The Mobile Presenter

Update: The promotion is now over. Congrats to the winners!

We're doing a promotion over at JavaRanch this week (Tuesday through Friday, i.e. July 16-19): Ask me a question about my ebook, Presenting for Geeks, or pretty much any other question related to presentations and presenting. I'll try to answer them all - and you'll get a chance to win a copy of the ebook.

I've linked to some of the more interesting discussions below. You can read them all over at the JavaRanch forum:

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.

Presenting for Geeks is a workshop that I designed to help my fellow geeks improve their presentation skills. The workshop is targeted at a technical audience, such as (but not limited to) software developers, who have to give presentations for one reason or another.

It advocates a more visual and engaging presentation style (fewer bullet points!) and was inspired by Garr Reynolds and his Presentation Zen approach. Contrary to what people often think, this presentation style does not only work for keynotes but is also applicable to technical presentations.

Here's the offer: I will give this workshop for free at your conference or user group meet-up. I only ask that you cover my travel expenses and accommodation.

Day Camp for Developers (or DC4D for short) is a series of online conferences for software developers and people from related fields. The motto of the series is Invest a day in your career. The idea is that you get to learn from fellow geeks in a series of 4 or 5 talks about a specific topic. Previous Day Camps were about Soft Skills and Project Management, for example.

The fifth instance had a topic that's relevant to this blog: Public Speaking. So I was curious to hear what fellow geeks had to say on the topic.

Why should someone who's giving presentation courses take a presentation course? Well, I believe in the idea of lifelong learning (or Continuous Improvement or Kaizen). Knowledge isn't static, and neither is mastery. There is always new information and research coming out and you can always get better at something - if you really care about it.

So when I had the opportunity to take a 2-day presentation course with friends and fellow presentation coaches, organised by Ideas on Stage in Paris - I took it.