The Mobile Presenter

I witnessed a case of a talk going way over the audience's head recently at a local event. It was a technical talk, but I've seen this happen with other topics as well.

Often things like this can be avoided by checking who your audience is in advance (if in doubt, ask the organisers). In this case, the audience was foreseeably mixed and it was pretty much impossible to know in advance which way the audience would skew on that particular evening, i.e. whether there would be more technical or more non-technical people in attendance. Also, the talk was very much on-topic for the event.

We're currently working with our speakers for the upcoming next TEDxStuttgart. With some speakers, we are still working on their talks. With others, we are already in the rehearsal stage. Many have come up with ideas for audience interaction or props they want to bring to the stage. It always breaks my heart a little when they come up with a great idea and I have to tell them that, unfortunately, it won't work because we're in a different venue this year.

I often test my presentations in front of a friendly audience. If you don't have anyone who would be interested in your talk, I can recommend attending a Barcamp. In fact, my "career" as a proponent of better presentations started with a short presentation at Barcamp Stuttgart in 2011. I barely had material for 10 minutes, but the positive feedback and constructive discussion afterwards confirmed that I was on to something.

So after I stressed the importance of using visuals in slides - how and why they work - in a session last year, I came back to Barcamp Stuttgart this year with the question if you can make use of the positive effects of visuals even if you're not using slides in your talk.

In other words: Can you present visually without slides?

Every time Apple introduces new products at one of their keynote events, there is this inevitable comparison with the late Steve Jobs. I've written about it before and really thought we'd be done with it. Everyone on the team at Apple has now found their role in these keynote presentations. Apple's keynotes are different now, but they're still recognisably Apple.

Last week's keynote was bigger than usual since, for the first time since Steve Jobs' death, Apple introduced an entirely new product category. And, inevitably, the "Steve would have done it differently" comments came up again. Sigh.

I come from an Open Source background. We share things. We make them available for others to use, adapt, improve upon, or turn them into something else entirely. Therefore, I usually share the slides for my talks. For this, I used to use SlideShare.

While SlideShare is already useful just for looking at slides, you will actually have to register to get the most out of it. Not only will you be able to upload your own and download other people's slides (if the author allows it) but you can also follow speakers and be notified when they publish new presentations. In other words, it's yet another social network. In fact, since SlideShare is owned by LinkedIn, it is part of a social network that you may already use.