The Eyes Have It

I took a handful of snapshots at InfoComm in June and forgot about them until today. The timing was good because I’ve been experimenting with integrating my flickr account into TEHI. My five photos are a tiny part of the collection of 155 InfoComm06 photos posted to flickr that doesn’t quite convey how huge the expo floor really was.

Please take a few minutes to complete this important survey sponsored by Infocomm International and its Presentation Council:

Would you like to know…

• What types of organizations do Presentation Professionals work in?
• What areas of expertise and background do Presentation Professionals have?
• Do you outsource your content development/delivery/overall communication
  strategy/technology/visual/graphic development, or do you do it in-house? How often does your organization contract with outside production firms for presentation development?
• What types of challenges do Presentation Professionals experience today, and how concerned are they about these challenges?

Find out by participating in InfoComm International’s Presentations Professional Survey. This online survey should only take you about 10 minutes to complete.

To thank you for your participation, you will receive the results of this survey by e-mail, once compiled. You will also get three Microsoft PowerPoint templates, one Corel Presentations master, and one Apple Keynote theme, all free of charge. In addition, you will have a chance to win one of five $50 Amazon gift certificates.

I’d like to invite you to visit another blog I’ve recently become involved with. It’s called Visual Being and it’s being billed as a weblog by and for presentation professionals. If you created, give, moderate, facilitate or provide AV support for any type of presentation, pitch, meeting or conference, there will most likely be content there that’s of interest to you. It’s a project that came out of my involvement with the ICIA’s Presentation Council (which you might want to consider joining if you’re interested in what Visual Being is about). We are only just beginning to get off the ground, lining up contributors, working out the kinks, etc. There are a few posts there now but were hoping to have a lot more stuff in the near future. Enjoy!

Robert Linstrom, author of Being Visual and fellow member of the ICIA’s Presentations Council, recently wrote a comprehensive wrap up of PowerPoint Live for the InfoComm website.

PowerPoint® transmogrifies! explores many of the issues crucial to communications professionals in today’s working environment and reviews the technology exhibited at the show that’s extending PowerPoint into realms no one would have even considered plausible a few years ago. I think it’s been fairly obvious that Microsoft has been attempting to position PowerPoint as a Flash analog with a somewhat less daunting learning curve and a much broader user base. The tools and technologies seen at PowerPoint Live seem to confirm the viability of this trend.

“Mother Nature is not the only one capable of madcap experiments with new life forms. The progression of Microsoft® PowerPoint® from a lowly, black-and-white-only electronic presentation tool to a ubiquitous, media-rich facilitator of tens of millions of presentations per day is one of the strangest tales in the history of computer software. From annual meetings of FORTUNE 500® companies to digital scrapbooks of the family vacation, PowerPoint® has shown itself to be surprisingly adaptive. … The morphing of PowerPoint into an enhanced media-communications platform could be called the dominant theme at this year’s PowerPoint Live conference, though such a claim did not appear in the conference literature. Nearly 200 users and 20 vendors gathered Oct. 10-14 in San Diego to share tips, tricks and strategies. Overall, the effect was that of a fan club meeting genetically blended with a professional development conference. The attendees were a mix of serious PowerPoint groupies and communications gurus — roughly equivalent to the Star Trek fans who attend conferences in full Klingon regalia — and avid newbies, who aspire to be masters of the Master Slide.”

I also would like to recommend Rob’s most recent project: Being Spherical. It’s one of those books that can really change the way you look at everything.