Given that I was off on Friday, stricken by the worst case of manflu ever, and that the gloomy weather we’ve all been subject to feels like a portent of tough times ahead, I thought I’d send out my missive early. Or late, depending on how you see it. I started off with a theme of productivity, looking for things in the ether that make your working life more productive (of which there are many). However, as is the way with these things, my jumplinking journey took me to worlds anew. So this week sees an amalgam of things that help you spend your time better and things that help you waste your time better.
Enjoy!
Spice up your presentations
We’re always looking for engaging ways to spice up our presentations without resorting to death by PowerPoint. Part of the challenge is preparing your content early enough to give you time to consider the storytelling element and there is a great, oft-used Confucius quote which sums up how we should really approach presentations: “tell me and I will forget, teach me and I will remember, involve me and I will understand.” Anyway, if you have managed to get all your thoughts into a decent stream, then these two sites could help you on the engagement front. The first, pptPlex, is an add-on to PowerPoint which allows you to remove the linear element from presentations and interact with slides in a more engaging way (the zoom function for images, for example, is really useful). It takes a bit of learning (all these things do), but it is worth persevering with. The second, Prezi, is similar to SlideRocket in that it is a web based tool that allows you to build presentations without using slides; those of us who have used SlideRocket recognize its limitations (i.e. it take a while to learn and makes last minute amends quite tricky) but it is worth looking at.
Politics without the politicking
Don’t ask me how I came across speechbreaker, I just did. I’ve seen this sort of thing done before, a site that allow you to build presentations from a selection of words and phrases and listen to your speech (in this case, delivered by either Gordon Brown, David Cameron or Stuart Clegg.) A bit like fridge poetry (aside from the Gordon Brown bit, that is) only more clunky, but it does integrate with YouTube and include a refer-a-friend mechanic. A silly idea that has a limited shelf life, but it did get me thinking that we could use this approach in advertising to make our ads more fun and involving (remember the quote from Confucius!)
A softer approach to trading
When I worked at Lloyds, we were all tied in to the company share-save scheme and the teletext share price link was an ever-present reminder of the performance of us and our managers in the eyes of stockholders. That’s all well and good when you’re working during a golden age (the LTSB share price was over £10 when I worked there), but when your hard earned pennies start to plummet, the result can be incredibly demotivating. Anyway, the boffins at Puma have developed a web based application that allows you to track the share price performance across three separate indices: the Dow Jones, the Deutscher Aktien Index and the Australian Securities Exchange. It’s cunningly labelled the Puma Index. IMHO it is teletext with a softer touch and would have been better as a downloadable desktop application, but it’s a good example of how content and presentation are being blended to make things more user friendly.
Sing when you’re winning
Those of you who hear my regular diatribe on the X-Factor will be forgiven for thinking that I might enjoy Karaoke. I don’t. But I know plenty of people who do. For those of you who haven’t discovered the joys of purchasing decent Karaoke machines from Japan or Argos (depending on which takes your fancy), I present to you Lucky Voice – Karaoke through your laptop. You’ll need to sign up to use it: some songs are available from free, you can purchase a day’s use for £3.99 or go the whole hog and purchase a month’s usage for £7.99. For those of you who believe this is another spurious web idea, it’s the brainchild of Martha Lane Fox, so I’d think again – the price point is low enough to make it appealing and having user tested it amongst my family yesterday, I can promise you that it is simple enough for a 5 year old to use. One for the Christmas party?