Jonathan Boutelle (pictured to the left) is the CTO of
SlideShare, and is a principal at Uzanto Consulting. A software
engineer by training, his interests lie at the intersection of
technology, business, and user experience. He has worked as a software
engineer for such companies as Commerce One and Advanced Visual
Systems, and has worked with numerous Fortune 500 companies to
help them make their technology easier to use. He is particularly
focused on technology that brings the web experience closer to
the capabilities of the desktop.
In this interview, Jonathan discusses SlideShare and PowerPoint.
Geetesh:
Tell us more about yourself and your team. Also,
tell us about how SlideShare evolved -- and where do see it
headed in the near future.
Jonathan:
So I'm a software developer turned entrepreneur. I founded
my company Uzanto 3
years ago with two partners: Rashmi
Sinha, who is a cognitive scientist turned designer,
and Amit
Ranjan, who is a consumer marketing guy turned entrepreneur. SlideShare is
our second product: our first was a web-based market research
platform called MindCanvas.
We have a crack team of developers and designers working
for us, and we have offices in both Mountain View, CA and
New Delhi, India.
The idea for Slideshare came about when
I was helping organize an informal tech conference. Speakers
were giving me their PowerPoint slides, and I was expected
to somehow upload them to the web for sharing. For informal
conferences, this is really important: the knowledge has
to be shared with the broader community over the internet
in order to have impact. I realized that there was no good
way to share PowerPoint on the web!
When we launched the site, we were really still thinking
about it as a way to share slideshows from conferences. But
our users had other ideas. From the first day we were getting
business plans, photo albums, sermons, and even book reports!
PowerPoint is a very flexible medium, and it turns out it
is used by all kinds of people to do all kinds of things.
It's a medium that allows you to tell a story with words
and pictures, and it's extremely easy to use. I think of
it as the people's multimedia authoring tool. So it's not
just for businesses. At this point SlideShare is a real mix.
We have professional speakers and consultants who upload
talks and presentations that they want to share. Then there
is the e-learning crowd which has lectures and lessons on
everything from math and history to web 2.0 and podcasting.
And of course there are individuals with the funny PowerPoints
that used to get emailed around and now get uploaded to SlideShare.
And photo essays, sermons ... all kinds of stuff really!
Geetesh:
SlideShare is often called the YouTube of presentations.
Do you think presentations will get as mainstream as video?
And what about your business model -- will SlideShare always
be free.
Jonathan:
Presentations are a fundamentally a different type of medium
than video. So it is an apples to oranges comparison. In
some sense, though, presentations are already more mainstream
than video. How many people create PowerPoints, compared
to creating videos? I would bet, globally, that more people
create PowerPoint. It's just not a mainstream web format
yet, because nobody has ever made an easy way to share it.
Video is mainstream because everyone enjoys being entertained.
Presentations will be popular on the web for the same reason
that regular text is: because people need to share knowledge
and ideas, because people need to communicate. If you look
at tags like education or web
2.0 on SlideShare, you'll see dozens and dozens of presentations:
it's becoming a real knowledge repository. We think that
eventually looking on SlideShare will be natural place to
go to get information about any topic, much the way Wikipedia
is today.
Now whether it's as big a business as video is another
question. Time will tell. We do know that it is big enough
to bring together a large and active community of users,
and that it has global appeal.
As to the business model: the current site functionality
will always be free. As we add new features, we may charge
for some of those features. But we think that the site itself,
as a free destination site, is a very compelling business
-- there are several ways to make money, including targeted
advertising. Wait and watch for more details!
Geetesh:
Now about the file formats -- and these are essentially
two questions. What made you choose Flash as a presentation
delivery format. Also, do you plan to support the new PPTX
file format of the upcoming PowerPoint 2007 --tell us more
about this.
Jonathan:
I chose Flash because it's the only viable way to display vector
graphics on the web. So we used Flash mostly for image quality
reasons. You can project a SlideShare slide onto a 30-foot
screen and it will still look good! That's the power of vector
graphics.
We will absolutely support PPTX! It will take a little
bit of time, but it's cool that Microsoft is using an XML-based
format -- this is much easier for third parties like us to
parse and interpret.
Geetesh:
Your PowerPoint support currently looks at the slide
itself as a unit rather than separate slide elements like video,
sound, animations, transitions, etc. Do you plan to make the
PowerPoint conversion to Flash more faithful in the future?
Jonathan:
We are listening very actively to our users on this one. Several
types of requests come up again and again, but we also hear
that that our users really like that SlideShare makes presentations
a truly web-friendly experience. So, we are keeping that
in mind as we decide what to add to make the conversion more
faithful.
Geetesh:
Can you share some trivia about SlideShare, or something
funny that you would like to share with Indezine readers.
Jonathan:
One of our most loyal users has started redesigning the front
pages of other people's presentations! He feels like the
first page of a presentation has a big effect on whether
people open it (which is very true, incidentally: the title
and the first slide make or break a slideshare presentation).
So if he finds a presentation he likes, he designs an alternative
first slide for it, and uploads it as a separate presentation.
So already we are seeing a phenomenon very similar to that
supported by the "video comments" feature on sites
like YouTube.
The most inspiring thing to me about SlideShare is the
number of teachers that are using SlideShare to share lessons
and lecture slides. I love the idea that we're helping teachers
do the important work of educating the next generation!
