Category — SlideShare

The entire Slideshare team was down at the Feroz Shah Kotla (Delhi’s cricket stadium) to watch the DLF IPL League match between Delhi Dare Devils & Bangalore Royal Challengers. This was a three hour expedition for us, venturing out into the circus that is the IPL 20-20 league. Except three of us, all the other team members were witnessing a live stadium cricket match for the first time, so there was palpable excitement & anticipation. Here are some snaps ..

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Incidentally cameras have been banned from the stadium during IPL matches …hence all snaps are courtesy our mobile phones.

Want to join the team that is building SlideShare? We are recruiting ROR hackers & geeks to join our New Delhi based team.

Working at SlideShare can be a hugely rewarding experience. Building social software is a whole lot of fun: the technical challenges, the high-involvement nature of the work (how often can you show your friends & family what you did at work last week?), the fast changing internet landscape, and the constant feedback from users, make it a different ball-game than the usual technical work.

Benefits include:

- Experience with cutting edge open-source technology
- Working with a team of bright, enthusiastic people in a “No-BS” environment where you can focus on creating great technology that is used by millions of people every day
- Competitive Salary
- Generous Stock options

We are recruiting for the following positions:

Server side hackers

If you’re a open source junkie, and love hacking Linux systems, deep algorithmic work (search, recommendation engines, etc), SQL tuning and optimization, and modifying open-source code to your own twisted purposes, then you might be a good fit for a position with our server side team. Experience in scalability of large webapplications is an advantage.

Front End Developers

We’re looking for web-savvy hackers who know JavaScript and Flash and PHP, and can use them to full effect in creating amazing web applications. Prior experience in application development in a internet firm may be an advantage.

Technologies/Platforms

We work on ruby on rails, linux, freebasd, debian, Amazon S3, MySql etc. Candidates not having experience in ROR can apply- if you have worked earlier on PHP, Python, Perl etc, thats fine as well.

Send resumes to ‘amit AT slideshare DOT net’

Here’s some SlideShare news that I would like to share with readers of this blog. We just announced the constitution of our board of advisors. Joining that board are Guy Kawasaki, Hal Varian & Ross Mayfield, all of whom are widely respected thought leaders in their respective fields. Actually, all three of them have informally been involved with SlideShare for a while now, but we thought this is an opportune moment to make the association formalized. They bring different perspectives and experiences to SlideShare. We look forward to their suggestions & criticisms as we try to drive SlideShare to the next level. Here are their brief intros-

Prof. Hal Varian– Prof. Varian is Chief Economist at Google. He is one of the world’s leading thinkers about the socio-economic dimension of the internet. He is a renowned economist researcher, teaches at the Univ of Berkeley, has written some of the best books about the information economy and writes a monthly column for the NYT.

Guy Kawasaki- Guy needs no introduction- Silicon Valley legend, former Apple think-tank, sharp marketing brain, investor, entrepreneur, A++ list blogger and something else that is of immense importance to us- he is an icon in the field of communications and presentations; his 10-20-30 rule for making presentations is widely acclaimed.

Ross Mayfield- Ross is the co-founder & CEO of Social Text, the world’s first and biggest enterprise wiki company. He is widely respected as a leading thinker about Enterprise 2.0. and has a very rich & diverse background, that includes a diplomatic stint with the Government of Estonia!

We welcome all the advisors to SlideShare. Something that we strongly believe in (and what I have also talked about very frequently on Webyantra) is the role of diversity within your startup as you take critical decisions about your product, strategy, competitive position et al. We have tried to bring that diversity to the board with this team.

Slideshare is looking to hire a content manager. This is a full time position based out of our Delhi office. Here’s a brief description for the position:

Role Description:

The person will be responsible for content realted aspects of SlideShare. SlideShare is the world’s largest community for sharing presentations. It has all kind of presentations that one could think of and its has a highly diversified user base- diversified in terms of geography, professional background, psychographics etc. The role would involve (but not be limited to)

1. creating and driving the content strategy for SlideShare
2. taking ownership of application’s content related sections (which constantly needs upgradation)
3. writing and managing our various blogs- the slideshare blog and another very interesting blog that we are soon launching
4. user engagement: we are from a user research background and SlideShare has been at the center of a serendipitous learning for us- the fact that in an agile development environment, heightened interactions with users can supplant conventional usability testing to a large extent. In that sense, we look upon user feedback & support as a strategic function. Proof of this lies in the fact that till now the job of answering support emails and user feedbacks (something that is usually accorded less importance) has been done directly by SlideShare’s three founders. Unfortunately we have limited time, but we feel the need for a smart, mature individual to take over that role.
5. handle content related aspects of events, contests, promotions on slideshare
6. represent & evangelize SlideShare in the community, media events..

Desired candidate profile:

1. the candidate must “get web 2.0″; he/she will should be living/breathing the web 24 hours/ day
2. “do what it takes” attitude with regards to work
3. be prepared to work in a small but fast growing, global scale internet company
4. ability to work alongside a hyper-agile software development team (bordering on extreme programming)
5. excellent written & oral language skills
6. prefer somebody with a strong interest/inclination in blogging, new media, social media etc (people authoring a popular blog are at an advantage here)
7. educational background: we’re not hung up about education, so this could be anything, though a degree in mass communication, new media, design etc might help.
8. experience: not more than 3-4 years, candidates with zilch experience are also welcome

Compensation will not be a constraint for the right person. If interested, please ping amit@uzanto.com

I am happy to share the results of the World’s Best Presentation Contest that recently concluded on SlideShare. The contest ran for a month and was judged by some of the superstars from the world of communications and presentations - Guy Kawasaki, Garr Reynolds, Bert Decker and Jerry Weissman. The idea behind the contest was to shine a spotlight on well designed presentations and the winning entries that emerged are REAL GEMS. You can check Technorati for hundreds of blogs that have blogged the winning presentations and people are really moved by the top winners.

The First Prize was bagged by ‘Shift Happens’, a superb commentary on the emerging socio-economic position in US as a result of the flattening world. In fact there is a bit of history to how this presentation was created; if you are interested, read that story here. The person who created this presentation runs a professional presentation design company in the US.

The Second Prize was bagged by a freakingly brilliant presentation called ‘Meet Henry’. It demonstrates a very refreshing communication style. This has already inspired a bunch of wannabes– check out this, this & this. Meet Henry also comes from a professional presentation design company.

The Third Prize went to a thought provoking (and intense) presentation titled “‘Sustainable Food Lab’” about the world’s food shortage situation. This was created by a non-profit sector worker, who lives in the US.

As Guy Kawasaki remarked, something common amongst all three winning entries was big fonts, big graphics and a storytelling orientation. In fact, one is tempted to question whether these are powerpoints at all. They are almost like a completely new medium for mass communication.

Apart from the three top awards, there were some honorable mentions as well. Check them out …

Translation as vocation: a primer for newbies
I Am The Media
Flickr
Winner, PowerPoint Live Conference 2006, “5 Killer Slides”
The 25 Basic Styles of Blogging … And When To Use Each One
Unlocking Cool - By Jeremy Gutsche, TrendHunter.com

We are elated by the response to the contest. SlideShare has gained significantly in terms of traffic & attention. And its been a great experience working with the likes of Guy Kawasaki, Garr Reynolds etc. Stay tuned to more SlideShare contests in future.