Intermediate

Presenters

Frank Abagnale

Some of the presenters are SlideGenius Clients.

Brian Barr – Managing Partner, Agile Trailblazers

Brian Barr is the co-founder and managing partner of AgileTrailblazers – a company founded to enable organizations to rapidly realize continuous business value delivery through use of lean and agile principles. Brian has over 25 years of experience driving other leaders and global teams in the creation of large-scale software solutions with a passion for quality, timeliness, and agile methodologies. He has influenced and led company-wide agile transformations in traditionally change-resistant organizations such as medical and financial services industries. Brian has a BSE in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania.

• Management Innovation to Achieve Continuous Business Value Delivery
  Tuesday, April 10, 2012 – 02:45 to 03:45 PM Ballroom E

Doug Bellenger – VP of Products, Movitas

Doug leads the development, design and IT teams at Movitas where he gets to work with a great group of engineers and designers who are working on new location based solutions for the destination and hospitality spaces. In this position, Doug has had experience with architecting, designing and developing scalable, integrated, cross platform systems and applications in both the web and mobile spaces for his clients and their guests. Doug has an undergraduate degree from RIT and a Masters in Technology Management from Drexel. Doug has also been active in the startup community serving as a past management and board member for Philly Startup Leaders.

• Case Study: Creating a Cross Platform Experience
  Wednesday, April 11, 2012 – 04:00 to 05:00 PM Ballroom E

Arlo Belshee – Sr. Program Manager, OData

Arlo does a little bit of everything, but what he really does is inspire courage. He has gone back and forth several times between management and in-the-trenches development on technically sophisticated products. He challenges every assumption he can find, and helps people learn to change always and continuously. He has been involved in Agile since 1999. Yet in the middle of that period he worked for 2 years in a rigorous, effective, and pro-people Waterfall development shop. He’s a strong believer in discipline and the agility that comes from it, in punctuated continuity, and in change as the only constant. Don’t do anything he says, but learn why he says it and come up with something better. The best compliment he’s recently received was when a co-worker termed him the Company Jester because Arlo always has permission to laugh at the King.

• Agile Tech Tree
  Wednesday, April 11, 2012 – 10:15 to 11:15 AM Ballroom D

Anna Bloom – Code for America Fellow

Anna Bloom recently completed a fellowship program with Code for America, a nonprofit dedicated to designing technologies that help make city governments more open, participatory and efficient. During the fellowship, Anna worked with the city of Philadelphia to build Change by Us, an online marketplace for community projects. Anna graduated from UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism and has previously worked for YouTube, The New York Times, MSNBC.com and Hot Studio, an experience design company in San Francisco.

• What happened when Philly launched a Social Network to Improve Neighborhoods?
  Tuesday, April 10, 2012 – 10:15 to 11:15 AM Ballroom E

Jeff Brown – Core Member, Grails team, Sr. Engineer, SpringSource.

Core member of the Grails development team, Jeff Brown, is a Senior Software Engineer with SpringSource. Jeff has been involved in designing and building object oriented systems for over 15 years. Jeff’s areas of expertise include web development with Groovy & Grails, Java and agile development

• What’s New In Grails 2.0?
  Tuesday, April 10, 2012 – 10:15 to 11:15 AM Ballroom D

Sean Brown – Sr. Director of Advanced Apps & Engineering at Comcast Interactive Media

Sean Brown is the Sr. Director of Advanced Applications Engineering at Comcast Interactive Media (CIM), a division of Comcast Corporation. He leads the engineering team developing the XFINITY TV app for iOS and Android. Prior to leading mobile application development for CIM he led the development of XfinityTV.com.

• From 0 to 4,500,000 downloads and how we built a mobile app development organization in Philadelphia
  Tuesday, April 10, 2012 – 01:30 to 02:30 PM Ballroom E

Trevor Burnham – Author, CoffeeScript: Accelerated Javascript Development

Trevor Burnham is a freelance web developer living in Cambridge, MA. He’s the author of CoffeeScript: Accelerated JavaScript Development, published by PragProg. He tweets as @trevorburnham and @coffeescript.

The CoffeeScript Edge

Aug 24 09:19 AM US/Eastern

KABUL, Afghanistan, Aug. 24 (UPI) — Throughout my career I have been known to walk that fine line between good taste and unemployment. I see no reason to change that now.

Consider the following therapeutic.

I have been assigned as a staff officer to a headquarters in Afghanistan for about two months. During that time, I have not done anything productive. Fortunately little of substance is really done here, but that is a task we do well.

We are part of the operational arm of the International Security Assistance Force commanded by U.S. Army Gen. David Petraeus. It is composed of military representatives from all the NATO countries, several of which I cannot pronounce.

Officially, IJC was founded in late 2009 to coordinate operations among all the regional commands in Afghanistan. More likely it was founded to provide some general a three-star command. Starting with a small group of dedicated and intelligent officers, IJC has successfully grown into a stove-piped and bloated organization, top-heavy in rank. Around here you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a colonel.

For headquarters staff, war consists largely of the endless tinkering with PowerPoint slides to conform with the idiosyncrasies of cognitively challenged generals in order to spoon-feed them information. Even one tiny flaw in a slide can halt a general’s thought processes as abruptly as a computer system’s blue screen of death.

The ability to brief well is, therefore, a critical skill. It is important to note that skill in briefing resides in how you say it. It doesn’t matter so much what you say or even if you are speaking Klingon.

Random motion, ad hoc processes and an in-depth knowledge of Army minutia and acronyms are also key characteristics of a successful staff officer. Harried movement together with furrowed brows and appropriate expressions of concern a la Clint Eastwood will please the generals. Progress in the war is optional.

Each day is guided by the “battle rhythm,” which is a series of PowerPoint briefings and meetings with PowerPoint presentations. It doesn’t matter how inane or useless the briefing or meeting might be. Once it is part of the battle rhythm, it has the persistence of carbon 14.

And you can’t skip these events because they take roll — just like gym class.

The start and culmination of each day is the commander’s update assessment. Please ignore the fact that “update assessment” is redundant. Simply saying commander’s update doesn’t provide the possibility of creating a three-letter acronym. It also doesn’t matter that the commander never attends the CUA.

The CUA consists of a series of PowerPoint slides describing the events of the previous 12 hours. Briefers explain each slide by reading from a written statement in a tone not unlike that of a congressman caught in a tryst with an escort. The CUA slides only change when a new commander arrives or the war ends.

The commander’s immediate subordinates, usually one- and two-star generals, listen to the CUA in a semi-comatose state. Each briefer has approximately 1 or 2 minutes to impart either information or misinformation. Usually they don’t do either. Fortunately, none of the information provided makes an indelible impact on any of the generals.

One important task of the IJC is to share information to the ISAF commander, his staff and to all the regional commands. This information is delivered as PowerPoint slides in e-mail at the flow rate of a fire hose. Standard operating procedure is to send everything that you have. Volume is considered the equivalent of quality.

Next month IJC will attempt a giant leap for mankind. In a first-of-its-kind effort, IJC will embed a new stovepipe into an already existing stovepipe. The rationale for this bold move resides in the fact that an officer, who is currently without one, needs a staff of 35 people to create a big splash before his promotion board.

Like most military organizations, structure always trumps function.

The ultimate consequences of this reorganization won’t be determined until after that officer rotates out of theater.

Nevertheless, the results will be presented by PowerPoint.

–

(Lawrence Sellin, Ph.D., is a colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve and a veteran of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. He is currently serving his second deployment to Afghanistan. The views expressed are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Army or U.S. government.)

–

(United Press International’s “Outside View” commentaries are written by outside contributors who specialize in a variety of important issues. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of United Press International. In the interests of creating an open forum, original submissions are invited.)

NBR staff | Friday April 30, 2010 | 9 comments

ABOVE: COMA AT 30 PACES: The US military’s Afghanistan-explained slide, credited to PA Consulting. PA maintains an Auckland office, if this type of work appeals.

Via the most excellent NZ Trade & Enterprise, our government has long warned about the dangers of Death by PowerPoint.

The US military bureaucracy has been a little slower on the update.

A slide shown by General Stanley McChrystal, head of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan (above), is now zinging around the internet, held up as a metaphor for America’s tangled policy in the region, and an example of the perils of over-reliance on Microsoft’s presentation software.

“When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war,” The New York Times reported General McChrystal as saying when he first unveiled the slide last year.

But as in the Middle East and Afghanistan, things are slowly starting to dawn on Uncle Sam.

“PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Marine Corps General James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina, reported the Times.

He spoke without slides.

Another member of the brass, Brigadier General H R McMaster, told the same conference that PowerPoint was “an internal threat” (remember when they used to root out Commies?).

“It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” he told the Times, “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”

22 December 2011 | By Reineke Reitsma

Forrester Research’s Reineke Reitsma looks back on 2011 and sets out what research professionals should watch out for in 2012.

For the fourth year in a row, members of the market insights team at Forrester have come up with their predictions for the industry for the year ahead. It’s hard to describe just how much we enjoy this activity: generating ideas, commenting on each other’s drafts, finding examples and building a unified view. Some ideas didn’t make it into the final report (and when one of those is yours, it hurts) but we agreed on many others. Here’s a summary of our thinking.

Looking back at 2011

Part of the exercise is to look back at last year’s predictions and see what we got right – and where we missed out, of course. In 2011, we expected market researchers to embrace social media as an information source, feel a greater need to show the value of market research, explore innovative methodologies, and look for ways to implement technology effectively.

• The uptake of social market research was mixed
Looking back, we did see a lot of interest in social tools and social media for market research purposes, especially market research online communities (MROCs). However, we expected that by this point, more market insight professionals would be listening to their customers through social media or directly engaging with them on social media platforms, but those still show very limited uptake.

• There is more pressure to show ROI
Given the tough economic climate, we predicted that showing the contribution of market insights was going to be important in 2011 – and we were right. In early 2011 we conducted a survey in which one third of market insights professionals said that they already had to prove their value to executives. More than half expected this to be the case in 2012 as well, with an emphasis on showing how they are improving key performance indicators and return on investment.

• Emerging methodologies saw limited interest
We expected to see an increase in interest in innovative methodologies in 2011, but we predicted that market researchers wouldn’t spend a lot of money on them during the year. Conference presentations showed that companies such as Insites Consulting, BrainJuicer, Vision Critical, and Mesh Planning are undertaking very interesting projects, using techniques like gamification, prediction markets, eyetracking, and mobile research. But uptake is still low across the industry, and it continues to be mostly vendor-driven.

• Market insight professionals don’t know what to do with big data
One of the big challenges that market insight professionals deal with is figuring out how to analyse large amounts of disparate data in meaningful ways. We imagined that 2011 would be the year in which people started thinking about building a central knowledge house and using technology tools like enterprise feedback management (EFM) for data integration. Although there has been lots of activity among EFM vendors, with platform enhancements and mergers and acquisitions, clients haven’t shown much interest yet. Expect interest to grow in the years to come – it’s too important to ignore.

What’s in store for 2012?

In the past couple of years, it has been challenging for market insight professionals to balance timeliness, quality, depth of insights, and innovation – all while keeping costs down and not running themselves and their employees ragged. In 2012 things aren’t likely to get any better.

Forrester has had a large number of conversations with both vendor- and clientside market researchers over the course of the year. Based on these conversations, we believe that the key themes for 2012 are new research methods, organisational structure and collaboration across the information supply chain, as well as innovative ways to deliver deeper and more aligned insights.

These are a few of the highlights.

• Mobile research showing uptake – finally
We identified the opportunities for mobile research back in 2009. Uptake has been slower than expected, but we saw it getting some traction in 2011. Until now mobile research has primarily been driven by vendors; they’ve rolled out mobile offerings to show clientside researchers how they can capture consumers’ ‘in the moment’ experiences. In 2012 more market insights professionals will start to think about how mobile tools can solve their research challenges, and will try out mobile research. However, as mobile research gets more integrated, look for debates on the “right” mobile research methodology and how to manage surveys across multiple platforms and devices.

• Optimising the information supply chain
The research world has become much more complex, with many intertwined suppliers, stakeholders, and projects. In 2011, Forrester saw more market insights professionals realising that their core business was not delivering reports but optimising information supply and delivery. In 2012 we believe an increased number of organisations will look at the supply of data and research, as well as its delivery, to find new ways to efficiently manage the flow of and ensure timely access to needed information. Similarly, they will look for ways to generate value through better integration and analysis across vendors and data sources – and will want to optimise insights by elevating their suppliers to the role of partner.

• Engaging stakeholders with research outputs
The world around us has evolved from static, one-dimensional information to interactive, visually stimulating graphics. Your audience quickly tires of looking at yet another deck of PowerPoint charts. With other departments in the organisation starting to present their information in more visually exciting formats, your stakeholders’ expectations are going to soar. We expect research vendors to be the first to take steps to create competitive differentiation here: Watch out for job openings at market insights vendors for designers and requests for proposals going out to design agencies.

In 2011 we have seen market insight professionals take their first steps on the path to adding social to their research mix, measuring their contribution to the organisation, fostering internal collaboration, and building influence. In 2012 it’s time to deliver on all of this.

Market insight professionals who want to be successful in 2012 and beyond need to embrace new research methods, change their research process to deliver deeper and more aligned insights, and build out collaborative relationships across the information supply chain. The challenge will be to find the time and resources to make this happen while handling the increased pressure on the market insights team to deliver faster, better, more insightful, and less costly results.

I came across this post at Presentation Zen – Garr Reynold‘s awesome blog.  The post is from 2007 and the article was suggesting that the disappearance of PowerPoint might be upon us but here on the dawn of 2012, it’s still going strong.

Last week an article appearing in The Sydney Morning Herald entitled Researcher points finger at PowerPoint generated quite a stir. The article highlighted findings by researchers from the University of New South Wales, including John Sweller who developed the Cognitive Load Theory back in the ’80s. One of the findings mentioned in the article: it is more difficult to process information if it is coming at you both verbally and in written form at the same time. Since people can not read and listen well at the same time, the reporter suggested, then this may mean “the death of the PowerPoint presentation.” The assumption being (apparently) that a presentation made with the aid of slideware such as PowerPoint or Keynote necessarily includes lines of text projected on a screen that mirror the spoken word of the presenter.

The article generated so much attention due in part to this quote by Professor Sweller:

“The use of the PowerPoint presentation has been a disaster. It should be ditched.”

— John Sweller

Professor Sweller’s comment makes a provocative headline and adds to the long list of professionals and researchers deriding the PowerPoint tool. I have added the professor’s quote to my talks on the Presentation Zen approach. Two versions of the slide appear below.

Is PowerPoint a method?
I am assuming that what Professor Sweller means is that the way PowerPoint is used should be ditched, not the tool itself. Suggesting we abandon PowerPoint because it’s often (usually?) misused and abused to produce awful presentation visuals is like saying we should dump the idea of 24-hour cable news because so much of it is vacuous rubbish. But whether we’re talking about bad TV or boring presentations, shouldn’t we blame the content producers not the content medium? When people rail against PowerPoint they seem to be saying that PowerPoint is a method, and a flawed method at that. But is PowerPoint itself really a “method”? In a 2004 interview with Cliff Atkinson, Multimedia Learning author Richard Mayer said this:

“I do not think it makes sense to refer to PowerPoint as a method. Instead… PowerPoint is a medium that can be used effectively — that is, with effective design methods — or ineffectively, that is with ineffective design methods. We would not necessarily say that books are rarely a good method, because books can be designed using effective or ineffective methods.”

— Richard Mayer

It may still be a typical scene of university life – rows of students in front of a lecturer and Powerpoint slides – but it’s also one many people want to see less of, including employers and the students themselves.

Being more innovative in approaches to teaching across the whole range of subjects is crucial to delivering employability, stimulating economic growth and tackling unemployment over the long-term. This means a fundamental shift in the role of lecturers, tutors and students; for example, more collaboration with employers and local communities on real-life projects; strategic support for high-quality teaching on a university-wide basis; and more responsibility for students to lead and engage with each other as an integral part of their university studies.

Of course lecturers still need to inspire and engage. The challenge is to integrate more traditional methods of teaching and assessment with new and innovative activities which unlock the potential of all students and enable them to make vital contributions as graduates to the societies in which they live and work.

The change is critical to the future of universities themselves so that they maintain their importance to the economy and society and their wider cultural impact on the UK. It also means that the education they provide continues to be a solid investment for students, particularly older students and those who traditionally have not considered university to be for them.

A new million+ report, Teaching that Matters, authored with the University of Wolverhampton, sets out how a revolution in teaching is already underway in modern universities. These universities have played an outstanding role in expanding opportunities while ensuring that students are active participants in learning. For example, History students at the University of Derby run a conference as well as deliver research papers; health students at Middlesex University work with service users and carers to close the gap between theory and practice. At Wolverhampton, students are appointed as e-champions to help their peers with ICT and higher grades across the board have been the result.

Modern universities also play a key role in helping people in work and those who prefer to study part-time gain higher qualifications by offering flexible learning opportunities and many more sandwich courses and work and professional placements. These universities act as engines of social mobility and growth for the knowledge economy, with more of their graduates moving into higher socio-economic groups (according to HESA data).

In their transformation of teaching, modern universities are an important model for the sector as a whole. The renewed interest of Ministers in teaching is very welcome. What’s needed now is on-going recognition of the key role that teaching excellence and innovation plays, in all universities, in supporting students to become the graduates that employers need and from which society as a whole benefits.

One political party in Switzerland thinks PowerPoint presentations are actually costing the country billions of dollars.

The Anti-PowerPoint Party wants to ban the software from being used in Switzerland. It even compares PowerPoint to a disease.

From Geekosystem:

The Anti-PowerPoint Party claims that the use of the presentation software costs the Swiss economy approximately 2.1 billion Swiss Francs a year (US $2.5billion). They base their calculation on reportedly unverified assumptions about the number of employees that attend PowerPoint presentations weekly, and the assumption that these presentations hold no value for 85% of attendees thus costing companies money from the loss of productive work hours.

Anyone in Switzerland can call for a referendum on nearly anything, as long as they obtain 100,000 voter signatures. But the Anti-PowerPoint party remains far from that goal, with just 245 members, according to PCWorld.

The party is free to join, but members must buy, “The PowerPoint Fallacy,” written by Anti-PowerPoint founder Matthias Poehm.

The author admits his party is a platform to sell his book, but insists, “it doesn’t end there.”

“This issue will be raised in the awareness of the all people who still don’t know that there is an alternative to PowerPoint and with this alternative you, provably, achieve three to five times more effect and excitement with the audience than with the PowerPoint,” Poehm said. “We want … that pupils in schools are not punished by a mark reduction if they don’t use PowerPoint.”

Posted: 11/15/2011 11:41 am

How many mindless presentations have you sat through in business and life?

How many numbing slides have you had to endure of pie charts or ones littered with hundreds of words? How many times have you sat through a presentation in which the speaker was, literally, reading aloud the content on the slides that are right in front of you? How many times have you sat there while someone (poorly) read a speech while stammering behind a podium. The amount of content (both in traditional media and online) about death by PowerPoint is staggering.

Why do we — as a society — put up with up?

It’s probably one of the last media frontiers that we need to take a serious look at, implode and re-invent. Yes, presentation software (be it, PowerPoint, Keynote, Prezi or others) are simply tools to help a message get communicated, but it’s gone beyond that to the point where the presentation software is the message… and not the true message (it would make Marshall McLuhan cry). In the recently published Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson, Jobs discusses how he re-invented Apple during the iMac phase by abolishing the use of presentation software in meetings. He felt that people were relying on the creation and presentation of a slide deck instead of actually thinking about the business problem and how to solve it. On page 337 of the telling biography, Jobs says, “People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint.”

It’s the content, stupid.

It seems obvious enough, but the idea that a presentation is only as good as the content being presented has become a lost art. It’s so fundamental (and obvious), but it’s true. Ultimately, people use bullet points because they’re worried they may forget something (which means, they don’t know their content well enough) or they use fancy charts (which means that they can’t explain something simply enough without a visualization) or they use fancy images or video (because it acts as a diversion to the fact that their own content is not as compelling).

There’s one simple and easy way to create and give a great presentation…

Know your content (inside and out). If you don’t, ask yourself this: “Should I really be presenting this material as a subject matter expert if I, myself, truly don’t know it and have to hide behind bullet points or bar graphs?” Here’s the thing: amazing images, hilarious videos, powerful infographics, bullet points and bar graphs are all incredible components to integrate into any presentation so long as the presentation can be done — 100 per cent in its entirety — without them. Think about some of the best presentations you have seen to date. Most of them used some form of multimedia but all of that media was a bonus. It acted as a vessel to simply push the speaker’s message out there in a brighter and more powerful fashion.

The problem is that many presenters feel that the presentation is the presentation. It isn’t.

The presentation begins (and ends) with the content and how the presenter delivers it. You don’t have to ditch PowerPoint, but you don’t need it. If you can augment your presentation by sprinkling it in, by all means… go for it. If software, audio visual, the type of microphone, etc… dictates how your presentation will be perceived, you need to return to the roots of what you’re presenting and why you’re presenting it, in the first place. Here’s an easy way to think about it…

The three C’s of a great presentation:

1. Content. What am I being asked to present? What is the story here? How can I tell it in a simple way? How can I create a simple story that pulls it all together?
2. Compelling. How well do I know my content? How well am I using my body language and words to deliver my content? What else can I do to make my presentation both memorable and actionable? How well have I practices this material be compelling in my delivery?
3. Compassion. How can I get people to emotionally connect to me? How candid am I being with the audience? How much do I care about the audience? How much do I care about the content? How much emotion can I deliver?

Great presentations don’t happen by accident.

People forget that the best presentations are also a performance. They are art. The best presenters (like the best actors, artists and musicians) commit to the practice, study and performance of presentations. It’s not an easy art to master (it takes years for some…with proper coaching, mentoring and instruction). Steve Jobs didn’t wander out on to a stage and hope for the best (and if not, rely on his PowerPoint slides to deliver the message). He worked obsessively on everything from the core message to how the lighting in the room was set. He felt that those who didn’t put the time and effort into this were bozos (granted, he felt that most people were bozos). Steve Jobs was a master presenter, and you can be too if you’re willing to focus on the content and step away from the PowerPoint.

What presentations tips would you add?

Mitch Joel is president of Twist Image — an award-winning digital marketing agency. HIs first book, Six Pixels of Separation, named after his highly-successful blog and podcast of the same name is a business and marketing bestseller.

Sometimes you need to show a webpage in a PowerPoint slideshow and a possible solution is using the external link feature that is available almost all Office PowerPoint distribution.

However, if you want to insert a live webpage into a PowerPoint slide you can choose a free add-on LiveWeb that makes available a new button to insert a webpage into the slide.

You can use LiveWeb to insert web pages into a PowerPoint slide and refresh the pages real-time during slide show. Display web pages without ever leaving the PowerPoint slide show.  LiveWeb works with documents off your local drive too. You can specify relative paths or absolute paths. LiveWeb will also look for files in the presentation folder if the files have local drive information and cannot be located at the location specified by the user during slideshow.

LiveWeb encapsulates the need to insert a web browser control manually and write code to update the web pages within the control during the slide show.

Usage

1. Click on Insert | Web Pages
2. Enter the list of web page address that you wish to create.
3. Provide the additional info required.
4. LiveWeb will create slides with web browser controls embedded on the slides
5. Run the slide show.
6. The web pages will be displayed during the slide show and refreshed at real-time.

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