The Mobile Presenter

Props are great to liven up a presentation and make things more tangible for your audience; even if they can't actually touch the props you bring. If you are doing a product introduction or demo of sorts, I strongly recommend to bring your product with you, if it fits on the stage somehow. Seeing a real person interacting with it, holding it, or simply standing next to it (if it's really big) will give your audience a much better idea of the size and use than any product photo on a slide could do. So if the goal of your presentation is to introduce and eventually sell a product, this should be a no-brainer.

If you still need convincing, watch Steve Jobs introduce the MacBook Air (remember the manila envelope?) or, a personal favourite of mine, the iPod nano: Ever wondered what this pocket is for?

It's not really a statistically relevant sample, but over the years, I've seen quite a few lawyers speak. And I have to say that pretty much all of them are still using text-heavy slides and not a lot of visuals. Yet at the same time, these talks are often pretty good; they're informative and even entertaining. Why is that so?

The very first slide of your presentation is what is called the welcome slide; the one with the topic of your talk and your name on it. I've written a bit about it in Presenting for Geeks, but presenters are doing it right most of the time automatically. Except, maybe, for one little detail ...

We're in the process of looking for speakers for our next TEDxStuttgart; and, as always, it's a mixture of frustration and delight. Frustration because of the huge amount of very weak proposals we get. Which only increases the delight when we find someone who actually has something to say.

The motto of TED, as you surely know, is "ideas worth spreading". The idea - revolutionary, evolutionary, novel, or just a new take on something long established - is at the heart of every TED talk. All else must stand back.