TEDxDubai 2010 To Be The First Prezi Only TEDx event

TEDx conferences are independently organized TED events following the original philosophy of introducing interesting speakers and ideas worth spreading. Prezi is often used as an optional presentation tool at these conferences. Giorgio Ungania, organizer of TEDX Dubai have now decided to go even further. He wants to create the first TEDx where every speaker will have to utilize Prezi as a presentation tool. They will build their own TEDx Prezi style, and to boost the process, create a little academy where speakers will be trained on how to use Prezi.

On the top of that Giorgio plans to make every TEDxDubai prezi available for sharing & remixing, with our new Reuse feature, and on the TEDx Dubai website they will post the video recording of the talks together with the relevant Prezi. Becoming excited about all this, we asked Giorgio about hows and whys after the jump.

You have decided to organize the first TEDx event with only prezi presentations allowed. How do you think this will affect the event and the audience?

Prezi, the innovative presentation technology, will create an equal starting canvas for all TEDx Dubai 2010 speakers; following the true spirit of TED of Ideas Worth Spreading, the TEDx Dubai 2010 Prezis will be made available on the net together with YouTube recordings in order to create a seamless experience for online visitors. TED is a forward thinking event and Prezi is possibly the most forward thinking presentation tool yet.

You also want to set up an academy to teach speakers how to use Prezi. How will this work?

Because not everybody will be familiar with Prezi's technology, we are planning to run some workshop to train the speakers in creating their own TEDx Dubai 2010 Prezi presentation. The ease of use and intuitiveness of the UI will make the workshop very easy to conduct even remotely via Voip when the speaker is not a UAE resident. Also the possibility of collaborating on line on the same file via web browser will be a great advantage over traditional presentation applications.


How do you think sharing every TEDx prezi for reuse will affect the TED philosophy and approach of knowledge sharing?

The new " remix" feature of Prezi will allow TEDx Dubai 2010 ideas to become a starting point for many other "variations on the theme". Every TED talk is an amazingly powerful tool per se, and it inspires, affects and motivates thousands of people all around the world. TEDx Dubai speakers will be given the option to "open source" their TED Talk making their Prezis "remixable" to anybody interested to add or remove, copy or paste elements; this way some ideas coming from the TEDx Dubai chapter can become starting points for other TEDx Talks around the world.

Server maintenance this Sunday

Dear Pezi Authors,

We’ll have to unplug Prezi.com this Sunday, January 31st from 10-11am CET (08:00-9:00am UTC), due to maintenance.

During the process, our online services will be unavailable. This means:

1. You won’t be able to reach Prezi.com, the online editor,
2. You can’t login or reach your online Prezis from PreziDesktop (offline editor available for Pro users).
3. You can still edit, and export presentations with PreziDesktop in offline mode (since the software is not necessarily connected to the internet).
4. Of course you can even show your Prezis during downtime, if you have previously downloaded them to your computer.

We will try to make this as painless as possible. Our most effective weapon to achieve this goal is transparency and support.

For this reason, we welcome your comments on @prezisupport on Twitter while our data center is offline. Once the upgrade has finished, we will notify you immediately on the blog and on Twitter as well.

Prezis in Davos - Tim Berners-Lee

This year we had the chance to cooperate with the World Economic Forum's Ideas Lab, where major universities and Forum attendees present their highly engaging topics in a short, pecha kucha format. Five speakers from this year's lineup decided to use Prezi to visualize their thoughts and ideas.

Today is the second day of the event and videos have just started to drop on the website of the Lab. We are very proud to introduce the prezi of MIT professor and director of the World Wide Web Consortium first, the guy who is best known and frequently mentioned in every school and university across the globe for inventing the World Wide Web protocol. Please watch Sir Tim Berners-Lee showing his prezi yesterday in Davos!

What is a pecha kucha presentation?
Pecha pucha is a presentation format, where a presenter shows 20 images for 20 seconds apiece, for a total time of 6 minutes, 40 seconds. The name is Japanese and means chit-chat. The first "pecha kucha night" was organized in Tokyo for young designers to generate conversation and cooperation.
Prezi has a dedicated pecha kucha mode, you can try now. Just go to "show mode" press and hold the right arrow in the navigation bar and you will see an option layer sliding out. Here you can set your prezi to autoplay in every 2, 10 or 20 seconds. Pecha kucha, go!

Father of peer-to-peer networking sees infinite possibilities with Prezi Reuse

In our series of introducing inspirational prezi authors and their works, we have a very interesting person for you to meet today.  Michel Bauwens is founder of the Foundation for Peer-to-Peer Alternatives and works with a global group of researchers in the exploration of peer production, governance, and property. He has been an analyst for the United States Information Agency, and knowledge manager for British Petroleum (where he created one of the first virtual information centers) as well. Michel used Prezi for his TEDxBrussels talk this Fall and kindly answered our questions after the conference. We wanted to know his points on how to create a good prezi, and what are the most important considerations when speaking in front of an audience.

First, thanks for choosing Prezi for your talk at TEDx Brussels! What motivated you to decide to use this tool instead of your old presentation software?

Having worked for business for two decades, I'm of course very familiar with ppt, but always thought it had negative side effects, in promoting linear thinking modes and bite sized communication, but there were really no alternatives that I knew of. When I saw Prezi, I immediately thought that this would be something qualitatively different. In my vision of it, it's a universal canvas in 3 dimensions, where I could throw a synthesis of the findings of our 10,000 page wiki at p2pfoundation.net, then create various paths for various audiences. The possibilities to create all kinds of non-linear visualizations is a real added value.

How do you think Prezi and mindmaps relate?

Mindmaps are fine, but they generally do not allow for sophisticated presentations for demanding audiences, and Prezi offers that.

You have kindly offered your prezi to our community for reuse. How do you think presentation remixing and knowledge sharing can affect the way we tell our stories?

In my case, what I would love is for people in the open, p2p and commons oriented communities to use the Open Everything mindmap, which is the essential part of the presentation, and to indeed consider it as a full universe; and another layer would then be the many different paths for different audiences. I see infinite possibilities. Because it is so easy to add video, audio and all kinds of graphics and visualizations, it's ideal for narrative approaches, and for more empathic communication.

How did Prezi help you explain your topic at TEDxBrussels?

My talk went well overall, but given the short time, 18 minutes, I regret that my path contained too much material for such a short term. Choosing is difficult, but a must.

What would you suggest to new Prezi authors--what are your key considerations when building a public talk?

For me the challenge is to keep the balance between the overall view, and the detailed approach, and to create a interaction between the whole and the parts. I still think that for non-techie guys like me, making a Prezi is still a challenge, but perhaps that's because I lacked any training.

Michel's prezi took just a few hours to create: it's based on his Open Everything mind map that we have imported in .pdf format. Then we built relations and created a storyline in Prezi with frames to zoom on, and a path to walk through.

CEO of Creative Commons offers all his prezis for reuse

Joi Ito, CEO of Creative Commons (the organization that provides free copyright consistent licenses for people to share and build upon the work of others) used Prezi for his talk at TEDxDubai a few weeks ago. When we reached out for him to ask about his experiences and thoughts on Prezi's new Reuse feature, he immediately offered all his prezis for our community to reuse. Read on to learn what Joi thinks about creating a good presentation with Prezi, and feel free to reuse his prezis stored in our Library!

Thanks for choosing Prezi for your talk at TEDxDubai. What motivated you to use this tool instead of your old presentation software?

Prezi provides context, fits my style of speaking much better than slides. I think it helps the audience understand how the concepts are related.

You have kindly offered all your public prezis to our community for reuse. How do you think remixing will affect presentation culture?

This is absolutely excellent and key. All of our talks are inspired by others and using and reusing material should significantly improve the quality of all of our talk. I think it would be good to come up with a way to give attribution and set up social norms for this. You should use Creative Commons licenses too. ;-)

What would you suggest to new Prezi authors, what are your key considerations when building a public talk?

You have some great tutorials, but I think the important thing is to sketch the concepts that you want to discuss. Then, create the assets and do the screenshots. Then, create the frames and orientations for the key concepts, drop the assets in. Then work on the path and adjust the frames as necessary.