Earlier this year, my colleague David Strom shared with you the sudden rise of a mobile presentation tool called SlideShark. It was a fairly simple concept to begin with: Upload a PowerPoint presentation to Brainshark’s servers, and then deploy that presentation to multiple recipients who can watch them from their mobile devices. Think YouTube without the possums chasing squirrels, and with a tailored suit.
Today, that concept got simpler in a way that’s both compelling and scary: One of the charter iOS apps for Box.net’s new OneCloud platform lets you effectively open up PowerPoint preso files in Box, in a way that uploads them to SlideShark and displays them in front of you.
It’s the latest demonstration of Brainshark’s free functionality, which up until now was only available through the Apple App Store. Through SlideShark for Box, you create a kind of conduit for opening presentations that are already uploaded to Box, in SlideShark without you having to download the presentation locally first.
This is important for folks who have been considering subscribing to Brainshark’s Team Edition. As we’ve covered here, Team Edition provides an environment for multiple users on a team to collect their presos together in a centralized “office.” Once a presentation is published, Team Edition gathers analytics about who’s viewing it, including members of the general public. So the presentation becomes a kind of website in itself, and the publishers become collaborators.
Up to now, the Team Edition has been the only way to achieve collaboration with these presos. But Box’s OneCloud also promises collaboration capabilities around all the files uploaded to Box, which may include items you display with SlideShark. Now, with SlideShark for Box, your preso is being published through SlideShark, not Box – so Box cannot gather analytics on nonpublic files. So if analytics is not important or necessary to you, but collaboration might be, Brainshark has opened up some new possibilities for free users and impromptu teams.
