If you are looking for a way to make your presentations more engaging and awesome, PowToon’s soon-to-be-released presentation software, #Slides, will can be the solution to your problem. We dig a little deeper into the company, and its latest offering, in a top secret conversation with PowToon’s CEO and Co-founder, Ilya Spitalnik.
Legend has it that a few years ago a group of renegade scientists banded together to fight a huge problem that was taking over both the business and academic world: Boring Presentations…
In fact, PowToon was born out of Ilya’s own needs and desires to make presentations both more fun, and all together awesome and engaging.
PowToon’s first “antidote” for the boring presentation problem was a software focused on creating animated short video clips, or “Powtoons” as they have come to be known, which took the world by storm, amassing over 1 million users in a mere 18 month period, and quite literally disrupting the animated video industry. Now PowToon is releasing their second “antidote”, a software codenamed “Project #Slides”, which is specifically designed to address the need for stunning and engaging slideshow presentations in the corporate and educational world.
About #Slides:
The idea for #Slides came about when the PowToon scientists started receiving requests from their users for a tool that would allow the fun and engaging aspects of PowToon to be transposed into a professional, boardroom setting slideshow format.
After extensive research, polls, and customer interactions it became apparent to the scientists that there are three main problems people experience when they create presentations:
1. How do I look cutting edge when I present? I don’t want to look outdated and boring!
2. How do I get my audience to pay attention?
3. How do I maintain my audiences engagement?
“So the Scientists set out to create an antidote for our customer’s problems” says Ilya “and we came up with a product that gives users the ability to make truly stunning and engaging presentations. We knew that we had to create a software that will allow users to achieve an incredibly professional and polished result, that will wow any audience, in just a few clicks, because if the tool is too complicated, users will always revert to PowerPoint….”
PowToon commissioned a team of brilliant designers from all over the world to create the designs, themes, and templates for #Slides so that users will be able to create dazzling presentations through mere click and point actions. In short, #Slides is effectively an outsourced presentation design center. Where previously you could only create a truly polished presentation with the help of an expensive designer, with PowToon #Slides you will get a level of artistry and professionalism from the very first moment you start working with it, effectively eliminating any need for outside help.
The Market Opportunity for #Slides:
In a broad sense, #Slides is looking to attract the over 500 million people worldwide that currently use PowerPoint and various other presentation softwares. Though many of these softwares are great applications, they haven’t found a way to truly allow users to brand themselves as cutting edge, amazing presenters, which is an issue that #Slides is committed to address successfully.
“We have built design templates into #Slides that will inevitably make your content look awesome, and, by doing so, you will look great as a presenter”, says Ilya “Visuals and design are super important aspects of any presentation, and #Slides will allow anyone to create masterpieces that look professionally designed without any extra costs for outsourced help. #Slides is aiming to become your one-stop presentation design center.”
People from all sectors and professions will benefit from PowToon #Slides, but the specific target market for the product includes marketing managers who use presentations to generate content for their customers, organizational staff who constantly need to create presentations for both colleagues and clients, and businesses, small and large, that use presentations to both promote and enhance their company’s brand.
“Our target market consist of people who need to create highly professional presentations that are innovative, creative, and all together awesome”, says Ilya.
What Sets #Slides Apart?
“Our focus is really on allowing presenters to look great from the first moment the audience sees the screen until the last moment when the presenter’s call to action has been communicated.” says Ilya, “We are giving #Slides users a bag of tricks that will captivate their audience so much so that they will literally be on the edge of their seats anticipating the next slides. Our bag of tricks includes animated scenes, funny and innovative slide transitions, and the crown in our engagement-arsenal; a video feature that allows you not only to embed, but to choose the exact part of a video clip that you want to present.”
With #Slides a person will present like a rockstar from the very beginning, and keep their audience wowed and wanting more up until the very end!
Though, like the PowToon product, #Slides will implement a level of restriction on its basic version, it will still allow users to create amazing animated presentations. #Slides will offer anyone the ability to add animated scenes, animated graphs, and video into their presentations with the ease of a mouse click.
Key Strengths of #Slides:
Design and animation are what makes the #Slides software such a strong product. When creating #Slides the PowToon scientists really took into consideration what their customers wanted and worked hard to make it happen.
While viewing a presentation an audience can become accustomed to the routine, and that is why #Slides provides the ability to build things into a presentation that will break through this, i.e. adding animation and video into the presentation.
“Creating pattern disrupts is a huge strength of #Slides, and the fact that the software will allow easy integration of YouTube videos, even letting users set specific start and end points of videos, is a HUGE win.”
Finally, and most importantly, #Slides addresses the 3 most important aspects of a successful presentation:
1. Personal Branding: Beautifully designed and engaging slideshows that will allowany presenter to truly shine, thus enhancing their personal brand.
2. Capturing Attention: Through the innovation of animation combined with professional design, any presenter will be able to capture and hold their audience’s attention from beginning to end.
3. Engaging the Audience: With #Slides any presenter will not only be able to holdtheir audience’s attention from start to finish, but they will leave their audience captivated and wanting more.
The Next Step for PowToon #Slides:
The PowToon #Slides Beta will be launching within the next few months, and the company has recently opened an invitation-only list that allows users to register to be shortlisted for the Beta version. A little secret is that people can guarantee themselves a spot, and move up the list simply by sharing the news of #Slides with their communities by way of Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, and so on. PowToon #Slides is going to spark a revolution in both presentation creation, and presentation giving, and finally, once and for all, the problem of dull, boring, routine presentations will be eradicated!
