Embedding videos to a presentation can give extra value to a talk. Film is indubitably the most powerful story telling tool, choosing to present your ideas with the aid of an embedded video can add a dramatic effect to your topic. We kept this in mind when we have developed YouTube integration to Prezi. Many presentation tools can handle video files, you can upload them from your hard drive to the presentation. With Prezi, you can do this too of course. However it was a logical step for Prezi – an online presentation tool – to go beyond this approach and offer a much simpler and faster solution.

Embedding YouTube videos to prezis opens new possibilities for the presenter. You just need to create a new textbox by double clicking the canvas, then paste a YouTube video URL and press OK. That’s it. Should it be a spectacular ballroom presentation that you have created to stun your audience, or a business meeting where you need to deliver hardcore data and information, this option always comes handy.

Our recent upgrade allows you to play, pause, adjust and control the volume of embedded YouTube videos right in the editor or in show mode while you present. Prezi’s new navigation bar for YouTube videos is a feature we have just released, so check the screencast below, and try it out with your editor now!

Less menus, more options. Easier text editing, upgraded Transformation Zebra and YouTube integration: the new editor has half the menus of its predecessor, while it has more features and a welcome video as a bonus.

See the complete feature list and changes after the jump. For detailed feature introduction, see the updated Prezi Manual or watch a prezi of all the changes complete with keyboard shortcuts!

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Besides the new editor, we introduce three additional features today:

1. Educational license: long-awaited feature requested by students and educators.
2. Prezi Reuse: share a copy of your prezis with others to use as a template.
3. New learn center: multimedia lessons and a community space to share your thoughts.

See how these shiny new things work after the jump!

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New features for today are:

1. Send a prezi to a client, or colleague via email – with password protection (Pro and Enjoy customers)

2. Embedding made easy with a code generator on your new My page

3. Invite collaborators, simply by adding their email, even if they don’t have a prezi account yet.

Now let’s see how these new goodies work:

1. If you need to deliver a prezi to a client, to your boss, or to a conference, use our send tool. Send your prezi to team members at a meeting! They will receive every information to project it in seconds. Want to keep it in secret? You can password protect your show page to keep away unauthorized sights from your sensitive data.

2. We have posted about the new embed feature previously. Reaching embed generator directly from the My page, you can customize window size and select simple or free navigation mode for the project. Embedded prezis can have a very simple navigation mode, so casual surfers can easily click through them.

3. Prezi works online. This makes collaboration with others very easy. Inviting others to co-work with you, share ideas and knowledge makes your project even better. Now you can invite others who don’t have a Prezi account yet. They will receive a nicely designed email from you, with direct access to register on Prezi instantly and start working on your common project in a heartbeat.

Click here to Check these features on the new My page.

All these features are available from the redesigned My page. The structure of the page has changed as novelties were added. For a short period of time we’ll keep the old prezi.com/my/ page alongside with the new prezi.com/my2/ that includes the above mentioned updates. We do this for we want to ask you to test, compare, and comment the changes before we publish the final version.

(We will be releasing 3 groups of new functionalities in the coming days. This is part one, we will follow up with embedding and online business prezi deliveries)

Today we have officially published major new features after a very exciting development session.
These features are not just updates or new options you can choose, when creating a prezi. We have just stepped on a brand new road that offers a lot of new possibilities for everybody.

Published prezi Page

When founders Peter and Adam created Prezi, they wanted the author to stand in the spotlight live on stage, and the tool to stay in the background providing a remarkable visual aid to the speech. Prezi  – initially meant to be a presentation tool, gradually grew into an online storytelling tool, with pages like Financial Times or Techcrunch embedding it to show content – eventually becoming a new medium. To help this process, which is very exciting for us, first we bring you the published prezi page.

Published prezi page now offers:

• If you make a prezi public, this will be a new home for it. Visitors can see other public prezis by you,  a selection of popular prezis, and advanced sharing tools
• a new embed feature that lets you fully customize the size and playback mode of your work. Choose simple navigation to roll through a prezi with single clicks anywhere on the embedded window, or free navigation that gives you the possibility to separately click objects and frames as well just as you were showing your prezi with the editor. (More about embed, and a new, simpler way to create this code, will be in the upcoming blogpost)
• a new autoplay mode which allows you to just sit back, relax and watch the show
• options to share on Twitter and Facebook with a single click, and send your prezi instantly in a fine designed email
• a box to say something nice to the author, or simple pat on the back to say ‘Hey, nice job!’

The new showcase

When make a prezi public, we automatically monitor how popular it becomes by counting the number of hits it gets out there. Every week, our system introduces a new selection of the most popular public prezis and publishes them in the showcase. We also keep an eye on your work, select and pick prezis that we find most interesting every week. Clicking a prezi’s thumbnail in the new showcase now leads you to the published prezi page, so you can check other public works from the same author, leave him/her a nice message, or share that cool prezi straight away.

These developments point to the direction of a more social Prezi site, where you get even more options to manage your prezis, get inspired by other authors great works, customize and share your projects. None of these could have ever been created without your support, so thanks a lot for your comments, emails, posts and tweets about Prezi, and please keep on sharing your thoughts!

What more is coming

We will roll out a new feature, where Pro and Enjoy customers can deliver, show a prezi to their clients, bosses, in a secure, very clean, non-branded no-logo format, using password protection, option to download, technical help, etc. So you won’t need to send those huge downloaded prezis in emails any more.

And end this release cycle with an updated prezi.com/my page, to support all the above features.

It’s always very exciting to introduce new Prezi features and upgrades. This Monday we have both! You can test Prezi embed using the code generator in the previous post, and we also have a shiny new front page and blog design to show you today.

On the old frontpage we used a prezi           Now we have a video to show some action

Now we use a video to introduce Prezi on the opening page, where we have also updated the example prezis. Click through those three presentations and watch the video! We made these changes to give a clearer first impression of Prezi, and show the new features we have introduced since April.

As you can see, Prezi blog has a new dress too. In addition, we have collected our social accounts here. Check prezi related images on Flickr, become a fan on Facebook, or share this post on Twitter right away. We have placed your recent comments to the front, so you can see our replies in a blink.

Start writing a comment now, and testdrive our cool new embed code generator below!

The style switcher feature is now ready and online. Just open a prezi, or start creating a new one using your online editor or the offline version, Prezi Desktop. You will notice that the editing interface has been upgraded. Now you have all the different Prezi styles available just a click away while working. We believe that a more customizable tool means more freedom, so don’t ever think we stop right here… Oh, and a little gift for movie fans: we have installed the super cool wipe transition effect to this feature, you will notice when switching between styles. This is the one that has first been used by Japanese movie director Kurosawa, then became famous in the Star Wars episodes.

Important notice: This update will automatically download for the Desktop Editor users as well. Don’t forget to login at least once in order to fetch all styles again from our servers. Once you have successfully logged in, you’ll be able to choose styles in the editor.

Thanks for your all your comments, tweets, and emails during the past weeks you have posted for the test version. Please continue to share your thoughts!