Present your Startup - Free Presentation Tools

At some point during the life cycle of your startup you're going to have to present your ideas to an audience, whether it's investors or press or feedback groups. Often this is not so much about conveying the complexity and depth of your fabulous idea, but about telling a compelling story that captures and makes sense to the receiver. One easy way of doing this is through visuals. Traditionally through slides, and now more and more through the use of video.

The obvious presentation tools are Microsoft PowerPoint if you use Windows, or Keynote for Mac users, but here's a free one in case you don't have these already - Open Office Impress. If you aren't familiar with creating slideshow presentations, it's worth starting to practice because an amateur presentation can really make you look bad. One tip for creating slides... keep text content to a minimum. Bullet points, especially multiple ones are really boring, especially as people are beginning to see a lot more exciting stuff in the design focused Web 2.0 world! The best place to upload and share your presentations is SlideShare, which allows you to embed the presentation anywhere after you've uploaded it. It's also a great place to look for inspiration and to find presentations on virtually any topic you can think of.

Talking of more exciting presentations though, a lot of presentations are moving towards becoming Flash based - and looking more like video rather than slides. Tools are popping up that allow you to do this sort of thing without really needing any technical knowledge. Here's a couple of free ones worth checking out - iSpring which converts PowerPoint slides to Flash, and Flypaper which allows you to create flash-based web presentations without any programming experience. Best place to upload these is YouTube, where you can create your own channel, and which like SlideShare opens up a host of embedding and share options.