The Fuze Tell a Story Contest has winners!

Grand Prize ($5000)
The Grand Prize goes to Drunkenomics - The Story of Bar Stool Economics from slides2407. Drunkenomics = Drunken + Economics and its a great story about tax & tax cuts. slides2407 also has a behind-the-scenes account of how Drunkenomics happened. Check out The Monday That Never Saw The Night - Story of making of Drunkenomics.

Congratulations slides2407! This is well deserved.

Four Category Prizes (iPhone + $100 iTunes card)

Best Design: This goes to Super Cool Dudes from amv8192

Best Story Telling Ability: This goes to The Story of H from LubomirP

Best Use of Multimedia: This goes to White Shaka - Graphic Novel from AlanBrody

Most Popular: This goes to Let’s Talk Poverty from dcaron

Big thanks to our awesome judges: Ann Handle, Don Tapscott, Om Malik, Pete Cashmore & Tony Hsieh.

Thanks to the contest sponsors, Fuze Meeting . We had a great time working with you. If you have not already, go give the Fuze meeting software a quick try.

SlideShare finds mention in Business Week’s article on cloud computing. The article says that on-demand cloud computing services are like “…plugging in the cord to get electricity..”

We could not agree more. A big part of the infrastructure that delivers SlideShare to the community utilises Amazon’s web services - S3, SQS, EC2 etc.

Check out the article on the MSNBC website.

While on this, do check out the SlideShare group on Cloud Computing. It has a collection of 67 presentations. Quite a treasure trove indeed!

Have you ever thought it would be fun to create a slideshow collaboratively with a group of people? Well, now’s your chance. This slideshow is being created by the community, one slide at a time! The first slide was created by Ethos3, the second slide is from Presentation Partners, and third one is from Rick Altman. The collaborative slideshow is embedded below.

| View | Upload your own

Start working on your slides, because from the sixth day, its open to anyone. Just make a slide about community (that would fit into the slideshow). Upload and tag it as “day6″.

This collaborative slideshow is part of the Presentation tennis (a new community activity on SlideShare). Learn more about Presentation Tennis here.

We are psyched to bring to you The World’s Best Presentation Contest 2008, SlideShare’s attempt to uncover the Global Presentation Superheroes for 2008. This is a sequel to last year’s contest, and it is bigger and better this time.

There are loads on prizes on offer: First prize- MacBook Air, Second prize- Amazon Kindle and Third prize- iPod Nano. There are six categories and each category winner gets an iPod Touch. Then there are honorable mentions, each of which gets a copy of the book, Presentation Zen. And all winners receive certificates from SlideShare. Check out the contest announcer preso below.

Here are the contest rules and the contest entries.

You can enter your presentation in the contest and people around the world will vote on it. Your presentation could be about anything you love or care for. It will have to be put under one of these categories -  Business, Education, Technology, Picture slideshows, Creative/Offbeat & About me. The top voted entries will be nominated to our panel of judges, who will decide the winners. And our judges are the who’s who of the presentation world.

Guy Kawasaki- who does not know him ??  VC, marketing superbrain, presentation guru, entrepreneur, author and most important for us, on the SlideShare advisory board.

Garr Renyolds- presentation design rockstar, author of the blog & book Presentation Zen, popular speaker and consultant.

Nancy Duarte- she runs Duarte Design, a global leader in business presentations and best known for having worked with Nobel Laureate & Former US Presidential candidate Al Gore to develop the presentation that became the Academy Award winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth.

Bert Decker- head of Decker Communications, author and ace business presentation coach, he has been on NBC’s Today Show many times as their communications expert, often commenting on the Presidential debates.

The contest ends on July 31 and the results will be announced one week later.

Screenshot of the details page below

So what are you waiting for? Rush to enter your preso… this could win you a shining MacBook Air, apart from building up your presentation credentials.

And let us know how you liked the contest, specially its stunning black theme, that Arun (our designer) has labored so hard to create.

Wired magazine asked Nancy Duarte for advice regarding creating great presentations. For those who don’t know Nancy, she is well known in the field of presentations (her company Duarte Design has done some great work, including working with Al Gore on his Inconvenient Truth slideshow).

Nancy gave several pieces of advice including - Know your audience, Know when to use a slideshow, Keep your face to the audience, Use type over 24 pt. For all the tips, read the magazine article.

They also mentioned SlideShare in the article: “Another phenomenon occurring is in the social networking space. Slideshare.net has become the YouTube for presentations. Some presentations have been viewed over a half million times.”

Thanks Nancy!

Edward Tufte, the renowned author, academic, and speaker best known for his pioneering work on the display of quantitative information, has joined the SlideShare board of advisors. Tufte is the author of “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information” and several other books of about the same size and shape. He is also renowned for his groundbreaking essay on presentation design, “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint” ( summary available).

“SlideShare offers a unique platform to influence the world of presentation design” said Tufte in an interview at his tastefully appointed office at Cheshire, Connecticut this morning. “Thousands of people upload PowerPoint presentations to SlideShare every day. But no one is providing people with guidance as to how to improve their work. It’s often as simple as hitting the delete key!“.

Welcoming Tufte to the board, Jonathan Boutelle (CTO of SlideShare) noted that from today, presentations containing bullet points will not be supported by SlideShare. Special algorithms based on Tufte’s groundbreaking work will parse the PowerPoint file and remove all bullet points, deceptive “chart junk”, and other elements that distract from a presentations effectiveness.

“By implementing algorithms that leverage Tufte’s unique approach to PowerPoint design, we’ll make all of the presentations on SlideShare more compelling and influential than ever!” said Boutelle. “And a unique side effect is that the algorithm compresses the resulting files better than any previous technique we’ve ever tried. Not only does this conserve bandwidth, but (what’s left) of the presentation should download in record time!”

There is a nice write up about SlideCasting in the Content Wrangler, a enterprise & business focused news website. Titled “Webinar Software Under Attack: Google Docs and SlideShare Take Aim“, this is a feature article and talks about how “…both companies are providing consumers with alternatives to pricey webinar software…“. Read the article here.

Thanks Scott Abel for the thumbs up…glad you like our mashup format.

P.S. we are working to add a few punches to slidecasting in the coming weeks; our focus is on bringing down the entry barriers to creating slidecasts, which should help in large scale adoption.

We are tickled pink that Business Week wrote about Slideshare. Recognition from mainstream media! Whoo-hoo! We love blog/ web coverage, but there is something special about seeing the words “Slideshare” in glossy print. I am going to go out and buy a copy of Business Week right now (its in the December 18th issue). The article is behind a login, but we thought you would want to know what they wrote.

Have I Got A PowerPoint For You (Business Week, Dec 18th)

In the beginning, there was MP3 sharing. Then came friend sharing (MySpace), photo sharing (Flickr), and video sharing (YouTube). Now it has come to this: PowerPoint slide sharing.

SlideShare.net offers a place to upload, view, and search for PowerPoint presentations. And since opening up its beta site in October, it has received tens of thousands of files.

The site’s “decks,” as the slide shows are called, are diverse: conference presentations, classroom lessons (”Let’s Learn Colors!” from a middle-school Spanish class), and PowerPoint satire (Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address famously summarized in bullet points, created in 2000 by Peter Norvig, Google’s research director).

Site co-founder Jonathan Boutelle came up with the service while organizing a conference. It will hardly grab as many eyeballs as YouTube, but corporate firewalls won’t block the likes of “Let’s Learn Colors.”

By Jena McGregor (Business Week)

Screenshot is below: