Slideshare extravaganza, and a new presentation on 3G

When we discovered Slideshare, the service looked fairly innocuous: putting presentations online. Alright. Have we not seen that somewhere before? It seemed well organized and easy to use, but its real value started to unfold when we started browsing the material that was made available there. It became clear that there was a lot of very good stuff, especially in the Internet and design fields.

So knowledge was there. But after we started to publish some of our own work (especially the one on social networks), it became more and more clear that Slideshare was also a marketing and networking tool. Marketing as people republished, downloaded and distributed our branded content around (“sharing is caring”), but also as we got more and more interesting contacts from companies and individuals who connected not on reputation, but on the ideas level.

And this is interesting. Most social networks list people promoting their face or tastes (MySpace), their profile (LinkedIn, Facebook) or using their friends (number, names) as faire valoirs. This is a fairly shallow way to connect, and does not tell much about who you are. When you put up a presentation you made, you’re stripping in front of an audience (some say “presentations are the new rock”), and you cannot hide (or everybody will see you are hiding – usually behind bullet points and excel graphs).

Though it came up as an unexpected side effect, Slideshare is thus also a social networking tool based on ideas and storytelling. Unfortunately, it is still more difficult to monetize ideas than pageviews, so Slideshare has a bit of work to do on business models. That being said, the educational value of what they collect is incredible and as people spend 100,000 USD on a good degree in US, there are chances they might spend a bit on getting new ideas, even online. On this topics, an interesting presentation was just put up by presentation acrobat Garr Reynolds, who runs the PresentationZen blog.

To conclude this piece and as we are now working on putting several new presentations online, we thought that one of them was particularly suited to this. It is a presentation we did at the end of last year at the Wireless Developers Conference in Beijing on “Dogs and demons in telecom“. To our great satisfaction, Slideshare is a dog. To know more, feel free to browse below!

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Many thanks to Alex Kerr, author of “Dogs and Demons: Tales from the Dark side of Japan” who opened our eyes and made us able to recognize what is a dog, and what is a demon.