Prezi at SXSW: It's a Rap

For a few weeks each year, Austin, Texas, is transformed into a Mecca for technology enthusiasts, musicians, filmmakers, educators, and more. That’s right, it’s the South By Southwest festival. They have a saying down there, "Keep Austin Weird,” and during SXSW, it gets especially so.

This year, we set out to try and do something completely different. We’d heard about SaulPaul, the Houston-based rapper, youth mentor, and entrepreneur. After talking with the man himself, we agreed take to collaborate with SaulPaul on his 2013 SXSW Official Recap Raps.

Each day, SaulPaul was to record a song to "rap-up" the keynote speech, immortalizing the speaker's message in rap form. Then, our lead prezi designer, Steve, would take the audio and produce a rapid-response prezi to accompany it.

Below are SaulPaul’s five 2013 Official SXSW Recap Raps… powered by Prezi.

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We are not alone

image source: http://www.tedxdanubia.com/

Prezi and TED have long been friends and partners, from TED's early investment in Prezi to our recent Ideas matter contest. It’s a union that makes a lot of sense. You only need to look as far as the two lines of language we use to define our companies to find the key common denominator.

Ideas matter.

Ideas worth spreading

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Thinking beyond the zoom

The most basic learning method of all time is imitation. As a child, we learn many things simply by copying those around us. The most obvious of these is the way we develop the ability to walk and talk. Without a doubt, imitation is one key technique we use to acquire the basics of our behavior. 

When we learn to make a great prezi, we can operate in the same way. Imitation is not stealing, it’s just the first steps towards analyzing, restructuring, and developing ideas. If you want, you can share your prezis and your ideas, allowing others to develop them further. That’s why I personally love to explore the world of prezis that live on the prezi.com/explore page.

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The Sound of 20 Million People

Photo credit: searchinstagram.com/prezi

It's not an easy thing to be the spreader of your own good news.  To "toot your own horn," as they say, is a breach of basic humility. Instead, we tend to admire most those people about whom good things are always being said, even when they are not around. We never hear it from them how great they are at their job or how well-liked they are by all who know them. It's always someone else doing the praising. 

So, it is always with a mixture of sheepishness and giddy excitement that we bring good news about Prezi to this blog. We are mindful of humility as a virtue. We would rather you heard it from others what wonders we're building and how wildly we're growing :)

So, for your convenience, here are some quotes and excerpts on what the world is saying about Prezi as we quietly celebrate our new found sound with our 20 million friends. 

"It's almost criminal how fun it is to use—and watch!" -- PC World 

"Prezi is quickly becoming the de facto alternative to a boring PowerPoint presentation" -- Business Insider

 "Prezi turns presentations from dull decks of slides into a journey-like experience" -- The Next Web

 "Prezi’s cloud-based software offers a respite from predictable PowerPoint presentations" -- Venture Beat

"It’s the kind of growth that’s been seen at breakout companies like Dropbox and Facebook‘s Instagram" -- Forbes

We are humbled and grateful! And our gratitude extends to all of you in the global Prezi community, our users, without whom none of this could have happened. We made it possible to add sound to prezis because we knew it's what you guys wanted, and now we can't wait to hear and see your ideas as you continue to share them with the expanding Prezi world.   

Prezi Ambassadors Reprezent

There aren’t many places more conducive to the creation of new ideas than a university campus. So it makes sense that our Ambassador Program has been a highly successful element of how we’ve gone about spreading word of Prezi across the world. After all, a tool designed to better present ideas should find favor in the same environments that gave birth to innovations like Facebook and Nike. We’ve just opened our application process for this year’s candidates, so we thought we’d take the opportunity to talk to two of last year’s successful ambassadors about what they got from their year representing Prezi on their college campuses.

 

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