The Mobile Presenter

Much has been written about the presentation style of Steve Jobs. For years, his style was also the style of Apple, the company that he founded and later saved from extinction. Now that he's no longer with us, the question was how would Apple's presentation style develop?

I think we saw the answer at the WWDC keynote last week. For the first time after Steve Jobs' death, the entire 2 hour presentation of new products looked consistent and each of the actors, so to speak, has found their place - and they are comfortable in it.

I recently came across this quote by R. Buckminster Fuller:

All the information in the world is available right here in this room.
It’s just a matter of presentation to make sense out of it.

This nicely highlights one of the underlying problems of many presentations.

One of the problems that you'll encounter when doing more visual presentations is that people are going to ask for your slides; yet your slides are pretty much useless for them without your narration. I've noticed that this makes some people - especially technically minded ones - suspicious of the whole concept of more visual slides in the first place.

As presenters, we operate in a pretty safe and static environment: There's usually a screen (and a wall!) behind us while the audience is in front of us, seated.

But there are other types of presentations that are much more challenging. Like presenting in the streets. Which is what city guides do.

Lately, I found myself mostly giving short presentations - 5 or 15 minutes long. Not surprisingly, it's really hard to give a good, consistent, and informative talk in such a short amount of time.

If you need help to get started here, have a look at the example of insightful short talks: TED talks. Garr Reynolds has a useful list of tips on how to prepare a good TED (or TED-style) talk.

But what do you do when your presentation turns out to be too long? How can you make it shorter without losing all that precious content?