Prezi, Where Presentations Don’t Have to Be Boring

Posted by on Wednesday, September 23, 2009 · 8 Comments 

Last week I got sucked into Prezi again and this time, I fell in love even more.

If you haven’t heard of Prezi, it’s a new kind of presentation tool.  Prezi tends to get you to dig in and find the creative bones and put them to use developing more than just a slideshow.  With fun or just plan cool visual effects.

I recently tweaked a syllabus Prezi for Howard Rheingold for his upcoming classes. This is just a small example of what Prezi can do.

If you want to get really crazy creative, then check out this press release done in Prezi…

Created by Adam Somlai-Fischer

If my mindblown awe isn’t enough of an endorsement consider this:

  • In June 2009, Prezi has successfully closed a series A investment round with Nordic based VC firm, Sunstone Capital
  • Owner of TED, The Sapling Foundation has invested in Prezi
  • Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter has joined Prezi’s advisory board
  • Prezi’s founder and lead designer Adam Somlai-Fischer named as one of the world’s top 40 emerging designers by I.D. magazine New York, is World Technology Awar winner in Arts category
  • Prezi has been awarded 2nd best at NextWeb Startup Rally in Amsterdam April 2009
  • Harvard Business, TechCrunch, Lifehacker, Mashable, Twitter founder Evan Williams and presentation guru Garr Reynolds have recently wowed about Prezi

This small company wants to make audiences and presenters alike have a lot of fun giving and listening to presentations.  For me they’ve succeeded.  It takes some getting used to, you’ll spend some time learning it, that’s usually half the fun.  You will also find you can engage your audience into the presentation a little better than using a typical PowerPoint.

If you’ve already tried Prezi, I’d love to see the results.  Just post them in the comments!  If you give a shot, do me a favor and let me know what you think?

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  • http://ecgridos.com Alan Wilensky

    It works for me, I don’t know for how long:

    http://prezi.com/p0eerckue6rm/

  • http://www.chelpixie.com Chel

    Alan,

    What *isn’t* working for you?

  • Lotte Andersen

    Copenhagen School of Architecture use a similar zooming program called Ahead http://www.ahead.com. It’s more focused on layouts and rich media than Prezi – and it’s free :-)

  • http://www.chelpixie.com Chel

    Hey Lotte,

    Thanks for turning me on to Ahead. I’m having issues with the media loading. I tested my connection just to make sure it wasn’t that before replying. I like that it’s free, if I were using it for a presentation I’d need the images to load a bit faster, instead of being pixelated upon focus.

    I’ll pass it around to others to see what they think!

  • Jens D

    Prezi is cool the first time you see it but when you've seen one you've seen them all. I think the layout options are too limited for creating great visual presentations and if you add more than 5-10 hi res images the player starts coughing. The great thing is that you can present offline.

    I've started using http://www.ahead.com instead. It's not template based and offers all the layout options you'd expectfroma professional layout tool – and on top of that it handles hi-res images very well and you can easily use it to build some cool rich media web sites as well. Someone dubbed Ahead Prezi for architects and designers.

    PS
    I wish people would experiment less with rotation in these presentation tools. It's annoying and rarely add anything good to your presentation.

  • Jens D

    Prezi is cool the first time you see it but when you've seen one you've seen them all. I think the layout options are too limited for creating great visual presentations and if you add more than 5-10 hi res images the player starts coughing. The great thing is that you can present offline.

    I've started using http://www.ahead.com instead. It's not template based and offers all the layout options you'd expectfroma professional layout tool – and on top of that it handles hi-res images very well and you can easily use it to build some cool rich media web sites as well. Someone dubbed Ahead Prezi for architects and designers.

    PS
    I wish people would experiment less with rotation in these presentation tools. It's annoying and rarely add anything good to your presentation.

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