"Best Business Model in the World"

"It's a new service called Prezi. And it's insanely great — the minute I saw it I had to have it, no questions asked. So, for the first time in half a decade, I found myself doing the unthinkable: paying for software" In the last few weeks we had many positive references on international news sites blogs and other media, but Umair Haque's post on Harvard Business Publishing blog is one of the best reviews we ever had.

Umair - the director of Havas Media Lab and founder of Bubblegeneration, an agenda-setting advisory boutique for blue chip companies and media industries believes that the new and most effective business model is simply to create "insanely great" stuff. Everybody's searching desperately for business model innovation - he adds, but "the 90s and 00s have been full of companies churning out the same old lame, toxic junk and trying to sell it in new ways — instead of detoxifying it."

He believes "stuff that's insanely great does what Prezi does — amazes, enriches, and inspires. That kind of stuff doesn't need a hard sell, a new market, or a convoluted product range. It just needs to be."

Check out Umair's presentation on Vimeo!

Umair Haque at BRITE '09 conference from BRITE Conference on Vimeo.

We are very proud of this review and hope that we can continue developing such a product.

Prezi is working fine again!

After a day of misery, sadness, nightmare here at our lab, Prezi is back to normal.

1 - we learned a lot, and are already working on ways not to get here ever again

2 - we will compensate you for this, updates about this will come in a notice at Prezi.com/my and here as well

Please, dear all, give us some more trust and keep zooming.

CEO's comments

Some people have contacted us asking about the name of our hosting company, but we are not in the naming and shaming business. Europe is also not as litigation oriented as other parts of the world. So the only thing we can to do is to pledge a forceful capacity and redundancy increase. This will happen in the matter of days.

Btw, if you have a quality hosting service that you'd like to offer, please contact us.

Our servers are offline until 11 (+1?) pm U.T.C due to Data center failure

Summary: what happened, when we expect to solve it?

Now that we can actually see a deadline when this nightmare is going to end (hopefully by 11 12 pm UTC our servers will be running again), we could stop worrying for a second and actually started to think what is coming next. We are completely aware of the fact, that what has happened today is unacceptable. This isn't something you can expect from a web service provider. We know that it is our responsibility to make sure that our service is up and running all the time, so we can only hope that you believe us when we say this was totally out of our hands.

What we'll do to make sure this won't happen again?

The biggest lesson we had to learn today is that we must choose a global provider. Someone who we can rely on  just as you can rely on our service. We are not a big company yet but the tool we have developed has visibly outgrown the environment we used for distribution. Soon we'll set up a public uptime policy, and will give free licence augmentation for our users after the downtime hours in compensation. We hope we can leave this terrible day behind us soon and can focus on further developments of Prezi. Thank you for understanding and sorry again for the inconvenience.

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UPDATE: we have just been informed by our provider that the servers will be up and running before 11 pm U.T.C today.

UPDATE: now at 10.36 U.T.C. we don't believe this

Hours ago of our servers went down due to a failure at our datacenter. We also know it's unendurable.

Let us explain this very embarassing data center downtime we have to face for... hours now. As the first pieces of information arrived from the provider, we believed this will be a minor, yet very inconvenient issue, so we tried to keep you informed as we were, via Twitter, email, and this blog. For hours we didn't have any kind of information, so we understand that you have to see how confusing this issue turned out to be.

Our office is in Budapest, we are sitting here around a huge table trying at least to communicate with our users about the issue. Our german provider company has its servers in France, our system administrators could only reach them via a livechat window on their website. The guy who replied us hours ago is in London on holiday. He is the only one who can reach the providers office, where people are sitting around other tables calling the men who are actually working in the server rooms.

We learned that our case is labelled high priority now, but as you may now see we don't recieve any more info on this than any of you already have. Of course we have learned a lot from this case, so please be patient for a little more time. We post every piece of info we know on Prezi's Twitter page and here right away.

Prezi Goes to the US!

We are happy to announce that Prezi has entered into an agreement with San Francisco based BootstrapLabs, to help us establish a US presence. This means that we now have a partner in Silicon Valley who is dedicated to help us to enter the US market.

From now on, you can find us in the Valley from time to time. Founder of BootstrapLabs Nicolai Wadstrom is going to be our eyes and ears there in our absence. Nicolai helps us to reach Silicon Valley business partners, and find partnership opportunities. Contact him on his blog and his Twitter page!

We believe we will create an impact on the worlds biggest market for presentation tools. Please keep on sharing your ideas and thoughts about our products!

Export a Prezi From the Desktop Software

Many of you have asked whether exporting from the desktop software would be available soon. Well, we have just finished working on it so now you can export your presentation even without internet connection. As you can see on the screenshot above, you just have to click the export button on the upper right corner of your stickie to get a .zip package with all the necessery files to open and play a Prezi whenever you want.

Previously, this feature was only available using Prezi's online editor. We hope that exporting from the desktop editor makes it easier to work with bigger files since you don't have to upload first, then download the .zip package anymore. Furthermore, this feature allows our users to create a presentation, store on your hard drives or export it to any external drives totally independent from internet connection.

Please share some of your ideas on this! Do you prefer using the online, or the desktop editor or both? What are your experiences?