Spice up a slideshow presentation

Danny Bradbury We've all been in them -- those interminable meetings, with presentations that drag on and fail to inspire. Bad presentations in business meetings can kill an idea by failing to inspire the audience. Experts have even written books about the crimes perpetrated with Microsoft Power-Point (read Edward Tufte's The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint). How can entrepreneurs add sparkle to their presentations without breaking the bank? A new, free service called Fly-paper aims to do just that. The downloadable software (at 89 MB it might take a while) lets you create what the developer calls "stories." Although it still uses pages to tell stories, it represents a marked departure from the traditional Power-Point's slide-based approach, which Mr. Tufte says can lead to presentations focused more on the presenter than on the audience. This can lead to reams of slides with text-based bullet points that the speaker simply continues to read, creating a presentation that is little more than a series of prompt notes. Flypaper users can select from pre-designed models or templates and can then proceed to customize the selections with their own content, including video, animation, music and voice-overs. Models can be saved to the desktop, or shared with a specific community via the Flypaper Web site, or posted on the creator's Web site, e-mailed to contacts, or uploaded to Web 2.0 forums including social-networking platforms like You-Tube, MySpace, and Facebook. The company also has a set of services to help companies using this system, including interactive training, content development, custom presentations and branded model templates. But there is a caveat: While this software is a good alternative to PowerPoint, and it is free, all the multimedia and whizzy graphics in the world won't shore up a presentation created without enthusiasm. Presenters may still produce dull and boring presentations if they don't understand the basics of how to engage an audience.