SlideShare

SlideShare
Web address www.slideshare.net
Alexa rank
 positive decrease 121 (April 2014)[1]

SlideShare is a Web 2.0 based slide hosting service. Users can upload files privately or publicly in the following file formats: PowerPoint, PDF, Keynote or OpenDocument presentations. Slide decks can then be viewed on the site itself, on hand held devices or embedded on other sites.[2] Launched on October 4, 2006, the website is considered to be similar to YouTube, but for slideshows.[3] The website was originally meant to be used for businesses to share slides among employees more easily, but it has since expanded to also become a host of a large number of slides that are uploaded merely to entertain.[4] Although the website is primarily a slide hosting service, it also supports documents, PDFs, videos and webinars.[5] SlideShare also provides users the ability to rate, comment on, and share the uploaded content. The current list of SlideShare's investors includes Venrock, David Siminoff and Dev Khare.[6]

The website gets an estimated 58 million unique visitors a month,[7] and has about 16 million registered users. SlideShare was voted among the World's Top 10 tools for education & e-learning in 2010.[8][9] SlideShare's biggest competitors include Scribd.com, Issuu and Docstoc. Some of the notable users of SlideShare include The White House, NASA, World Economic Forum, State of Utah, O'Reilly Media, Hewlett Packard and IBM.

Zipcasts

In February 2011 SlideShare added a feature called Zipcasts.[10] A Zipcast is a social web conferencing system that allows presenters to broadcast an audio/video feed while driving the presentation through the Internet. Zipcasts also allows users to communicate during the presentation via an inbuilt chat function.

Zipcasts do not currently support screen sharing with the presenter, a feature available in competing paid services like WebEx and GoToMeeting. Additionally, presenters using Zipcasts are not able to control the flow of a presentation allowing viewers to navigate back and forth through the slides themselves.

Founding Team

Rashmi Sinha, the CEO and co-founder of SlideShare is responsible for partnerships and product strategy. She was named amongst the world's Top 10 Women Influencers in Web 2.0 by FastCompany.[11]

Jonathan Boutelle [6] is the CTO of SlideShare and came up with the initial idea behind SlideShare. He wrote the first version of the site.

Amit Ranjan, the COO heads SlideShare's development team in India and focuses on product management, content and community.

In the news

On May 3, 2012, SlideShare announced[12] that it was to be acquired by LinkedIn. It is reported that the deal was $118.75 Million.[13]

In December 2013, SlideShare revamped its site offering more of a visual spin on the homepage, including larger images.[14]

References

  1. ↑ "Slideshare.net Site Info". Alexa Internet. Retrieved 2014-04-01.
  2. ↑ Bell, Gavin. Building Social Web Applications. O'Reilly Media. ISBN 978-0-596-51875-2.
  3. ↑ "Introducing SlideShare: Power Point + YouTube". TechCrunch. 2006.
  4. ↑ "The Rise Of SlideShare And How Corporate Presentations Became Entertainment". siliconbeat.com.
  5. ↑ "SlideShare". slideshare.net.
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 "SlideShare Secures $3M for Embeddable Presentations". TechCrunch.
  7. ↑ "Domain: Slideshare.net". Click.
  8. ↑ "Top 100 Tools for Learning 2010".
  9. ↑ "PUB HTML5 Presentation Tools".
  10. ↑ "Zipcast – changing the way the world conducts web meetings". SlideShare.
  11. ↑ "Most Influential Women in Web 2.0". FastCompany.
  12. ↑ Kit Seeborg. "SlideShare and LinkedIn sitting in a tree… | SlideShare Blog". Blog.slideshare.net. Retrieved 2013-02-18.
  13. ↑ Jay Yarow (2012-05-03). "LinkedIn Is Buying SlideShare For $119 Million". Business Insider. Retrieved 2013-02-18.
  14. ↑ By Kurt Wagner, Mashable."SlideShare Overhauls Homepage With Art That Pops." December 5, 2013. Retrieved December 6, 2013.

External links