Here’s an excellent talk by the Computer History Museum in California, USA. The talk titled ‘How Indian MIT and IIT Graduates Have Shaped Computer History’ pretty much says it all. The entire video is attached below.
Hope you like it.
It’s sad but, most people still don’t seem to get PowerPoint. Sure, they know how to use it but, they don’t know how to use it right. What they fail to understand is that slides are no more than assistants to your actual presentation. Most people still throw at least 5-8 points of information on every slide. In a world where people suffer to maintain concentration beyond a couple of minutes, it’s up to the presenter to captivate the audience. Here are some tricks that I use to keep people involved in my presentations and also participate actively on the topic.
Research Content Prior To Preparing The Deck
It’s the first thing I do. I completely research the topic I wish to present. It seems quite trivial at first but surprisingly, most people don’t do it. I list down the important points that need to be dealt with in a mind map if it’s pretty long. Otherwise, I just make a note in bullet format. These points are usually what I would use as slide headers. Not the content itself. It’s essential to completely research the topic so you’d be able to answer any questions your audience throw at you. Done? Move on to the next step.
Keep A Working Model Ready (Used where required)
Steve Jobs Demos A Product On Stage
If you’re demonstrating a physical or an online product, it’s recommended that you at least have a basic model to show people. Slides and screenshots are great but, nothing works better than showing people a working model. You’ll use this model after your introductory slides. If you’re simply going to talk about a concept, you won’t need this. Skip right to the next step.
Fire Up PowerPoint (Or Keynote, Impress etc.)
This is where most people begin to mess things up. Sure, themes and animations are great but, hold your temptations. Most people don’t care about this stuff. It’s best to avoid any major theming and completely avoid animations. People are interested in the content. What’s most essential to remember is that these slides will serve as a tool for you to speak about the real content. Do not put up the real content (the stuff you will talk about) on the slides. If you do this, you might as well print out a Word document and let your audience read it! People want to hear you.
Put up the headers collected in the first step on each slide accompanied with an image representing the header (feel free to add a little bit of humor) and use those slides as you talk about the actual information. Your audience will recognize your involvement and enthusiasm in the topic. It instantly sends out a message that you’ve clearly done your research.
Try To Involve The Audience
Wherever possible, try to call a member of the audience to volunteer on some activity related to your presentation. If you’re going to demo a new kind of online chat system, try and call a volunteer to be the ‘other guy’. A sidekick. If the volunteer’s face lights up upon using the product, bravo! You’ve got a winner. Ask him / her to speak about it instantly. Be careful though, limit their involvement to what you think is right and make sure your product works.
Actively Engage Your Audience
Another method is to ask the audience questions. Stuff like ‘What do you think this is?’ or ‘Can you guess how much [item] was used to make [product]?’ work really well. If they get it right, you could probably even reward them with something. It’s not compulsory but, everyone loves free stuff.
Add Personal Experiences
People love to hear stories. Audiences feel more connected to your presentation if they see that you’ve personally experienced something with regard to the topic or you’ve benefitted from it. Include statistics to prove it. It will serve as social proof so, use it carefully. You don’t want to oversell. How many times have you heard Steve Jobs say “I’ve personally been using this and it totally blows me away”? It works.
Relate Content To Stuff That’s More Understandable
Many people find it difficult to relate to the topic of your presentation. To make it easy for them to understand, try and compare it with something that common people might get. Instead of saying “[product] is 10 millimeters thin”, you could say “we can fit 4 [your product] in one [competing product]”. Don’t just stop there though. Reveal the actual thickness (or thinness) after you say this.
Conclude And Direct To More Information
Wrap up your talk with recaps of your entire presentation and then don’t forget to direct people to places where they can contact you or find more information.
These are some tricks that I use. What techniques do you use? I’d love to hear some more strategies from my readers. Don’t forget to share them in the comments section.
If you spend a fair amount of time on the internet reading about technology news, you’ve most likely come across this term a lot. It’s receiving the kind of attention that social networking received (and still is receiving) four years ago. The kind that excites all large corporations (Google, Microsoft etc.) to pour money into it and roll out their own offering just so they don’t miss a spot in the hot new market.
What is Cloud Computing? Why is it big? Why should your small or mid-sized company consider it? What can it do for you? In this article, I’ll give you the low down on this hot new technology and direct you to places for more information.
What is Cloud Computing?
Let’s take a ‘For Dummies’ approach to understanding this. In the old IT model, companies regardless of their size allocated large IT budgets so they could buy hardware (servers, networking equipment, fat internet pipes, hire IT dudes to manage all the hardware and rent space to hold all this infrastructure in place) and also buy software (with licenses so expensive that it would even make a Sequoia Capital backed startup cry) to run on that spankin’ new hardware. To add to these hassles were the recurring costs incurred in the form of electricity to cool and run the hardware, maintenance, upgrades and salaries for IT administrators. As a startup or small business with little money to play with on the stuff that actually matters, these tasks and costs are quite difficult to deal with. Enter cloud computing.
With Cloud Computing, the hardware is offered to you as a service. This is known as Infrastructure as a Service (or IaaS). What does this mean? In essence, you wouldn’t have to buy a single server. All servers are located in highly advanced datacenters run by Cloud Service Providers such as Google (Visit Google App Engine) and Microsoft (Visit Windows Azure). The Cloud Service Provider buys the hardware, networks it, maintains it and keeps it running. You can build web applications using the specified APIs to run on top of this hardware and choose how much IT resources you’ll need to run it. The advantages of using a cloud computing platform to run your web application are numerous. Here are some that will put a smile on your face.
Advantages of Cloud Computing
So, now you know what cloud computing is. But, what other benefits do you get?
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Cost: One of the most essential factors considered by small companies. Since you don’t buy or manage any of the hardware, you can put money into actually developing your product.
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Metered Usage: You pay for what you use. Unlike the traditional model that required you to purchase servers when usage increases and keep them idle during lower usage periods, with cloud computing, you’re paying for what you use exactly when you use it.
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Scalability: If you receive an unexpected surge in traffic to your web application, you don’t have to worry about installing new servers. The cloud infrastructure automatically allocates resources to you when you need it and shuts it down when you don’t. This way, your users never know that millions of others are using the application.
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Reliability & Maintenance: Companies like Google and Microsoft spend heavily on their data centers. They meticulously check their infrastructure and keep it in good shape. After all, they do run services that are used by hundreds of millions of users. So, let’s just say they know a little something when it comes to dealing with complex data centers. You run your applications in such data centers and as a result, your application never goes down.
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Security: All cloud computing providers take extreme security measures to ensure that their infrastructure is locked. A lot of innovation is in place to also allow a kind of hybrid solution that lets you to store sensitive data in your own servers and allocate common computing tasks to cloud computing providers.
All of these advantages are difficult to say no to. With the infrastructure being handled by someone else, your company can focus on building innovative applications. The only hardware you’ll need are the computers / work stations used to build applications.
Where To Find More Information
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Janakiram on Cloud Computing: My buddy Jani writes an authoritative blog on cloud computing. He’s a cloud computing strategist at Microsoft India and speaks at several cloud computing events.
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InfoWorld on What Cloud Computing Really Means
As always, I would love to answer any doubts you have. Comment and ask me your doubts or tell me your opinion.
Update: This article has been republished at Pluggd.in, India’s most popular business and entrepreneurship blog.
We’ve all been in one or more situations where friends have recommended products or services that we should absolutely try and buy because it just worked for them. We’ve also watched boat loads of infomercials that try and sell you everything from slimming belts to construction tools.
What’s important to note is that these infomercials aren’t very different from traditional 30 second advertisements. However, they do run a lot longer (typically 30 minutes to an hour) and they include dozens of user reviews that convince you to pick up the phone and dial in to buy the product no matter how ridiculous the offering is. How do they do this? What makes you pick up the phone and share your credit card details? In this article, I’ll tell you why social proof is important and if done right, how it can influence your investors and clients to work with you.
Social Proof
To understand social proof, we have to understand the fundamentals of human behavior and consumer attitude. The concepts of influence, persuasion and authority are very important. At the very crux of it all, we humans form our opinions and decisions based on our own experiments and also on what others think of a certain issue. I’ll shamelessly admit that I’ve purchased products solely based on user reviews.
Knowingly or unknowingly, we are all victims of influence. There are situations when we agree with someone but, keep our real opinions private. There are situations where we make decisions based on the opinion of someone who’s liked and respected. Then there are situations where we genuinely agree to another person’s opinion both publicly and privately.
How many times have you watched a famous celebrity endorse a watch, a car or even a house and thought “Gee, I think I should buy that”? In most cases, the celebrity endorsing the product has little or no connection to it. Yet, they sell it and we buy it. Why do we do this? We assume that the celebrity (a famous person with influence and authority) possesses greater knowledge of the product or that if they’re using the product, it’s got to be good.
Another factor that greatly influences people’s decision is their need to be part of the gang and feel socially accepted. Tell an investor that another reputed investor is seriously considering putting money into your firm (you’ve got to also be able to prove that, obviously) and you’ll notice that his / her opinion is also positive and that they will most likely invest in you. The same applies with consumers too.
Social Proof On The Web
The internet uses this phenomena more than any other medium. The first websites to make use of social proof in a mass scale were online commerce stores like Amazon. You’ll find user reviews on products throughout their store. More often than not, this plays a major role in most people’s buying decision.
With Facebook’s ‘Like’ button implemented in almost every popular website, it’s become extremely easy to tell our friends if we find something interesting and that tickles them to take action on it as well. In this ecosystem, everyone wins.
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Facebook gets more people to use it’s service to learn about other places on the web.
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The website which uses the ‘Like’ button generates more traffic and possibly, more sales / conversions.
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The user is happy that they purchased / checked out something that was actually interesting.
The same applies on other websites such as Twitter and Google as well. As a matter of fact, the very core of Google’s search algorithm ‘Page Rank’ determines the importance of a site based on how many other quality sites link back to the site that is displayed. While this isn’t the only criteria, it is one of the most essential features of the algorithm. The algorithm is smart enough to count the number of links to a website and also count the number of quality links. What does this mean? It’s very similar to the real world. We tend to believe and follow people with more authority. Google considers a page to be more relevant and real if a popular website (such as Engadget) links to your website.
Conclusion
It’s no doubt that social proof plays a very important role not just in marketing but, also in other deep technological innovations. However, what I’ll talk about is how you can use social proof to build your business and I’ll cover some important aspects on how to do this just right in the next article. I’d love to read your opinion as well so, feel free to share it in the comments section.
So yeah, this is my blog. Not bad huh? Simple layout, nice colors, links to stuff that you can use and awesome plugins that make the site super social and informative. All neat but, where’s all the content? Nag, show us the content? Chill out. They’re on the way.
I usually don’t like writing long introduction articles but, I’ll let you have a bite out of the cookie. Here’s what you can expect from this blog (but, only if you promise to keep coming back and subscribe to the RSS feed link) and also learn something along the way.
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Lots of stuff on technology, trends and their economical / business implications.
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I’ll try and teach you how you can start a company that’s pretty darn cool.
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I’ll leak some tips that you can use to dazzle anyone you meet. Be it customer, friend or investor.
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I’ll share interesting links that I find useful and that can benefit you as well.
Sounds cool? If you want all this stuff, bookmark the site, subscribe to the feed and follow me on Twitter. Also, do me a favor and share this with your peers. Everyone can benefit from this stuff. We’re all members of a social web. I’ve also made this crazily simple for you. See those tiny social links at the bottom of this article? Click away. Have fun.
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RT @Microsoft: Hotmail now supports Exchange ActiveSync for push mail, calendar, contacts http://bit.ly/bCmTPc [Inside Windows Live] ^SL
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