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Empressr: Create and share presentations online
While I'm not nearly convinced by the claim that Empressr is "the first web-based application that lets you create, share and store presentations online" (did it come before Thumbstacks?), it does indeed let you do that, and does it pretty well. It's a Flash-based app, which makes it smooth and responsive, and has most of the features you need to make basic presentations. PowerPoint users will find Empressr familiar when navigating slides, editing text, and so on. You can upload images and, more impressively (Empressvly?), audio and video that will be streamed in your slideshow, though currently only FLV video is supported. You can share your presentations over the web or print them out, but currently there's no way to export them (not even to PDF), though the Empressr FAQ says export is in the works. Right now Empressr is in open alpha testing, and you can go play with it without even registering (though you must register if you want to save and share your presentations), but the FAQ hints that it may not be free in the future.
Comments
2
Subscribe to commentsBryan ThatcherJul 14th 2006 12:02AM
Thanks for the great review! A couple of items I wanted to comment on:
1. PDF, yes in the future we plan on having a pdf feature, but since we have a nicely working print feature and most people have a way to print to pdf, we felt our time was best spent on other features.
2. Video, yes flv's only, we are working on a conversion on upload from multiple formats to flv, you will see that in a near future release.
3. The first.... I think we said "one of the first" :)
4. Free, yes it is, and as much as I am in favor of open-source and free software, storage and bandwidth as far as I know, is not free! We will need to re-coop some cost to continue to provide the service. It will be inexpensive and probably continue to be free for the average occasional user. Whatever we plan to charge as fees, it will certainly be a fair price. We want on the app to be free, and want users to be able to create cool presentations for little or no cost to them, but yes sometime in the future we will need to offer additional storage or bandwidth at a fee.
5. Export, we do have this feature and do have an offline application to view and edit the presentations, we haven't offered it now because we are working on a future release that will conform to the OASIS open doc standards. The offline app is currently in use with our enterprise version. The enterprise version has additional workflow and collaboration tools that we found too difficult to adapt the the general public use at this time.
cheers
Jordan RunningJul 14th 2006 12:13AM
Thanks for stopping by, Bryan. Glad to hear some of these features are in the works.