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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.

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

If you wish to understand the intricacies of the venture capital funding process, here’s something that will come in handy. I read about (or hear) lots of VC jargon all the time (e.g. Series A investments, term sheets, management fees, exit valuations), and while I have a rudimentary idea of what it means, I don’t get many parts of it. Partly, because one needs to experience it firsthand, before you get the complete picture. Still, if somebody could explain all that jargon in simple, uncomplicated English, it’ll help a lot. So I was delighted to stumble across these two presentations, while performing the daily quality drill on SlideShare.

The first presentation is titled – ‘Everything you need to know about Venture Capital‘. It was delivered by Ben Holmes from Index Ventures at the Future of Web Applications (FOWA) summit at London last week. The presentation is stunningly clear and straightforward. It explains the how, why, when, when not, etc of venture funding in all of 22 slides. DON’T MISS THIS.

The second slide deck is titled ‘Sex & the Investor‘. It is from John Wilson of Folio Partners and he delivered it recently at BarcampLondon2. He talks less about the VC jargon and more about the underlying motivations behind getting venture funding. This is great as well.

I recently gave a talk on funding options available to Indian technology startups in front of a gathering, consisting mostly of MBA students and academicians. Of course, my own slides would pale into insignificance compared to these two presentations. Wish I seen these beforehand.