Category: Meetings

Presentation Design Agency – Used to Best effect…

Annie

Powerpoint presentations have long been a double-edged sword. Competent sales presentations using decent powerpoint design can be a real asset to a company. A low-quality presentation, put together by someone who doesn’t know what they are doing, can be a liability.

One of the difficulties with Powerpoint, as well as its advantage, is that it is so easy to use. Without any background, someone with basic computer literacy can throw together a slideshow without too much trouble. It’s extremely powerful, allowing you to embed all kinds of different graphics, movies, audio and other effects. So much is built in that a speaker planning to make a good impression can really go to town, incorporating as many as possible of its bells and whistles.

This, however, is often a hopeless mistake. Powerpoint design is a fairly tricky art. Like any audio-visual medium, doing it well is not as easy as it looks. Just because you can put together a poster with desktop publishing software, or a home movie with a video camera, doesn’t mean that the product will convince the audience.

Worse, Powerpoint is so popular in the business world that there is often the expectation that it will be used – both on the part of the audience and the speaker. That means that presentations can be thrown together just to fulfil that expectation. Whilst well-designed Powerpoint presentations can add a whole other dimension to a speech, giving complementary information and appealing to listeners for whom the spoken word isn’t a natural medium, a bad presentation will put people off. Put another way, not having a Powerpoint presentation is better than having a bad one. This can hamstring otherwise good speakers, because they find that the slideshow actually detracts from what they are saying. This is never more the case when it simply follows the material verbatim – a mistake that is all too common.

The purpose of sales presentations is to win a deal. Good Powerpoint design can help you with this; bad powerpoint design can end up losing you the bid. If you are in any doubt, compare a few successful presentations – yours or other companies’ – with presentations that haven’t gone so well. What has been the difference? Where Powerpoint adds to clear and effective communication, it is an asset. Where is makes things more complicated and distracting, it’s best left out. The trick is understanding how to do it properly, every time.

Please visit http://www.eyefulpresentations.co.uk/

Audio Visual Conferencing: From Simple Beginnings to a Spectacular Future

John

Video conferencing technology has come a very long way since the development of digital telephony transmission networks, which occurred in the 1980s. Back then, the first commercial telepresence video conferencing systems started to arrive on the market. But the audio visual conferencing that it was designed for was hard on transmission networks, and the compression of large volumes of data was problematic. As a result of this, the technology was costly, and this price transferred onto clients and customers.

The 1990s, however, saw a surge in development regarding the technology involved in video conferencing. For the first time the data could be compressed using Internet Protocol, which meant that audio visual communication was possible on desktop computers. Simultaneously the technology involved in the compression of data became ever more advanced. Step by step, conferencing solutions continued to evolve as an industry, and the ready availability of the required technology, coupled with a rise in international trade and a demand for fast communication, meant that these solutions became ever more affordable and, as such, ubiquitous in businesses.

Now we have entered the second decade of the twenty-first century, and technology is more sophisticated than ever. These are really invigorating times for global communication, and boundaries continue to be probed. But the best part is that this technology is available to your company for an affordable fee. Its use is not limited to the highest profile platforms such as the news media and awards ceremonies (in the form of satellite links, for example) but has spread to the wider public through the availability of personal internet access in the form of web chatting and, more recently the Skype phenomenon.

While in the past, we have marvelled at the idea of being in ever more realistic ‘virtual’ contact with people across the globe, this has only been an idea, and the reality has not done it justice. You only need to look at 1990s television adverts for internet providers to understand this; they make it seem like you could step into someone else’s world for a while before coming back to your own, when really the product they are advertising is video added to a phone call. In this era of audio video conferencing we have edged the reality closer to the idea. audio visual conferencing today is considerably more than just video added to a phone call. Telepresence video conferencing makes the whole experience as near to real as it is possible to get.

Please visit http://www.edgevision.co.uk/ for further information about this topic.

http://www.edgevision.co.uk/

4c8600a156ae3