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Month: February 2012

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What is the Pecha Kucha 20×20 Presentation Technique?

Posted on by Rick E

Founded by Tokyo-based architects Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham in 2003 and stylized as PechaKucha 20×20, this simple presentation technique lets you show 20 images for 20 seconds each, for a running time of about 7 minutes in total.

Pecha Kucha lasts longer than an elevator pitch, which is supposed to be delivered for as long as an elevator ride, and runs shorter than the time Guy Kawasaki suggests in his 10/20/30 rule.

This presentation technique is recommended for more informal gatherings.

The official Pecha Kucha events held around the globe are meant to serve as a social gathering of creative minds and talents. In these gatherings, anyone can pitch their ideas at the event about any topic.

But we’re not suggesting that you talk about random topics during your pitch. Rather, you can utilize the presentation’s unique format to benefit your deck.

Graphic Intensive Pitch

The key difference between Pecha Kucha, an elevator pitch, and the 10/20/30 rule are its limitations.

It’s a time-bound format where you let your presentation play automatically, with each slide running for 20 seconds each.

This means that you can’t go back or skip to the next slide. Compared to an elevator pitch and the 10/20/30 rule, it’s restricted to a self-presenting deck or a time limit per slide.

While the 10/20/30 rule also advocates a limit of 10 slides in 30 minutes, Pecha Kucha runs 20 slide images in 7 minutes.

This means that the latter goes through more slides in a fraction of the time, making Pecha Kucha an image-intensive presentation.

Pecha Kucha 20×20 has been described as a business meeting meets poetic poetry slam, which aren’t far from each other in a way. Both utilize imagery, structure, and analogies to convey their message.

Find the Middle Ground

Pecha Kucha or PechaKucha is perfect if you find elevator pitches too short, and Guy Kawasaki’s 20-minute recommended running time too long.

It’s a completely different challenge to deliver a 20-slide deck for 20 seconds each. You need to rehearse your speech per slide to last exactly for 20 seconds.

Any more and you’ll rush your delivery, any less and you’ll have dead air in your already barebones 7-minute presentation.

Some previous experience in giving presentations and a lot of rehearsals may be required to pull off this style without a hitch.

In addition, using a conversational tone is necessary in order to foster the relaxed atmosphere that this movement started.

A conversational tone lets your audience follow a jargon-free pitch much faster and easier.

Passion is Key to Success

The word pecha–kucha comes from the Japanese word for “chatter”.

The early stages of the gatherings were coined after the conversational atmosphere this type of presentation attracted. The laid back and social aspect of Pecha Kucha events has been the key to its success.

You can translate this to your pitch by showing your enthusiasm through your presentation. Tell your audience that you’re about to do something different today and introduce the Pecha Kucha technique.

Choose powerful images that support the message of your pitch while still remembering to stay within your time limit. Master your topic and engage your audience using a relaxed, conversational tone.

This presentation style develops your ability to be concise with your speech so that you can get straight to the point and improves your rapport with the audience because of its informality.

A Pitch That’s Just Right

Change up your presentation habits and incorporate PechaKucha 20×20 into your pitch. Informal gatherings can benefit from this fun presentation style.

Challenge yourself and entertain your audience by showing them what you can do with 20 slides for 20 seconds each.

Since this is an image-intensive pitch, make sure to pick visuals that stand out. Support your message with your image by providing the right amount of words to say.

Rehearse your words carefully so that you don’t exceed the time limit.

But most of all, have fun while you’re at it. People’s attention gravitate towards speakers who are clearly passionate in what they have to say.

 

References

“Frequently Asked Questions.” PechaKucha 20×20. Accessed December 22, 2015. www.pechakucha.org/faq
“Guy Kawasaki – The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint.” Guy Kawasaki. December 30, 2005. Accessed December 22, 2015. http://guykawasaki.com/the_102030_rule
Pink, Daniel H. “Pecha Kucha: Get to the PowerPoint in 20 Slides Then Sit the Hell Down.” Wired.com. August 21, 2007. Accessed December 22, 2015. www.wired.com/2007/08/st-pechakucha

 

Featured Image: by Ryan McGuire on gratisography.com

The Rise of Visual Revolution: Unveiling the Anti-PowerPoint Party

Posted on by Rick E

The Anti-PowerPoint Party is a political party born in Switzerland, which wants to avoid the use of PowerPoint presentations around the world. As their leaders say, they don’t want to make MS PowerPoint a forbidden program, they just want to make companies more flexible in the use of other kind of programmes. They argue that would make the number of boring presentations decrease.

Every day, 250 millions of people in the world have to deal with lots of long and heavy presentations. As a solution, they urge employees not to simply read what they see on the screen, but to offer an entertaining and dynamic presentation. Remember that from FPPT, we can help you to make this.>

Reasons that made this political party to be born in a country like Switzerland are that It’s the easiest country for creating and joining a political group. This political party aspires to be one of the strongest political coalitions in Switzerland, expanding their power to other countries in the European Union, like Spain or France.

PowerPoint can be a very useful tool if you know how to use it. The main problem here is not the tool but the presenters instead. Trying to be a better presenter and make better PowerPoint presentations is the main goal that all of us need to achieve instead of criticizing the tool.

What is a PowerPoint Karaoke?

Posted on by Rick E

When we talk about PowerPoint Karaoke, or Battle Decks, we are referring to a new form of Karaoke where people don’t just sing songs. It is based on a PowerPoint presentation, projected on a screen to a group of participants. The images are totally random and it sometimes doesn’t make any sense.

Participants will have to explain what appears on the screen, even if it’s absurd. The objective of this game is not just hanging out, it’s a simple and funny way to improve our rhetorical skills and use it in our own PowerPoint works.  This helps you to avoid the problem of making boring presentations, where people just read what appears on the screen without explaining any ideas or important concepts of what they’re talking about.

It also can be used as an exercise for actors who need to improve their improvisational skills. It also helps you to lose stage fright.

This curious game was presented at a Berlin conference named Zentralle Intelligenz Agentur in 2006, and supposed a total success. Nowadays, it is used in a lot of group dynamics, companies and camps.

Think carefully before you use PowerPoint animations and transition effects. It’s like putting an earring on a newborn baby

Posted on by Rick E

by Rosie Hoyland on February 11, 2012

In a previous post I talked about slides as a personal brand extension, and here’s a little more on what your slides suggest about you as you speak with them.  If you’ve got a beautiful thing, you don’t need to do much to make it stand out.  You can’t ‘guild the lily’, you shouldn’t put a bling earring on a baby, and a dog is never improved by a leather coat. It’s already got one, hasn’t it?  Yes, these are matters of taste, and taste is a very personal thing, but there are some things you should just know.

For PowerPoint, all you need to know is that a beautiful slide is seldom improved by special effects. Bullet points screeching across the screen or key messages exploding before you like fireworks are all very well when you’re still at school and having to prove to your teacher that you really do know what all the different buttons in PowerPoint actually do; but when you grow up and want to be taken seriously in the real world,  think carefully.

Just because you CAN do something doesn’t mean you HAVE to do it.  They really can be quite annoying and distracting but of course used wisely can be a good thing and even enhance your presentation.

My advice would be to limit them to just three options: APPEAR, FADE or WIPE (which is particularly effective when revealing arrows and bar charts). And don’t use them on every slide.  It’s too predictable and your audience will soon become bored, distracted (or worse).

Quick Office HD Pro for Android and iPad

Posted on by Rick E

Quick Office HD Pro is an iPhone and iPad application that recently was also available in the Android Market. With iPad Presentation Application like Quick Office you can get full control of creating and editing PowerPoint presentations. Also you can format presentations and share documents online including spreadsheets, text documents and presentations.

 

With this application it is also possible to connect to other services and share presentations online for example using DropBox and Mobile Me. There is also possible to use Huddle or SugarSync, EverNote, Catch and Google Docs to share the presentations online.

Latest version also added a feature to share the presentations in social networks like Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook and Slideshare. You can download a free version in the market but there is a full paid version with lot of other functionalities.

 

Scribd and Docstoc integration is also supported and you can also share with Microsoft Office files. If you ware looking for iPad applications to run your presentations this Quick Office application is an essential tool that you can download for productivity. This is a good alternative to PowerPoint in your smartphone device or tablet.

Using PowerPoint and a photocopier to make a Microfluidics lab

Posted on by Rick E

In Wired we read about a Microfuidics lab that was made using a photocopier and PowerPoint.

Forget £300 “lab-on-a-chip” devices. A high school physics teacher in Cambridge, Massachusetts has made a handy, DIY microfluidic chip with Microsoft PowerPoint, a photocopier and a slide of transparency film.

Microfluidic chips are used to study liquids at the microliter and nanoliter range, to take advantage of the unique fluid behaviors that take place at such tiny scales. The technology has had a huge impact on fields such as physics, chemistry, engineering and biotechnology.

But the devices are expensive, and created through a complicated production method involving clean rooms, photolithography and etching.

Joe Childs, a physics teacher at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School and collaborator with Harvard University’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), has come up with a quick and inexpensive way to make reusable lab-on-a-chip devices, which are perfect for schools.

In defense of PowerPoint

Posted on by Rick E

I am about to do something rash, which is to disagree with Lucy Kellaway. Last week, the fearless observer of business follies went too far: she called for PowerPoint to be banned.

The prosecution’s argument is simple: many PowerPoint presentations are very bad. This is true but it hardly makes the case for a ban. Serviceable tools can produce awful results in the wrong hands, as anyone who has seen me put up shelves can attest. Banning the screwdriver is not the answer.

So it is with PowerPoint. It’s an unromantic, practical piece of kit. It is often used poorly. It is not the most elegant tool, but botched jobs must be blamed on the workman. Many of the bad presentations people deliver with the help of PowerPoint would have been bad presentations in any case. Would it have been better to hear the impromptu ramblings of a nervous speaker in total cognitive meltdown? Or to watch a piece of professionally produced but irrelevant film, in the dark? Many readers will remember corporate life before PowerPoint. It was no lost Eden.

PowerPoint is not the world’s most wonderful piece of software. The built-in templates have long been ugly, the clip-art tacky and the animations risible. As if determined to deliver on the name, it inserts bullet points into text with little provocation. It is harder than it should be simply to make all the letters line up. (I am still using PowerPoint 2003. By all means dismiss this column as the ranting of a corporate shill.)

Yet for all its flaws, PowerPoint performs two useful tasks well enough. It quickly allows one to compose speaking notes and to create slides showing images and graphs. The trouble starts when people confuse the two jobs.

There is nothing wrong with jotting down speaking notes as a memory aid. PowerPoint is as good a way of doing this as any, especially if you have handwriting like mine. For the vast majority of speakers, such speaking notes are preferable to the alternatives, including memorising, ad-libbing on the spot or writing the whole speech out and reading it in a wooden monotone.

The problem is that for some baffling reason, many speakers decide to project their speaking notes on to a wall rather than printing them out, postcard size, and sticking them on to 3×5 inch cards. I often sketch out my speeches with the help of PowerPoint. I just prefer to keep the slides to myself.

The second use of PowerPoint is to project visual aids on to a screen. This it does perfectly well – and the clichéd clip-art of yesteryear is now almost extinct. These days people “borrow” cartoons from Dilbert, or grab photos from the web. The effect is often pleasing enough.

It would be better if people learnt a bit about fonts, and better still if they learnt that by pressing “B” they could temporarily blank the screen. But one cannot have everything.

Lucy approvingly mentions a famous condemnation of PowerPoint by the brilliant information designer Edward Tufte. Professor Tufte attacks PowerPoint partly for its “relentless sequentiality, one damn slide after another” and partly for the asymmetric relationship between speaker and “followers”.

This is odd because Tufte does not acknowledge that he is really assaulting the idea of public speaking itself. What could be more relentlessly sequential than a speech? One damn word in front of another. If you hate the very idea of a speech, fine. But say so.

It would take little to improve greatly the quality of most people’s PowerPoint presentations – far less than it would take to improve the quality of corporate Newspeak. So why call for a ban?

The true problem is far more troubling. It is that in a corporate environment, we are asked to read prose by people who cannot write and watch performances given by people with neither the talent nor the training to perform. For some reason these amateurs are better paid than most writers and performers. There is something depressing about all this, but the blame cannot be pinned on PowerPoint.

I cannot finish without confronting the greatest sin in my version of PowerPoint: the “AutoContent” function, which sketches out a speech if you cannot do it yourself. AutoContent, The New Yorker once reported, was named as a joke, in “outright mockery of its target customers”. The very idea of the function is pernicious indeed but the real horror is that it was created to satisfy a demand.

How To Insert Youtube Videos In PowerPoint

Posted on by Rick E

You have just downloaded a video from YouTube and want to do a project. Want to insert YouTube videos in PowerPoint? Follow the guide to add a video to PowerPoint.

Notice: Not all videos can be imported to PowerPoint. Downloaded videos are in .FLV format but PowerPoint supports MP4, WMV. In order to compatible video with PowerPoint, you need convert video to the right format. Get the converter at the bottom of the article.

After all the preparing work is done, you can embed YouTube videos to PowerPoint right now!

For PowerPoint 2003:

Drop-down Insert menu and point to Movies and Sounds>Movie from File. It will show you a box to select video files from your hard disk.

Then PowerPoint prompted you a message asking how you want the movie to start in the slide show. Choose “Automatically”.

To edit the videos in PowerPoint, you can right click the Movies Object shortcut. Change setting on the menu and click OK to save.

For PowerPoint 2007:

Adding YoutTube videos in PowerPoint 2007 is easier than in 2003.

At Insert menu, choose Movie>Movie from File. You are enables to insert a video into the presentation.

For both versions, you can preview videos you added to PowerPoint by clicking Slide Show>View Show.

For other tools, Windows Movie Maker is another Microsoft-published program where you can edit your videos easily. With this tool, you can customize videos and cut black bars making your videos friendly for PowerPoint.

Learning to Love PowerPoint

Posted on by Rick E

We interrupt this magazine for a PowerPoint presentation:
• For artist and musician David Byrne, the medium is the message.
• Infographic guru Edward Tufte wants to kill the messenger.

A while ago, I decided to base the book-tour readings from my pseudoreligious tract The New Sins on sales presentations. I was going for a fair dose of irony and satire, and what could be better than using PowerPoint and a projector, the same tools that every sales and marketing person relies on?

Having never used the program before, I found it limiting, inflexible, and biased, like most software. On top of that, PowerPoint makes hilariously bad-looking visuals. But that’s a small price to pay for ease and utility. We live in a world where convenience beats quality every time. It was, for my purposes, perfect.

I began to see PowerPoint as a metaprogram, one that organizes and presents stuff created in other applications. Initially, I made presentations about presentations; they were almost completely without content. The content, I learned, was in the medium itself. I discovered that I could attach my photographs, short videos, scanned images, and music. What’s more, the application can be made to run by itself -no one even needs to be at the podium. How fantastic!

Although I began by making fun of the medium, I soon realized I could actually create things that were beautiful. I could bend the program to my own whim and use it as an artistic agent. The pieces became like short films: Some were sweet, some were scary, and some were mysterioso. I discovered that even without text, I could make works that were “about” something, something beyond themselves, and that they could even have emotional resonance. What had I stumbled upon? Surely some techie or computer artist was already using this dumb program as an artistic medium. I couldn’t really have this territory all to myself -or could I?

David Byrne

“In thinking about graphic design, industrial design, and what might really be the cutting-edge of design, I realized it would have to be genetic engineering. Dolly (God rest her soul) represents the latest in design, but it is, in her case, design we cannot see. Dolly looks like any other sheep, which is precisely the point. The dogma of some graphic designers is that their work be invisible. This perfection has been achieved with Dolly.”

David Byrne

“I began this project making fun of the iconography of PowerPoint, which wasn’t hard to do, but soon realized that the pieces were taking on lives of their own. This whirlwind of arrows, pointing everywhere and nowhere -each one color-coded to represent God knows what aspects of growth, market share, or regional trends -ends up capturing the excitement and pleasant confusion of the marketplace, the everyday street, personal relationships, and the simultaneity of multitasking. Does it really do all that? If you imagine you are inside there it does.”

David Byrne

“This is Dan Rather’s profile. Expanded to the nth degree. Taken to infinity. Overlayed on the back of Patrick Stewart’s head. It’s recombinant phrenology. The elements of phrenology recombined in ways that follow the rules of irrational logic, a rigorous methodology that follows nonrational rules. It is a structure for following your intuition and your obsessions. It is the hyperfocused scribblings of the mad and the gifted. The order and structure give it the appearance of rationality and scientific rigor. This appearance is easy to emulate.

Phrenology sought to reveal criminal propensities -and those of potential leaders and geniuses -in the shapes and bumps of the head and face. Nowadays we see it as a scientific justification for racist and cultural biases. A dangerous pseudoscience. But if phrenology was the genetic profiling of a previous era, what will supplant genetic profiling when that too appears as ridiculous as phrenology does to us now? Nonrational logic will not go away.”

David Byrne’s Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information, a book and DVD in which these images appear, will be published in September by Steidl and Pace/MacGill Gallery. His new album, Lead Us Not Into Temptation (Music From the Film Young Adam), also comes out this month

Video: The Way Forward For Marketing

Posted on by Rick E

Video marketing is a new type of internet marketing which involves creating 2-5 minute short videos about a particular topic. So for example, for a car dealer website company, they would only design their videos around automotive video marketing. Once the videos are completed, they are uploaded to different websites such as YouTube for distribution and exposure to the world.

The best way to make videos is to convert articles. This is usually done by creating a powerpoint presentation of the original article which transforms the article text to an animated slideshow. Once the powerpoint presentation is built, relevant pictures are then added to the slideshow and then a voice is then added to the slideshow as a voice-over narration. The last thing to do in this process is to record the presentation using a screen capture software package such as Camtasia and once this has been completed, the slideshow is then converted to a video that can be uploaded to internet websites such as Youtube. By converting articles to videos, the amount of time that someone takes to read the articles is greatly reduced and, therefore, the chance of reading the whole article is increased. Article marketing is a popular type of advertising in which businesses write short articles about the business and then publish them on the internet. Writing short articles with good links within it will increase search engine optimization which means that a company with links to their website within the article will encourage search engines to rank the website further up its rankings.

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