It’s striking how fast one has come to experience search, distribution and measurability of ones content across different social platforms as a commodity, no matter how great or disruptive the service itself might be. Since all objects are social, we also have a need to share and know what’s going on with our content to better interact around it.

Good example of a great and disruptive service is Prezi, an online visualization and storytelling tool that aims to change the way people present information and tell their stories. To me Prezi was love at first beta invite, resulting it to become one of the very few software products that I’m actually, and happily, paying for. And I’m not the only one who’s been dazzled by how it inspires and challenges, both its user and audience, at the same time. In just within a year Prezi has become the darling of the innovative minds in tech, design and educational institutions. It’s often seen on stage in places like Davos, TED conferences, who also has invested in Prezi, and LeWeb. Robert Scoble is in love with it, and it’s certainly not every day Umair Haque describes a product as “total awesomeness”.

Thus, it’s no surprise that education, social media and technology are the most common words used in the public prezis.

The Hungarian startup with its Swedish CEO Peter Arvai and Jack Dorsey, Co-founder of Twitter and CEO of Square, on the advisory board, seems to have chosen the right path by being obsessive about the product development to create great user experience and an awesome product. As Jason Calacanis keeps reminding the startups on TWiST: “Create great user experience and an awesome product, and the business will follow.” Having both dedicated fans and paying customers with a great product is a good space for Prezi to be in, but to stay competitive I think it’s important they gear up its social sharing and discovery of content a notch.

Prezi was early to embrace social media by including basic social sharing options, as well as using blogging, Twitter and Facebook for customer feedback and service.

If that’s not enough for being social as a service, what am I still missing?

User profile and improved search: To be able to share and socialize around content it needs to be found. There’s no public user profile page, and since the search function only includes the titles of the content, it’s nearly impossible to search and find single users. (I’ve tested to add my name in the description field without any luck). For example: A search for Sean Percival results to a copy of his presentation saved by someone else only because his name is found in the title. On the positive note, Prezi has become more search engine optimized after changing its URL structure to more readable ones.

Tags and categories: Adding possibility to tag and categorize content will also facilitate and improve the search and user experience.

Statistics: A standard and important feature in so many levels, both to the user and the service itself. Prezi does have a page for popular prezis, which I believe would better serve its purpose if including metrics about number of viewings and sharings.

Notifications: Since it’s possible to “pad”, i.e. like, a presentation, as well as to comment on it, it’s necessary to receive a notification of some sort to be able to act upon it. This would also help to increase the conversation and engagement level of the Prezi community.

Slideshare: All the functionality mentioned is found on the largest document sharing service Slideshare, yet a closed door for prezis. As Slideshare doesn’t support Prezi’s file format and Prezi doesn’t offer any conversion functionality, this has become a slight inconvenience to, and a request from, its users, who now have to use manual workarounds.

Copyright: Gregg from GriDD

Whereas Prezi’s claimed to be the Powerpoint killer, it’s actually pretty funny to find over 200 Powerpoint or Keynote presentations on Slideshare about Prezi, or actual prezis converted to ones. Think if they were all prezis.

Prezi recently released an improved editor, to my liking, and is now also offering reuse of all the public prezis. There’s a free public license option so you can easily let yourself get inspired by the works of both Joi Ito, CEO of Creative Commons, and Sean Percival of MySpace, to get started with your own storytelling.

To quote Joi Ito: “All of our talks are inspired by others and using and reusing material should significantly improve the quality of all of our talk.”

Paula is online strategist and startup evangelist. She blogs at paulamarttila.com and here at Bub.blicio.us.
Follow her on Twitter: @paulamarttila
Drop her email at paula.marttila[at]gmail[dot]com

by Marissa Louie

ZOMG Our angel and VC friends have done it again. They’d rather roast our insides than roast the turkey. Turn that portfolio company from turkey to turnkey. Joke’s on us, VC billionaires.

Purchaze

-1- Paul Kedrosky: Somali Pirates and TARP

*PAULSON: TARP PIRATE EQUITY IS AN `INVESTMENT,’ WILL PAY OFF.”

-2- Brad Feld: Take Responsibility for your Actions

“I tried calling 1-800-BAIL-OUT to see if I was missing something.  They wouldn’t help me…”

-3- Joi Ito: Loic for a Day

“I thought about selling Loic on eBay, but I realized that would be too selfish.”

-4- Jeff Nolan: I am a Bond

“4 basic types of bonds, Schoolhouse Rock style.”

-5- Fred Wilson: Do You Ever Do Any Real Work?

“Slowly but surely people are wising up to the fact that blogging is work and its a very valuable use of my time.”

-6- James D. Robinson IV: The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same

“VC’s are too arrogant and the pitching process is too inefficient.”

-7- Daniel Cohen: New TeeVee Live!

“”The best part was his reply to a question on how Fred changed his life: “I get attention from the senior girls in school, which is cool”. Excellent.”

-8- Josh Kopelman: Road Trip

“Chris Fralic, organized a two-day road trip to the four largest advertising agencies in country.  We rented a bus.”

-9- Bing Gordon: Looking for Killer Apps

“Look how smart I am (how dumb I am not!); I got this new (insert hardware model here) and it can do this!!!”

-10- Mark Cuban: Proud to be an American

“I can tell you that no entrepreneur or CEO worth a damn in this country gives up or works less because of a change in tax policy.”

**Honorable mention**

-11- David Cowan: It’s a Smule World After All

When Jeff’s team isn’t cleaning out Bessemer’s kitchen, they’re churning out ass-kicking Chuck-on-iPhone (CHiP) apps.

**Your turn**

Suggest funny angel and VC blog posts through Turkey Day (you know these are going to be ridiculous!)

Marissa Louie is the Founder and CEO of AD Village (http://ad-village.com) which helps bloggers monetize and advertisers optimize. If you liked this post, you might also like You Know You’re a Young Female Entrepreneur When…, 10+ Funniest Angel and VC Blog Posts October 2008, and The Future Co-existence of PR and Advertising. She gets esoteric on Twitter, where she announces Entrepreneur 2 Entrepreneur Office Hours and broadcasts her entrepreneurial journey.

words and pictures by Brian Solis

BusinessWeek released its report on the 25 most influential people on the Web today as determined by the magazine’s staff.

Congratulations to our friends as well as those we have yet to meet in person for making this prestigious list. I’ve included pictures of those that I have on hand.

Here are your influencers, in no particular order:

The Seeker: Steve Ballmer, Microsoft

The Marshall: Mitchell Baker, Mozilla.org

The Innovator: Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com

The Searchers: Sergey Brin, larry Page, and Eric Schmidt, Google

The Investor: Jeff CLavier, softtechvc

The Papa Bear: Paul Graham, ycombinator

The Muckracker: Arianna Huffington, HuffingtonPost

The Adviser: Joi Ito

The Mastermind: Steve Jobs, Apple

The Filmer: Jonathan Kaplan, Flip

The Communicator: Loic Le Meur, Leweb, Seesmic

The Trader: Jack Ma, alibaba.com

The Publisher: Matt Mullenweg, WordPress.org

The Mogul: Rupert Murdoch, Myspace.com

The Community Organizer: Craig Newmark, craigslist

The Traffic Driver: Gabe Rivera, Techmeme

The Poster Boy: Kevin Rose, Digg

The Adult: Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook

The Edutainer: Jon Stewart, The Daily Show

The Money Man: Peter Thiel, Clarium Capital, The Founders Fund

The Crafter, Maria Thomas, etsy.com

The Advocate: Anssi Vanjoki, Nokia

The Crowd Sourcer: Jimmy Wales, Wikia, wikipedia

The Blogger: Evan Williams, Twitter

The Fighter: Jerry Yang, Yahoo

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