SlideBoom Pro: Conversation with Yury Uskov

Yury Uskov is a founder and CEO of iSpring Solutions Inc., an innovative software company with the development center in Russia. Yury has a Masters degree in Software Engineering and since 2001 have been working in rich media industry inspired with the idea of making the best solution for online presentation sharing. iSpring Solutions has already launched several Flash technology projects including iSpring, a PowerPoint to Flash converter, and SlideBoom, an online service for presentations sharing. In this conversation, Yury discusses the new SlideBoom Pro account.

Geetesh: Tell us more about how the SlideBoom Pro account evolved, and how it differs from the free account.

Yury: As you know SlideBoom is a professional solution for sharing PowerPoint presentations which offers a full set of services for publishing presentations on the web. Sharing and distributing PowerPoint presentations on the web was normally quite difficult as PowerPoint PPT files are usually large to send, they require the proper version of PowerPoint installed, etc.

SlideBoom makes presentation sharing as easy as never before. It takes just a few clicks: upload a presentation to SlideBoom, and send a link to anybody. SlideBoom has become extremely popular due to the rich set of features, and excellent presentation quality. Plus it’s available for free.

Those who use PowerPoint presentations on a daily basis require additional capabilities for online presentation delivery. We are happy to supply them with advanced features available under the Pro account now.

Professional service cannot be free, but the pricing is quite moderate: The Pro account is available for $99 per year including SlideBoom technical support.

SlideBoom service can be a perfect online companion to iSpring desktop products for PowerPoint to Flash conversion. While free SlideBoom Basic accounts are targeted to users of the non-commercial iSpring CONVERTER freeware, SlideBoom PRO accounts are primarily designed for customers of the advanced iSpring PRESENTER product, widely used in a business sphere.

SlideBoom PRO account adds a number of advantages essential for professional work with presentations:

1. Acceptable Content: The greatest difference is that Pro accounts can be used to publish business and marketing presentations while Basic accounts are valid for sharing non-commercial content only.
   
   
2. Privacy Features: Pro account users can create private groups, and invite other SlideBoomers to join their private discussions.
   
   
3. Hosting Space Volume: SlideBoom Pro allows upload and share of up to 500 presentations.
   
   
4. Slidelog: Pro account users are offered an option to create and customize their own Slidelog (slides + weblog), their personal space on SlideBoom.
   
   
5. Presentation Playback Customization: Pro accounts provide 3 additional Slidelog players with various navigation control features and playback options: presentation playback autostart, automatic presentation replay.
   
   
6. Presentation Tuning: Compression ratio for images and audio can be easily set before uploading to SlideBoom.
   

Geetesh: What sort of branding options do you allow in the Pro account -- and how is that a convincing reason to upgrade to the Pro account?

Yury: Branding options are available for Slidelog and customizable players.

You can customize your Slidelog, posting your company logo and choosing a color scheme that matches your company colors. It’s easy to set up a custom appearance for your Slidelog by changing navigation elements and sidebar blocks.

The players also change their colors according to a color scheme, and display your company logo over your content if needed. For example, you may want to include company logo in a presentation when it appears at third-party sites and blogs or only into its offline versions that should be delivered on CD/DVD.

If you’d like to have personal web page at SlideBoom, brand your presentations, and require advanced sharing experience -- then Pro accounts are the right choice. For $99/year you get the maximum from SlideBoom.

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