Category — SlideShare

I was invited as a speaker to Conquest2007, an entrepreneurship focused event at BITS Pilani, one of India’s top engineering schools. I was part of the session on ‘Challenges in Globalisation and Scalability for a startup‘. My talk centered on the slideshare experience and the kind of challenges we are facing as we scale up. The audience consisted of engineering students, faculty members, participants from industry, venture capital firms etc. It was a great experience to be back amongst engineering students and one cannot help feeling nostalgic about your own educational institution. The event was organised by CELBITS, the entrepreneurial club at BITS and was sponsored by SAP.

Here are the slides for my talk shared via slideshare.

Other speakers at the workshop included Ashmeet Sidana from Foundation Capital (a Silicon Valley VC firm), Manish Vij from Quasar Media and Kunwar Sachdev, CEO of Su-Kum (the invertor company).

Also take a minute to go through a few snaps that I clicked using my camera phone. The photographic quality is not great, so bear with me on this.

Guy Kawasaki’s firm, Garage Ventures and SlideShare have jointly co-sponsored the “Worlds Best Presentation Contest”. The contest went live yesterday and it will continue for a month. The contest’s four judges are literally a who’s who from the world of presentations and communication. Guy Kawasaki needs no introduction, but what you might not know about him is that, he is a thought leader on how to make effective presentations with his 10/20/30 rule. He blogged about the contest here. Garr Reynolds is the author of Presentation Zen and a hugely inspiring figure on the presentation scene. Bert Decker is a very well respected communications expert and is known best for his commentaries on US Presidential debates on television. Jerry Weissman is one of the world’s top presentation coaches and works with many high profile CEOs and companies.

Users will vote on the contest entries and the top entries will be judged by the panel for the Best Presentation Awards. There is also the People’s Choice awards for the entries receiving the most user votes. The prizes for the Best Presentation Award (Alienware laptop, X Box) are sponsored by Microsoft. The People’s Awards prizes (Ipods) are sponsored by SlideShare. If you have a killer slide deck, do enter it into the contest (in fact, you can enter upto five) and get it reviewed by these luminaries of the presentation world. You can learn more about the rules here.

The idea behind the contest is to shine a spotlight on well-designed presentations and to highlight the creative and effective use of PowerPoint. Powerpoints are often blamed for brain dead presentations, but the software is hardly to blame. As Guy Kawasaki says in the press release – “A craftsman doesn’t blame his tools. We expect this contest to show exactly what PowerPoint ‘artists’ can be do with clear thinking, concise text, and cool graphics.”

And here’s some insider news. While we always had a SlideShare contest in the back of our minds, the idea for this one was thought of by Guy Kawasaki himself. He has been involved in the working out of the basic concept and its modalities. Its been a very learning experience for us all along the way.

p.s. - YouTube also launched their 2006 Most Popular Videos Awards yesterday. It was sheer coincidence that the day they chose was the same as ours.

Uzanto is hiring web developers to join our Delhi based team. The job involves working on both our products- SlideShare & MindCanvas. We are a small (but growing) team, which means that if selected, you will get a first-hand experience in the design, development, running, scalability and stabilization of innovative, global scale web products.

Technologies (or platforms) involved are Ruby on Rails (ROR), AJAX, JAVA, PHP, MYSQL, XML, HTML, CSS, Amazon Web Services (like S3 & EC2), Linux, FreeBSD et al. Its great if you have prior experience in these, but that’s not necessary. We are happy to teach you, if you ‘get’ the web and want to make this your career.

We care about bright & enthusiastic folks, with zeal to explore and learn the latest technologies. People who have demonstrated the ability to undertake innovative, independent projects & assignments (outside the purview of their academic or professional work) are preferred. We specially care for people with interest in open source technologies.

Preferred candidate profile - BE/BTech in Computer Science; 0-3 years of web development experience; bright freshers are welcome; people with special interest in Web2.0, blogs, RSS et al are welcome.

We offer attractive salary, a work environment that is geared towards shared learning and the opportunity to play a significant role in creating/running world class web products .

If the above positions interest you, ping me at amit@uzanto.com

Slideshare has been covered in BusinessWeek, the global business news magazine cum website. This is an extract from the write up about Slideshare titled - “Have I Got A PowerPoint For You“.

” In the beginning, there was MP3 sharing. Then came friend sharing (MySpace), photo sharing (Flickr), and video sharing (YouTube). Now it has come to this: PowerPoint slide sharing.

The site’s “decks,” as the slide shows are called, are diverse: conference presentations, classroom lessons (”Let’s Learn Colors!” from a middle-school Spanish class), and PowerPoint satire (Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address famously summarized in bullet points, created in 2000 by Peter Norvig, Google’s research director). ”

Unfortunately, you might not be able to see the article since BusinessWeek’s online version is a paid subscription (and they have no trial account as well).

This is great news for us and we are really kicked by this coverage. Let me thank all users of the site.

Slideshare is hiring in New Delhi!

We’ve got a very good response to the launch of SlideShare and need to hire developers and a sysadmin immediately to keep up with your enthusiasm. This is for our team in New Delhi. The Uzanto team is a small, tightly-knit team of developers and designers in India & US.

We work with cutting edge technologies - Ruby on Rails, MySQL, and Amazon Web Services. We are looking for developers and a sys admins. We have a small, tightly-knit team of web developers & designers in US and India. Our setup consists of Ruby, Rails, MySQL, lighttpd/mongrel, Pound, FreeBSD, and Debian. We run our Rails apps on a 5-machine cluster (and Amazon S3).

Developer Position: You should be a proven web hacker who can help us get Slideshare to out of the Beta stage and beyond. Freshers OK: having an existing personal web project is a huge plus. Ruby or PHP experience is OK: we can teach you Ruby if you already “get” the web, PHP, CSS, MySql, etc. You MUST be a rock-star where web coding is concerned.

SysAdmin Position: You should have some experience managing open-source clusters. You must be comfortable setting up new servers, tweaking NFS configs, spotting bottlenecks, server surveillance, benchmarking Mongrels, etc. We need you to keep Slideshare working - dealing with any performance crunches, & daily problems that might slow down the site or cause other problems for users.

If the above positions interest you, ping me at amit@uzanto.com.