layout, typography, generous white spaces and attractive graphics.Once you start experiencing your Twitter streams on Flipboard, it is addicting.

Flipboard is free, and has already  been downloaded by over a million people. (I confess, I did not make it to the first million, just started using it recently.) It seems to me that Flipboard ushers in a fundamentally new way of consuming content on touchscreen tablets.  The page flipping action is a perfect navigation method on the iPad, which is all about touch.

Flipboard lets you pull in Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Google Reader feeds and other custom feeds. It grabs photos, text or video from Twitter streams and stitches them into a magazine-like layout.  In essence, it helps you design your own visually rich newspaper - which is always up to date.You get to read the content you care about, posted by people you care about.

In that sense, Flipboard is a magazine that reads you - your interests and your social networks - to build itself. Sounds like a holy grail for advertisers. 

Building Digital Narratives - Microsoft Research Showcases Cutting Edge Technology for Rich Internet Narratives (RIN)

Imagine flying over the majestic Himalaya mountains and slowly descending on to the Domkhar valley near Ladakh. You enjoy a panoramic view of the lush green valley and wonder how it looked in winter snow. You pause a moment, and with a click of a mouse, contrast the view, now brimming with life, with a desolate winter not too long ago. You land and enter the village. Now you reckon it is time to enter an ancient monastery. Presently you are in. As you hear the incantations you look around. You find a wall showing several images of the Buddha, each illustrating a different symbolic sign. You can't just walk by, you need to know more. The narrative pauses. You approach the wall, go take a closer look, turn around and the narrative continues. The whole experience is media-rich, interactive and immersive.


Microsoft Research recently showcased a new technology called Rich Internet Narratives (RIN) that combines the best of two worlds. On the one hand you have the power of storytelling narrative, which traditional media such as video, audio and text provide. On the other hand you have the exploratory freedom offered by new technologies such as 3D scene construction from photo images, gigapixel image navigation and interactive maps. RIN brings these two together in a compelling interactive narrative.

Curious? Check out the Digital Narratives website.

Lessons on Better Presenting from San Diego

I had the good fortune to represent Harbinger at the Presentation Summit 2010 (formerly known as PPT Live) in San Diego from Oct 17-20. In its eighth year, the Summit brings together some of the world's best presentation designers and presenters in an exchange of ideas and best practices for four days of intense activity.

Image Credits http://www.betterppt.com/summit

Some of the presenters and speakers included Nancy Duarte, Rick Altman, Geetesh Bajaj, Ric Bretschneider, Nigel Holmes, Sandra Johnson, Glen Millar, Echo Swinford and Julie Terberg. They have several distinctions to their credit - from being a Microsoft MVP to being involved in designing presentations for Al Gore to directing graphics for Time magazine.

Here are some hidden gems that came from the interactions.

1. Top 3 peeves of audience: (1) Presenter reads the slides (2) Slides contain full sentences (3) Some fonts are too small to read (This survey was repeated year after year with more-or-less same conclusions)
2. Universal axiom #1 : If it moves, they have to look. At the same time, improper animation  is a leading cause of death by PowerPoint.
3. Sometimes the best way to get your point across is to put up a blank slide and perform in front of your audience.
4. Three rules for better visuals: (1) use primitive features (color, size, orientation, movement, shape, depth) to get attention (2) use grouping to show relationships (3) reduce the realism of your graphics
5. Don't memorize - just know the transitions
6. Your audience cares about how much you share - not how much you know
7. Enough already! The biggest problem of slides is too much text
8. Slides cannot double as handouts. Printing out slides to make a handout is a bad idea. Slides and handouts serve two completely different purposes. Slides should be visual. Handouts should be textual.

Enhancing the Cognitive Style of PowerPoint with Interactivity

If you went to a dinner party where all guests were to present their stories in PPT format - it might be informative but also a bore. The unfortunate price of simplification is over-simplification, and the additional tax paid out is in the form of pedantry - says Youngme Moon, the author of Different, a recent book on marketing.

Edward R. Tufte, professor emeritus at Yale University, presents a scholarly criticism of PowerPoint in two of his essays:  PowerPoint is Evil  (Wired, 11(9), 2003) and The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint  (Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press. ISBN 0961392169).

According to Wikipedia, here are Tufte’s arguments against the overuse of PowerPoint: 

1. It is used to guide and to reassure a presenter, rather than to enlighten the audience;
2. It has unhelpfully simplistic tables and charts, resulting from the low resolution of early computer displays;
3. The outliner causes ideas to be arranged in an unnecessarily deep hierarchy, itself subverted by the need to restate the hierarchy on each slide;
4. Enforcement of the audience's linear progression through that hierarchy (whereas with handouts, readers could browse and relate items at their leisure);
5. Poor typography and chart layout, from presenters who are poor designers and who use poorly designed templates and default
6. Simplistic thinking, from ideas being squashed into bulleted lists, and stories with beginning, middle, and end being turned into a collection of disparate, loosely disguised points. 

We believe that these limitations of PowerPoint are overcome by interactivity, as is evident when you consider interactivity tools such as Raptivity Presenter.  Let me explain how the combination of Raptivity Presenter and PowerPoint alleviates some of the concerns outlined above.

1.  By its very nature, Raptivity Presenter’s  output objects are interactive. A presentation may be sent in email to a user, who can experience the interactive elements at their own pace – thus reassuring the audience, not just the presenter.
2. With the use of Flash, the content displayed by Raptivity Presenter presumes high resolution and is rich.
3.  There is no compulsion to arrange material hierarchically, because Raptivity Presenter provides a  variety of presentation alternatives (accordion panels, page flip books, rotating 3D cubes, panning cards, flash cards, magnifiers, tabs, etc.)
4. Due to this, audience can progress non-linearly through the presentation material. Consider the selective displays or business visuals in Raptivity Presenter. They are perfect for drilling down by audience.
5. The beauty of professionally designed interaction models is that you get ready-made graphics and text types – you simply change the content. 
6. Language shapes the way you think. With Raptivity Presenter, the controlling metaphor is not the bullet list – instead you have story builders, selective displays, business visuals, brainteasers and such other rich interaction metaphors.

We agree with Prof Tufte that the PowerPoint style routinely disrupts, dominates and trivializes content. Several hundred million copies of Microsoft PowerPoint are churning out trillions of slides each year.  Majority of these slides do not do a good job of educating the audience. 

We however believe that instead of doing away with PowerPoint, it is better to add interactivity to it – so that we reap the benefits of both ubiquity and interactivity.