Prezi is more than a zooming, slideless presentation tool that lets you deliver stunning visuals from the stage. Many authors use Prezi for education purposes or to create embeddable web contents. Nevertheless, there is another ever growing field of prezi use that we want to focus on today. More and more companies decide to advertise their services, or introduce their products on their websites using Prezi.

Creating such a content means even more fun with Prezi. There are companies who embed prezis on their front page like online telephony firm 3Jam, and others who create a video version to tell their stories. Oakland based software company Skytide sells online business solutions and now describes them with a prezi creencast. “We wanted to provide an interesting overview that they could watch in just a few minutes” – says Partick Hurley, VP of Marketing, who have kindly answered our questions about hows and whys.

What is the prezi is about? what story does it tell?

We wanted to create a very short, pithy video that quickly conveyed the benefits of our latest product, Skytide Insight for Flash Video Players.

Why have you decided to use Prezi on your website advertising your service?

Prospective customers often don’t want to wade through a lot of web pages or marketing materials, so we wanted to provide an interesting overview that they could watch in just a few minutes.  And since our customers are executives that work in the digital media industry, we thought it was apropos to showcase what we do in video form.

How do you think Prezi helps your possible clients understand your points and goals?

Eyes often glaze over when you begin a Powerpoint presentation.  Prezi allows us to presenting a far more arresting, attention-holding way.

Why do you think Prezi can be a good medium to embed content to your site?

For one, it is unexpected.  When you see a good Prezi for the first time, it blows you away. It’s also easy to do so that small and medium-sized businesses can do it with ease.

What were the most attractive Prezi features when you first tried it?

The ability to create a sense of movement and scale, especially through the zooming function.  It allows me to use text as a powerful graphical element.

What are your benefits using Prezi?

I like the flexibility and visual dynamism of Prezi.  I don’t feel hemmed in like I do with Powerpoint.  Prezi is more free form and allows me more control of the narrative in the story that my colleagues and I tell.

How much time did it take to create the final video?

It probably took me a dozen hours but….. that was because I was just learning how to use Prezi, was scouting for stock photos and music, reviewing the early drafts with my colleagues, et al.  I expect that my next one will take me just a few hours.

How did you make/embed it, what tools did you use?

•    First I created the prezi
•    I then used Camtasia screen recording software to capture the presentation.  I didn’t use the auto-presentation option because there were some areas of the prezi that I want to skip through quickly and others that I wanted to linger on.
•    I added stock music to Camtasia and outputted the final video as both a Quicktime file and as HTML to embed on our site.  I then provided it to my web designer to embed on the site.
•    I also uploaded it to many video sharing sites.

Matthias Lüfkens is the man behind the social media communication of the World Economic Forum. He and his colleagues have upgraded the Forum’s online presence and have made the world’s most important summit on economy more transparent than ever before. They now use Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube and Myspace among other channels, involve citizen reporters and share almost every media content instantly on the web. Introducing how the WEF uses social media tools, Matthias is a keynote speaker of many events and conferences worldwide. Telling the story of going 2.0, Matthias uses Prezi, and now explains what he thinks about creating a good one.

As social media architect at the World Economic Forum, you see world leaders talking about the hottest issues of the planet. What do you think is needed for a good speech, what skills a good speaker must have?

The best presentations are those which do not require any text. Too many
 presentations are cluttered with text that the speaker is just reading. I
 believe a picture is worth a thousand words and therefore I like to capture
 the audience’s attention with visuals only. The pictures and videos will
 capture the audience attention and help get the message accross.

What were the most attractive features of Prezi when you first tried it?

Prezi is bringing the art of presentation to a new level. Instead of going
 linear from slide to slide like a PowerPoint presentation, Prezis let you
 surf from one subject to the other and allows you to deep-dive into
s pecific issues without losing the full picture.

How do you think Prezi shapes the way people tell their stories?

Prezi helps visualize the stream of consciousness of a speaker. I hope
 Prezi will soon allow multiple paths, so that the speaker can go different
 ways in the presentation depending on the reactions of the audience.

Was it easy or hard to switch to Prezi? What are the benefits you see?

It was amazing to see how easily you can prepare a slideshow using Prezi’s 
online tool. It takes some time to get used to it, but once you have 
mastered the control buttons, it is fairly easy and straightforward.

In the Prezi embedded to this interview you show the process of upgrading the Forum’s communication extending it to the social media. What was the main message you wanted to deliver?

My aim was to show the richness of social networks out there and then to
 focus on the five key social media sites. The presentation aims to show how 
the Forum has been using the key social media sites.

How do you think Prezi helps the audience understand your points?

Judging from the reactions I received after the presentation it was a
 smashing success.

The prezi above has been created by Jamie Inman, strategic planner at Wired UK’s creative agency – HMDG. Wired commissioned the company to create their Intelligence Briefing using Prezi, about ten trends worth discussing. Being regular readers of Wired it is no surprise that the result is full of interesting data, includes a massive load of information. To continue our series of Q&A about how to create a good presentation, we have asked Jamie to explain his experience with Prezi this time.

How do you see the future of story telling?

People are consuming media in so many different ways. Without a strong narrative, your message will get lost, whether you are a brand trying to reach a customer or  an individual trying to connect with an audience. But there are also all sorts of new ways to tell a story, of which Prezi is one.

What were the most attractive features of Prezi when you first tried it?

It’s both simple and theatrical at the same time. There’s a wow factor that really helps win your audience’s attention. At HMDG, we’re using it in a lot of our new business meetings and it makes a real difference when your potential clients have sat through a day of Powerpoint. Actually, I was just a bit anxious to be able to use Prezi a few times before too many people found out about it.

Was it easy or hard to switch?

Hard, hard, hard. It doesn’t take long to learn how to use Prezi itself. But I think I’m still getting my head round how to make it work best as a format. There’s a dependency between all the elements of the presentation that you don’t have when you’re working with charts.  So you do have to work at it to make sure your thinking is clear.

Your prezi is really well constructed looking at the big picture and in the smallest details as well. What was the main message you wanted to visualize with it?

I was scratching my head for a bigger theme until I realised this particular presentation was a list when it came down to it. So I wanted a visual that intrigued the audience from a distance and acted as a bridge to these robust individual bits of content.

What was your method of building relations and arguments?

I think you need to answer two questions to make a good prezi. Firstly, what does it look like from a distance? If you can start with that image it helps a lot. It gives you a structure.  Secondly, you need to have work out how the ‘pods’ – the individual sections of the presentation – work. I was creating this for a live presentation, so each one had to be really hit and run – a big thought, a key example, a single powerful statistic. I’ve found Q&As like this quite useful. I read the blogpost on Loqloq and saw how something messy like sketches can work really well when you mix it with the slickness of a Prezi. That made me think handwritten headlines might look ok.

Having said all that, there’s something to be said for just getting your content up on the screen and messing about with it. I try not to worry about adding the paths until I’m nearing the end.

How much time did it take to finish the project?

Maybe a day or two for the actual Prezi. But this particular project took place over several months.

How do you think Prezi helps the audience understand your points?

It’s much less familiar, so I think they concentrate more. And it’s inherently playful, which is useful if you want to reach people.

We couldn’t be happier: the first talk visualized with Prezi at TEDGlobal conference back in July just appeared on TED.com. As we have posted about this before, New America Foundation researcher and geopolitics expert Parag Khanna spoke at the annual conference in Oxford, UK and he used Prezi to visualize his very interesting topic about countries reshaping constantly. TED also invested in Prezi since.

Please note that the Prezi you can see in the video above has been created by professional designers and include pre-made flash animations. Adding them to a Prezi is not a feature of our software now.

Yesterday, Parag took time to kindly join a short Q&A session about his experiences using Prezi back in Oxford.

Prezi: Thanks for choosing Prezi for your talk at TEDGlobal! What were your considerations when you have decided to switch?

Parag Khanna: Two of the flaws in cartographic depictions is that people toggle between maps which almost gives the impression that different regions aren’t connected, but I wanted to be able to flow between them so that the world appears an organic whole. Another is that border shifts are often depicted in sudden, jerky shifts, whereas in reality the “facts on the ground” can change and mutate slowly. Prezi allows to do both these things better.

For you, what is the main difference between Prezi and other presentation tools?

Prezi is very intuitive to use. It seems to allow one to implement one’s thoughts rather than having to adapt to clunky software.

How did Prezi help you explaining your topic?

I wanted to show the slow, morphing of borders and new vectors of influence like finance and demographics and infrastructure. Prezi allowed me to overlay this onto existing political borders.

How did it feel to speak with Prezi as a visual aid in the background?

It was very easy – and in fact having Prezi there was a really great substitute for having a prepared text since it visualized for me and the audience exactly what I wanted to say!

How do you think Prezi affects the audience’s understanding?

Prezi really helped people understand the range of influences at play in affecting borders, which are such a traditional and basic issue that it’s almost forgotten today.

There was quite a buzz on Twitter about a prezi a few weeks ago, that was created by Brian Shire, and presented in Tokyo at this year’s annual PHP Conference. Shire, who works as an engineer at Facebook in California, says he really likes to create relations and deep analysis in Prezi. In his approach Prezi is a great tool if you want to show a massive amount of data and show an eye popping presentation in one.

Continuing our interview series, we present a short Q&A below with Brian, who kindly took time to answer our questions and explain his professional view on how to create a good prezi.

Brian, first a little bit about you: what is your job at Facebook, and how have you decided to use Prezi for your international speeches?

I started at Facebook writing front-end products such as Notes and Discussion Boards, but for the last 3-4 years I’ve focused on performance in PHP Internals and APC (an opcode cache for PHP) specifically.  The next logical step was to start giving talks at conferences about APC, which I was initially doing in Keynote.  Around the same time I was able to attend a lecture by Edward R. Tufte, his description of modern presentations as an “Endless parade of slides” was very applicable and when I spent a year or two searching for alternatives that could bring more rich interactive displays especially for technical material.  But this meant writing up a presentation in something like Flash or Java, which wasn’t really appealing or realistic.  When I came across Prezi I knew this was a much improved format for what I needed.  Scalable data presented in an interactive way yet still easy to create and manipulate for the presenter.  I re-wrote my existing presentation for APC in prezi, and never thought of going back after.

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When it comes to creating a presentation, we often look out for good examples hoping to get inspired. Browsing the Prezi showcase or checking the result of other people’s work on Twitter might be a good start.

However, we couldn’t have shown you a better example then a prezi which has been created by a professional media expert and worldwide speaker. We are very proud to have Jeff Jarvis‘ recent prezi here. Jeff, a New York University professor and columnist for the Guardian gave a talk at the Aspen Institute’s Forum on Communication and Society about New Business Models for News Project a few days ago.

He has decided to use Prezi to visualize his thoughts and he told us later, he really liked working with the tool. His work is a perfect example of using Prezi to create relations, organize thoughts, show connections among elements and visualize arguments in a given topic.

Jeff, thanks for choosing Prezi!

We receive many comments and tweets every week with super creative prezis attached. Usually we forward them around the office and advertise online, sharing inspiration with others. Now we have decided to open a new channel on the Prezi blog for the most spectacular prezis created by our users. We plan to make short Q and A-s with them enlightening how they made those eye catching visuals and what method they followed to tell their stories.

This is all about sharing knowledge and skills, so come, join the conversation! Share your best prezis and explain how you have made them!

So for now here is the story of Lokloq, a white label mobile recruitment application from Amsterdam. Lokloq team has created and uploaded a very nice prezi regarding their business. The story has been built up using awsome custom graphics and it also uses Prezi’s zooming technology perfectly to create a catching visual about finding a new job on the go. We have asked founder Gordon Lokenberg and designer Esther Gons about how they built their prezi. Continue reading the interview!
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