So you’ve got a PowerPoint presentation or Word doc or .pdf that you’re proud of and would like to show the world. The hands down least cumbersome way to do this is to upload it through a new Web app called Reel. The service seems dedicated to removing absolutely all obstacles: You don’t even need to sign up or enter an email address. READ MORE
We’ve all sat through those tedious presentations — the ones that have sound effects of blasting rifles, swirling letters, and just too many slides. If you have a colleague who’s stuck in permanent Office 97 mode, you might suggest Zurb’s new offering, Reel. READ MORE
Cisco has moved back into its comfort zone with the acquisition of Versly, an Office collaboration start-up. In April, Cisco shuttered its Flip video camera unit, whose consumer focus always seemed an odd fit for the corporate-friendly company. READ MORE
GlobalMeet, which was launched in February and already has more than 20,000 people using its Web conferencing service, now has new pricing, features and a mobile app available at the iTunes store. With plans that start at $29 a month, GlobalMeet can be used for Web and audio meetings with no software downloads for meeting guests and a “connect me” feature that calls participants automatically without using dial-in numbers and passcodes. READ MORE
Koka Sexton, director of social strategy at InsideView, a company that helps sales professionals get to know their leads through sales intelligence delivery, says LinkedIn is not only a place to build your online resume, but a online resource for sales. READ MORE
Jonah Sterling is building a suite for interactive presentations that just might transform the way we see the conference room. Sterling, a creative director at Seattle software application development firm IdentityMine (www.identitymine.com), is building a paperless meeting space for a Fortune 100 client that incorporates touch and gesture-enabled interactive whiteboards, interactive video conferencing, and touchscreen tablets. Now, they just need to add popcorn to make users fully engaged. “I think there has been a fundamental shift in the last couple of years that’s starting to show some payoff,” says Sterling, explaining that users are becoming more savvy with technology and there is a greater need for more interactive and engaging presentations. Unfortunately, most boardroom presentations follow a familiar routine: someone talking while PowerPoint slides click by on a big screen, says Mike Fisher, a convergence and new technologies consultant for Futuresource Consulting (www. futuresource-consulting.com), a technology research firm. IdentityMine’s work is a vanguard for any corporation. Experts argue that businesses must be ready to shift how they view presentations and incorporate collaboration if they want to keep pace with competitors. The introduction of touch tablets, large flat panels, an increased demand for touch technology and the expectation of interactivity by users will change the way even small businesses handle sales pitches, brainstorming sessions, and employee training. The presentation tool landscapeWhile not widely embraced, there are several high-tech tools available, and they are not reach for most small businesses. Fisher notes that interactivity, collaboration and viewer impact are key areas to consider as you consider how to liven up a presentation. Among the options on the market today: – Interactive whiteboards The use of these boards, connected to computers and projectors, is exploding in educational settings, and the boards have been around in high-level boardrooms for a while. However, their capabilities are expanding. For instance, on whiteboards made by Promothean (www.prometheanworld.com), four people might work simultaneously, clicking anywhere on the board. You can edit on the fly, rendering presentations organic and ever-changing as ideas evolve. SMART Technologies (www.smarttech.com) and Promethean are the big players. Price range depends on board size. Expect to pay from $2,000 to $4,500, which is not out of line with traditional conference room projector setups. If you’re uncertain about making an investment in an interactive whiteboard as presentation technology changes, consider leasing, advises John Byrne, a managing partner with interactive whiteboard seller New Age Learning. “This industry technically is moving very fast,” Byrne says. “Small businesses should be careful to work with resellers that will stay in touch and keep them abreast of updates and keep those systems maintained properly.” – Interactive projectors Projectors from Epson (www.epson.com) and Texas Instruments (www.ti.com) eliminate the need for the whiteboard altogether, notes Fisher. These projectors work on any surface using an interactive pen. This provides some flexibility in screen size, and the open architecture allows interaction with all sorts of software and digital media. Expect to pay around $2,000 for an interactive projector. – Apple iPad You can use iPad, Keynote for iPad and a VGA connector to put together presentations. Sterling recently used his iPad as he toured the office space where the futuristic presentation dashboard will be installed. As he toured, he used an Eye-Fi wireless memory card to load photos from his camera to his iPad. He used an iPad application called Sketchbook Pro to make ‘doodles’ of the office space, and he made annotations on copies of the floor plan. He swiftly assembled a presentation that offered hand-drawn and realistic visuals, and he also had the capability of editing it on the iPad as he presented. Sterling thinks the iPad is a tool that will work well in concert with a more traditional presentation. “I would probably still be doing the laptop and the projector for the core presentation,” he says. “But you’d be able to hand around your iPad with information on it, [such as] sales brochures, during a meeting to involve people.” – Canson PAPERSHOW Want to dabble a toe in the creative presentation pool? Check out PAPERSHOW by Canson for $249 (www.showpapershow.com). This 2010 Best of Show winner at Macworld Expo uses an interactive pen and special paper. You project an image such as a pie chart onto the screen, and your annotations using the paper and pen show up on the chart. You can save the annotations. Louise Sattler, owner of a small Maryland business called Signing Families (www.signingfamilies.com), uses it in workshops as she teaches American Sign Language. ”It is easy, and I figured it out for myself in under an hour,” she says. ”I like that it’s affordable. I love that it’s portable.” Sattler finds her students engage more when she uses PAPERSHOW. No matter the business size, keeping your audience or your participants involved is critical. You don’t want surreptitious, under-the-table smartphone use. “The key thing is, how do you get people to talk more effectively together?” asks Fisher. “And in terms of presenting, how do you get the most impact you can?” In the end, the answer is in moving away from stale PowerPoint slides and adding interactivity, gesture control on the iPad, touchscreens and HD displays, and more digital media.
“I can’t open the document you sent me!” This has been a frequent complaint by users of Microsoft Office 2003 and earlier word processing software since Microsoft launched Office 2007, and introduced the .docx format. “At the beginning of every semester, we hire new interns who are college students,” says Matt Brownell, editor at the Ictus Initiative, a marketing and public relations company that deals mostly with speakers, authors, and consultants, and uses Microsoft Office 2003. “They tend to have new laptops and they have the latest version of Office, and they send us résumés we can’t open.” Though Microsoft offers a free conversion program that users can download from its website, like many Office 2003 users, Brownell and his colleagues weren’t eager to use this solution. Instead, prospective interns were told to resubmit their résumés as .doc files. But Ictus had fewer choices when clients sent .docx files. And, Brownell discovered, the problem wasn’t limited to Microsoft Word. There were new .pptx files for PowerPoint and .xlsx files for Excel as well. “The other day, I assigned a project to an intern to have her produce a spreadsheet,” Brownell says. “It came as an .xlsx file. At that point, I finally gave in and downloaded the converter, but I wasn’t happy about it.” “I upgraded to Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac in 2008,” says Kimberly Hathaway, managing partner at Hathaway PR. “But what was this ‘X’ stuff? It was almost as if we shouldn’t have bothered upgrading.” Most high-tech clients have Office 2007, she notes — but they make up only about 10 percent of her business. “For the rest, you really don’t know who has the new Office and who doesn’t,” she says. “We do a lot of work with smaller regional publications, and they don’t have the newest version of Office.” One client, an attorney, is using an older version of WordPerfect, presenting another set of problems. “I don’t want my agency to appear antiquated,” Hathaway says. To her mind, sending .doc files to Office 2007 users risks sending that message. “If I see someone is using .docx, then I send a .docx file.” When in doubt, she sends a .doc file to avoid embarrassing anyone using the older version of Word. To make sure to always have files in the needed formats, the policy for her company is to save every document in three formats: .doc, .docx, and .pdf. “From one to three times a week, we have an issue when someone forgets and sends a .docx file, and we have to resend something in the older format,” she says. “It’s frustrating how much time and energy is spent on the stupid formatting.” Why Microsoft added the x To users like Hathaway and Brownell, the new format seems intended to cause irritation and force users to upgrade sooner to the newest software. “I think there was initial disbelief among users that it wasn’t at all backwards-compatible with the old version,” Brownell says. “We assumed it was a problem that would be fixed. If it was possible to create this new format, why couldn’t they make it backwards-compatible?” But creating a backwards compatible format might have been impossible, since with .docx, pptx, and .xlsx, the company was making a fundamental change in the way its files are created. The new file formats are based on Extensible Markup Language or XML, a widely recognized document standard. In fact, the move to .docx, .pptx, and .xlsx are part of a move to a more open standard of file formatting for Microsoft, allowing developers to more easily create applications that can access data within Word documents (for transfer to a webpage, for instance), and also to make it easier for other word processing software to open Word documents. Some claim that Microsoft made the move to compete with Open Document Format (.odf) files, an open source format that is popular, especially outside the United States. “Our software supports both .odf and .docx, and also .pdf files,” responds Gray Knowlton, group product manager of Office for developers at Microsoft. “The move we’ve made is to be more open and more transparent.” And XML-based files have other advantages he says. For one thing, they are more compressed than .doc files. “A Word document using the .docx format could be half or three quarters the size it would be as a .doc file,” he says. “That saves on hard drive space and bandwidth. Also, if you tried to open a corrupted file in a .doc format, Word simply couldn’t open it. A lot of data was lost that way. When you open a .docx file that’s corrupted, it will still open and you can see and use all the parts that aren’t corrupted.” Dan Gookin, author of Microsoft Word for Dummies (which comes in both 2003 and 2007 versions) agrees that, though it frustrates many users, the new format brings worthwhile benefits. “You can’t stick with old file formats forever,” he says. And, he adds, “Because it’s so flexible and upgradeable, I think they will stick with the .docx format for a long time to come.” Coping with .doc and .docx If .docx is here to stay, but most users still have Word 2003, what’s the best way to manage file format conflicts? Here are some strategies that may help, depending upon what version of Word you are using. If you use Word 2003: • Download the converter. The simplest way to cope with .docx and other XML-based files is to download Microsoft’s free converter. Once it’s installed, Office 2003 will open .doc, .xlsx, and .pptx files, with a few seconds’ pause for conversion.• Use Google Documents. Google Documents will open a .docx file through its online interface. It’s free, though you have to create a Google account.• Try Open Office. The current version of Open Office can open .docx files, and it’s free.• Hold off on buying Office 2007. With the release of Office 2010 scheduled for this summer, investing in Office 2007 makes little sense at this point. On the other hand, if you’re curious, you can download a free beta version of Office 2010 to play with. If you use Word 2007: • Set .doc as your default format. “The newer format is valuable, and I think everyone should switch to it eventually,” Gookin says. “But for now, you should configure Office 2007 to save files in .doc format by default. People with the newer version of Word can open the older format—and may not even notice the difference.”
Grand Circle Travel, a Boston-based travel chain, has 30 regional offices around the world and 400 employees. The firm sells pre-packaged tours around the world to mature Americans. The company saved time and money and increased productivity by switching to online presentation software to train call center employees about new tours, replacing face-to-face training sessions, John Utter, performance coach and trainer for the call center tells IncTechnology.com Elizabeth Wasserman: When did your company realize that the use of the Internet could help cut costs? John Utter: With the advent of a new CEO, we’ve really made a push into Web technology and significantly upgraded our website. Mostly, it’s quite the informational tool for us. We have approximately 120 different types of trips worldwide. Some of those destinations have three or four departures per week. We’ve made a huge investment into the Web portion of our business. We also hired a senior vice president who had experience using Brainshark in a previous job. He brought it on board. Think of it as a voice over PowerPoint delivered over the Web. One of the huge powers is that it does backend reporting. It’s not just a narrated PowerPoint that lives online. The beauty is all the reporting applications to us so that we can use it for product knowledge to get our call center employees up to speed on all the trips we offer. We can do it in an on-demand fashion. Wasserman: How does it work? Utter: Normally what would happen is we would pull these employees together and have 15 or 20 associates sit in a classroom for 20 minutes or 30 minutes for presentations and then go back on the phone. Now what happens is it’s all done on demand. They have a library of available sessions or modules or presentations that they can do before work, after work, at home, or in between calls. Missing calls is a huge issue in our business. If the average reservation is a $4,000-$6,000 sales opportunity then missing a call is a missed opportunity. We’re able to squeeze that in now in between calls and that means we don’t miss those opportunities. If all of a sudden the call volumes slow down, we can have a bunch of people educating themselves about the products. We’re now using it for a variety of marketing purposes as well. We have a group sales division because a lot of groups go with our travel packages. We just finished a presentation to go out to 2,000 retirement communities to solicit their business, as well. Wasserman: What have the results been? Utter: In the first week of August, the year-to-date result from January to the end of July was that we dropped $473,000 from the bottom line. Our 200 call center associates received 855 hours of training online on-demand. Not once did they have to be pulled off the phone into a group meeting. We figured we saved 266 reservations in that 855 hours of call time and also gained a half customer service employee based on all the calls saved. Wasserman: What type of reporting can you gather? Utter: In terms of product training modules, we can test associates in terms of product knowledge. They are required to get 100 percent. We ask eight to 12 questions to validate their learning and it’s pretty much a pass or fail system. When we send a presentation out to the public, we can track who opened it and how long they spent on it, and the retention rate for every single slide. It’s an extremely powerful tool.
Times are tough, but you can save your company some cash by taking advantage of many free applications and services to help you remain lean and competitive. This includes many downloadable programs for your BlackBerry, iPhone, or Android smartphone as well as tools for PC productivity, such as online back-up options, voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) software, and no-cost office suites. Free apps are sought-after downloads today in business. It’s not just because it makes sense to those watching their bottom line, but the apps are getting a lot more robust instead of simply covering the basics, says Scott Steinberg, publisher of Digital Trends. “You’d be surprise what you can find today when it comes to free applications — and there’s plenty of free apps to choose from for your smartphone, PC, or a cloud-computing solution that bridges the two,” adds Steinberg. Steinberg says he’s most excited about the explosion in downloadable apps for smartphones. “The apps transform phones into notebook replacements, audio recorders, GPS navigation devices, note-taking devices, and even gaming getaways for those in need of an entertainment fix while traveling for business.” Speaking of travel, Chris Silva, an analyst at the Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester, the technology research company, says many of these free productivity tools have an inherent benefit compared to traditional desktop software: “On-the-go businesspersons want to be able to access their content wherever and whenever, and on any device — and while Microsoft recently unveiled a ‘cloud’ component to [Microsoft] Office, we’re finding people are turning to Google’s established and free Gmail for e-mail, file storage, document sharing, and so on.” Caveat emptor There’s little dispute that cost-cutting measures are critical — especially given the current state of the economy — but there are a few things about free software that businesses should be aware of. Silva reminds businesses that these free apps are still not as full-featured as paid versions. “Productivity suites might not have the 500-plus menus and tools built into Microsoft Office, for example, but most people don’t venture outside of ‘create, format, print and share’ anyway,” he says. “Many companies, especially small to mid-sized businesses, are finding these free alternatives to be good enough for their needs.” Silva also warns of two other possible downsides to free apps. “It’s no secret there are occasional Gmail outages, which means you can’t access your e-mail, or Skype congestion that can affect call quality, along with other issues associated with Internet-based solutions,” he says. “Plus, there are always increased security risks in allowing your employees to use any kind of software they want. You’ll need to take steps to educate employees about risks, about some company information that shouldn’t be shared with Gmail or IM, and mitigate these with policies.” Best bets for free apps If you’re looking for completely free apps for your smartphone or PC, consider the following recommendations: Skype – Available for PCs and select smartphones (iPhone and Windows Mobile), Skype lets you make free phone calls to any other Skype user on the Internet via VoIP technology. PC users can also chat using video, swap files, or pay a few cents a minute for “Skype Out” calls to landlines and cell phones. Gmail – Google’s free Web-based e-mail solution reliably keeps you in touch with others, regardless of the platform you’re using it on. Benefits include loads of storage, little spam, contact and calendar management, and support for Google Talk between multiple devices. OpenOffice.org – Sun Microsystems’s free Microsoft Office alternative offers a suite of productivity tools, including word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, databases, and graphics. It supports multiple operating systems and has a portable version that runs off a USB key. Documents To Go – With a free version included on newer BlackBerry devices, this clever app suite allows for viewing and editing of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents. It’s usually bundled with PDF To Go, as well, supporting Adobe’s popular Portable Document Format. Zoho – Free for individuals, Zoho’s range of productivity and collaboration apps include Zoho Mail, Zoho Chat, Zoho CRM, Zoho Writer, Zoho Discussions, Zoho Sheet, Zoho Meeting, Zoho Show, Zoho Creator, Zoho Docs, Zoho Invoice, Zoho Notebook, Zoho Projects, Zoho Wiki, Zoho Reports, and others. Windows Live SkyDrive – Microsoft is offering up to 25GB of free online storage. Only a Windows ID is required (such as a Hotmail e-mail address) and this password-protected virtual drive can be accessed for virtually any online computer in the world. Some folders can be set up for sharing, while other are for your eyes only. Remote Desktop Lite – Use your iPhone or iPod touch to securely access a Windows XP Professional computer, anywhere on the planet. This software provides full access to your PC — via Wi-Fi or EDGE — as if you were in front of the machine you’re accessing. At the time of writing this, Remote Desktop Lite is the no. 1 free business app at Apple’s App Store. Call Time Tracker by momentum – As the name suggests, Redwood Technologies’ free app for Blackberry helps business professionals account for their time in order to bill hours and recover expenses. Ideal for lawyers, consultants, salespeople, realtors and IT professionals, this app pops up at the end of calls and you can easily mark it as billable time. Nice Office – BlackBerry users can manage their e-mail, calendar, contacts, and tasks from this one free suite of tools. Nice Office securely also grants access to forms and documents, lets you record sales activity while on the go and automatically logs device activity, and provides a detailed report on mobile interactions with your contacts, including calls, messages, and appointments. Google Maps – While it doesn’t provide audio-based turn-by-turn commands, Google Maps is a completely free and powerful tool for your smartphone that can help you find nearby establishments (such as restaurants, gas stations, or hotels), show overhead street views (even with satellite imagery), and give you accurate directions to a destination. It works via GPS or even cellular technology (though the latter isn’t as accurate).
Trinity Pharma Solutions, based in Waltham, Mass., has been the technology arm of life sciences consulting firm Trinity Partners since 2004. The company, which employs 30, helps pharmaceutical companies create, deploy and manage data management solutions. But the firm found that it was able to help its customers solve business challenges by better analyzing data, director Glenn Wong tells IncTechnology.com. Elizabeth Wasserman: How does your company use data? Glenn Wong: We are a business and tech solutions provider to pharmaceutical and biotech industries, primarily to manufacturers. The mainstay of what we do is to build reporting and analytic solutions to help the sales teams, the folks who sell the pharmaceutical products. We’re not just reporting what they did but we help them with data management. Wasserman: Why did you decide to look into business intelligence? Wong: It was to help us do our job better. We were actually introduced to TIBCO Spotfire by one of our clients. They said, ‘We know you are smart guys and you deal with a lot of data. Take a look at this.’ We did and we really liked the software. It did help us analyze information better, faster, easier and with more richness. We started using it internally on projects initially for clients. Wasserman: What problems did it help you solve? Wong: In our world, data can be quite complex. Finding an insight or answering a question can take a number of steps. It requires fairly technical knowledge. This product simplified that process and allowed us to get to an answer faster. It also allowed us to get to a better answer. We had a great tool and it wasn’t as if we went out to find problems to fix, but as we started to use it, we recognized problems the software could help with and started addressing them better than before. Wasserman: Such as what? Wong: In the pharmaceuticals industry we look a lot at segmentation. How do you look at your customers? What are the criteria that let you classify and categorize your customers? With pharmaceutical clients, we’re typically looking at physicians as the person you’re selling to or trying to influence. One thing that’s important is understand prescribing patterns – whether a physician is likely to use a drug when it’s first released and what are the patient populations different physicians have. We also try to derive other information. What are your target customers and how would they respond to a different message or market event – for example, if another product, such as a pain medication, would enter the market, are they likely to use that quickly or are they likely to wait and see what the general feedback is? You’re looking at patterns of behavior. Depending on the richness of the data, you can look at the promotional response. If I have a sales rep go talk to doctor once a month, does that make it more likely he would use my product? This doctor attended a conference. Could we look a few months down the line and see whether his prescribing changed based on attendance of that conference? Wasserman: What have the results been? Wong: It’s made us get answers in a more timely manner and it’s also made us more responsive to our customers. It allows us to see insights we might not have otherwise seen. Besides the speed and flexibility, it’s also a great visual tool, which allows us to see multiple dimensions faster than you would otherwise. If I’m putting together a graph using PowerPoint or Excel, I’m lucky if I can show three variables. With Spotfire, I can put up five or six in the blink of an eye. It’s also made us more responsive to our customers. For example, a client VP asked an off topic question during a presentation. Using the software, we came up with an answer quickly and at the VP’s request, gave him soft and hardcopies on short order. He said, ‘I’ve been asking this question internally for 2 months, and you just gave me the answer in 10 minutes.’”
