If you can sketch an idea on a napkin, then Prezi is the presentation tool for you. Adam and I just gave our first Prezi-ntation using this “zooming presentation editor”, and it went off really well.
Prezi is a different way of thinking about presentations – not at all like traditional slideshows made in Powerpoint or Keynote. In fact, Prezi is more like an interactive Flash video, but without having to use the Adobe Flash or know about timelines, paths or layers.
Prezi starts with a blank slate and you map out a presentation as orderly or disorderly as you want. You can use frames to anchor areas to include photos and text into, similar to a single slide in a traditional slideshow. Create the path which you want the presentation to travel in, by hooking assets (frames, images, video, PDF files, text) with anchors.
Click on the screenshot to view the Internet marketing class project for our client Surf City MX (@surfcitymx):
The toolbar/menu is also unlike a traditional desktop software. And the “transformation zebra” – the blue striped concentric circles of the logo – isn’t immediately intuitive. But if you take the short tutorials (complete with Hungarian accent), it’s pretty easy to pick up. Here’s a look at the tool-cluster:
I like Prezi because it’s a different way to engage your audience with presentations. Powerpoint and Keynote come out with new animations and other visual candy with each release, but you can’t get away from the old transperancy on an overhead projector frame. Prezi is all online – no installation of software, upgrading or toting files on a thumb drive.
There are still things lacking in Prezi such as the selection of themes, the ability to customize your own theme. I’d like to see Prezi allow embedding of video, images or text from the Web, much like Tumblr. What if it could take a URL and have the screen shot appear on the Prezi with full navigability? And hopefully a link to embed Prezis elsewhere on the Web (think YouTube videos). All in due time, I hope.
Prezi is still in private beta, but you can apply on their homepage to be a tester. Try it out if you can!
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