Improved presentation kit

A few days ago I posted about my brand new, highly portable presentation kit; few minutes of its use immediately highlighted several areas for improvement, and today I am happy to report about the rev.2 of said kit.

Speed of setup

One ofe the things I complained about was the risk of not having access to the meeting room wi-fi and how this could potentially derail any coolness credits if you must go clumsily hunting at reception for the password. I also reported that, sadly, my Sammy SII’ portable hotspot bandwidth was not sufficient to support Airplay.

To solve this I bought a cheap TP-Link router (the white box on the left); you see it here connected to my phone spare battery pack (through a clumsy USB micro to USB mini adaptor, but I did not want to spend the 30 euro for a USB mini battery pack I would have no other use for). Once it powers up by simply connecting the battery pack, it generates a 802.11/n wifi network whose login details are memorized on all my devices which will therefore automatically connect.

It won’t access the Internet, although it could simply by plugging a 3G/4G stick in the USB-in port, but in presentation mode I have no need for that; the beauty is that I do not even have to take it out of the carrying bag!

Sound

The second area for improvement was the sound department, as the tiny projector speakers are really not powerful enough for anything but the most limited audiences. The Insignia speakers I had originally decided upon could not be delivered so I looked for an alternative and settled for the Cyber Acoustics USB-powered speakers.

Being USB-powered, they do away with the power cord and have a nice magnetized spot on the speakers which ensures they stick together when transported.

HDMI connection

A third area for improvement was the huge HDMI cable connecting the Apple TV and the projector: a short, flat cable did improve it a little bit, but this is still something that needs proper addressing, as the spaghetti are still there and the potential for unbalancing the kit has only marginally decreased.

Rev.2 result

The original carrying case won’t contain all these other gizmos, so there might be a rev. 3 opportunity in a better transport packaging; also the USB cables are really clumsy; there is perhaps a solution in using Airplay-capable speakers, but they have power cords and are currently too expensive for this, so this setup may be the best I can achieve right now.

As to the performance, the sound and video are quite impressive for such a small kit, see/hear for yourself:

Shopping list (addendum)

• TP Link router – EUR 26.90
• USB micro to mini adapter – EUR 4.00
• Flat HDMI cable – EUR 10.58
• Cyber Acoustics speakers – EUR 25.00 (a saving of EUR 9.00 over the previously selected Insignia)

Dream presentation kit hands-on

Remember this post?

The gear has arrived and I had my first hands-on session. I’ll jump right at the conclusion: fantastic!

Let’s start with this tiny LED HDMI projector  by Brookstone which is a true gem; image quality is pretty good for a thing this small, and definitely more than adequate for business use. Just out of curiosity I tried blowing it all the way up to maybe 80′ with the result you see below.

The ergonomics are just right: as you can see the whole kit (well, almost) fits in this little neoprene pouch. The only items left out are the HDMI cable (more later) and the power supply for the projector, which, however is not strictly necessary as the device packs enough battery to keep you going for 90′.

Once opened, you can see the projector (left), the Apple TV (right), plus Apple Remote, minitripod and power cable for the Apple TV.

First thing is to screw the minitripod on the standard 1/2″ threaded hole at the bottom of the projector – thanks God this operation does not preclude access to any port or connector as sadly it’s so often the case with portable devices.

This results in a solid coupling – of course, any tripod will do: from the huge, multi-segmented professional ones to pocketable Gorillapods. The one you see in the picture was a suggestion by Brookstone and is very pocketable while offering a respectable 40 cm height when fully extended, which I believe is more than enough for most meeting room settings where you typically need to put the projector on a table. The pivoting head also allows you to do a little image orientation since the projector has no keystone correction.

You can now connect the Apple TV via any regular male-male HDMI cable, power it up and place it on top of the projector:

Both items are very light and produce very little in terms of heat; the projector ventilation in particular happens though the down-facing grid which is free.

Turning on and off and focusing of the projector are done through side mounted switches – again very easy and fully accessible.

But.

Yes, there is a “but”, perhaps the only one I found so far, and it’s about the damn HDMI cable: as you can see, the HDMI clunky connectors are almost as big as the devices, and the weight and the rigidity of a standard HDMI cable is enough to unbalance the setup.

I am sure there must be a better way to connect those two tiny devices, whose female HDMI connectors almost line up and face each other correctly. I scoured the Cables4less catalog (my usual source for all things cables) but for some reason nobody makes cables shorter than 0.5m which is still about twice what I need.

Additionally, regular HDMI cables are thick and rigid, which is my case is a problem, as they could easily topple my little tower. Flat cables are probably my best bet, so I must look for a short one.

90° adaptors and joiners are a possibility, but the probability of a stiff connector to be exactly the length I need are minimal.

The projector has its own speakers, which are predictably underpowered – my MacBook Air sounds better, in fact. It also has an audio out 3.5mm jack and an USB charging port to which I am hoping to connect these flat speakers by Insignia. I have used flat panel speakers before and I know they can deliver more than enough punch for a business presentation, and should be small enough to fit in the same pouch.

Now that the system is all connected you connect the Apple TV to the same WiFi network as your Mac, iPad or iPhone – you can have more than one Apple TV on the same network, each of them will have its own name and you can beam any of your screen(s) to any one of them and hot swap – I tried setting up an ad hoc WiFi network but that does not seem to work at all.

Also I tried using the portable hotspot feature of my phone to create an on-the-go network, but while I am able to get the devices on this network, its bandwidth is probably not enought to support AirPlay.

Using in a real life situation

The pouch contains all you need (once the short cable is found): if the meeting room has a big LCD TV, you only use the Apple TV connecting it to an HDMI input; if not, you will also need the projector – in both cases you can either use your iPad or iPhone as well as a more traditional Mac, the latter having the advantage of a much wider choice of transitions.

In all cases, the longest and more dodgy item of set up is connecting to the existing WiFi (obtaining the password, etc.) which has to be done each time, as the Apple TV forgets passwords once you connect it to a different network (why?!?!) but 10′ should be more than enough and of course you always run the risk that the meeting room DOES NOT have a wifi connection, in which case you’re stuck and must fall back to cables.

Assuming you’re not that unlucky, however, you then enjoy maximum liberty to roam around the room while you speak and, perhaps more importantly, can completely ignore technical constraints in the room setup and place yourself and your colleagues where it makes most sense; you will also be able to switch speaker simply by passing along the computer or iPad or, better, by having multiple copies of the presentation loaded on different devices and hot swapping them as you move from one speaker to the other.

Buying list:

1. Brookstone projector ($299.99 + delivery) = €250
2. Apple TV – €109
3. Pouch + tripod ($29.99) = €25
4. Flat HDMI cable (£13.55) = €20
5. Flat Insignia Speakers ($44.50) = €34

Dream presentation kit

There at last! After much research, and after having discarded a billion solution, I believe I have found the perfect presentation kit.

Before venturing into the products, some of which are being sourced as I speak due to funny delivery limitations (I thought we were in a global market) let me recap what I think every professional presenter needs to deliver great performances:

1. Portability – I certainly cannot wheel along crates of equipment “just in case” I may need to deliver a presentation and while I, like many of you, have delivered impromptu presentations using nothing but my laptop’ screen as the only visual support, I have suffered all along for the limitations that this implies.
2. Speed of setup – this is an imperfect world. Things never work as they should; the sound file will not play. The animation will freeze. The movie will not start or it will be out of sync. Now, in big conferences there is usually time the night before to iron out these wrinkles, but not so in many customer situations, where your best chance for everything to work as planned is to use your own equipment which therefore must be up & running, pronto!
3. Industry standard break points in the chain - A/V people hate me for this, but they are just too far behind. Their world has not progressed from still frame Powerpoint slides in Comic Sans. So save yourself the aggravation: if you invited me to speak to your event, I won’t send you my slides and I won’t load them on your PC, period. This is not because I don’t want to share them – in fact I make a point of loading each and every one of my presentations on Slideshare. The ideal presentation kit, however, should break down in components that are easily coupled to the available A/V equipment through standard interfaces and no franken-cables!
4. Wireless – is it just me, or the long VGA cable snaking across the table feels so ’80s? I want to move, I want to walk, pace the stage as I please, but I still like to have my laptop at hand, mainly for reason #5 but more in general because for Heaven’s sake, everything else is wireless, why not my presentation? I have been in so many meeting rooms where the ideal placement for the projector is dead in the center of the table and the ideal location for the presenter laptop is at one of the ends, meaning you’ll need a telco-sized coil of thick VGA cable. And note that when I say wireless I do not mean the brain-dead version projectors manufacturers have tried to smuggle as wireless: I want full motion video, HD and – why not – 5.1 sound if I so fancy. I want the whole shebang, minus the cable.
5. Monitoring – hey, I am a lazy sod. I have been irreversibly spoiled by the nice presenter layout of Keynote (now available also on Powerpoint). I like to know how long I have been blabbering, how many more slides I’ve got, which one comes up next. Unfortunately these freebies are only available if my laptop is within reach.
6. Resolution – I understand that showing stuff in 3D on a panoramic arena-sized screen requires a little more complex equipment; I have seen the crews of rock groups putting together their stuff. My requirements are lower than Bono’s, but do I really have to live with sub-XGA resolution? In the age of retina displays, must my eyes hurt when I show stuff on screen?
7. Mobile – is it such a given that every presentation should be done off a laptop? How un-cool is showing a mobile app from… a laptop?

Then there are a couple of nice-to-have’s:

• I cannot see another pile of books under the projector to tilt it up. I just cannot. I want some degree of mechanical independence from stupidly installed screens or dwarf-sized tables.
• My dislike for cables extends to all sort of cables, including power cables; so a little battery juice would be very nice, thank you!
• The assembled kit should not look like a kludge built by dr. Everett Scott
• and, last but not least, it should not break my piggybank. I am willing to invest, say, up to €500 for the complete solution (excluding the cost of the laptop, of course)

I just realized this post is long enough already, so I will post the solution as soon as I receive the last bits

iPad magic act (via @rogerwarner)

Presentation excellence + Magic + Tech = hat trick!

iPad charting: some love from @lovely_djay

Had you been a faithful reader of this blog (haven’t you regretted this already several times?) you would remember this post about Lovely Charts, a brave attempt to make charting slightly less obvious, monotone and Powerpoint-dull.

Jérôme Cordiez brings us an exquisitely superfluous – but exactly for this reason totally necessary – application which brings charting to the iPad in the way it was meant to be. Pretty basic functionality so far, needs hues, more shapes, more text options, some 3D, but you should really fork over the four bucks to encourage JC to continue the development. Me, I just suspect I will take every opportunity to illustrate my thoughts in flow charts…

Playing with #Prezi

It’s been a while since I posted anything on this channel, and the simple reason is that I haven’t come across anything I considered really new there. So when I saw a retweet by Robert Scoble about the release of Prezi for the iPad I was immediately hooked and had to test it. The result was something of a letdown, as Prezi and its iPad app failed to enable me to do stuff I couldn’t without it.

After a full evening of testing on a very real presentation I will deliver next week, therefore, here is my

10 suggestions to make Prezi truly outstanding

1. Add some elementary shape drawing tools – they are useful not only to add as visual elements, but also to group other elements. I hate having to import squares and circles from other apps.
2. Add permanent grouping of objects, it’s there already, but it does not stick e.g. when you want to make a group a stop for your path and have Prezi automatically zoom to fit all the grouped objects in the window.
3. Pan, Zoom and Rotate are great, but in a presentation that is more than, say, five slides, they will tire the audience; I appreciate essentiality, but I need more transitions, e.g. a good quality dissolve or fade to black not to mention the fancy ones.
4. The bubble menu is a nice trick, but frankly I don’t think it adds anything; it’s not faster, it does not save screen real estate, it’s not more intuitive. It’s a trick, but I don’t have time for tricks that do not give me anyhing in return for my effort to master them.
5. Why always move the screen and not objects instead? why can’t I build a bullet slide flying in the different bullets one at the time, maybe combining it with the auto zoom neat-o feature? Or complement a text slide with an image?
6. Why tie me to a fixed font set defined in the style set? I like to creatively use fonts, combining contrasting faces to achieve a pleasant effect, and I don’t need to be restrained for fear of creating one of those “all the fonts I have on this machine” horrors.
7. Ditto for colors. We are NOT all color blind. In general, do not protect me from my own style mistakes, as this turns into unnecessary limitations to my creativity. If I don’t know what I’m doing, shame on me.
8. What is wrong with transparent background in imported objects? It seems really basic, but I wasn’t able to turn it on. Ditto for overlays where I’d like a transparency control dial.
9. I must admit I was curious to see how they solved the Flash on iPad issue, and predictably, they didn’t. All the iPad app does is download what looks like a PDF version of the preso which you can flip thru. And gone is the non-linearity of the flow: yes, you can click on another section of the preso, but when you click “next” it will bring you back where you were.
10. On the iPad Pan and Rotate, yes, but Zoom no-no-no. Fonts will not scale, neither will objects or images. Aliasing becomes immediately visible, feels so 80s.
11. And alignments end up all over the place: carefully positioned objects are not even on the same screen anymore, carriage returns are repositioned for no good reason.

I just realized it’s not 10 but eleven, I guess I felt the pull of the date.

Conclusion? I think Prezi as it stands is a nice curio which I may use to astonish friends on (very) short presentations. Not sure the iPad app will remain here, though.

Maybe the next release…

Mathematica seminar

Invested half a day yesterday at the University of Rome attending a seminar organized by Adalta about the new version of Mathematica, a symbolic calculation software (“and much more”); my other reason was I was curious about the founders, brothers Conrad and Stephen Wolfram, the latter of which stakes big claims for himself, like having invented an overall “completely new kind of science” in his book.

Result was a complete letdown: not only I still fail to understand what – if any – application does Mathematica have outside the classroom (which I am not belittling, mind you), but astonish at the utter lack of preparation and respect for the audience shown by the two speakers.

Poorly designed, unclear slides and a difficult to follow presentation flow lost me several times although I had a genuine interest; the complete disregard for any practical information on the product (i.e. licensing for example) I put down to the “academic” environment where it is not polite to talk about dirty money matters, but then, why was I invited ?

If mr. Wolfram’ presentation was amateurial at best (the effort to show he can do a presentation using Mathematica is pathetic – yes, I can stretch the A column in a spreadsheet to 80 characters, but typing text there this does not a word processor maketh !), prof. Falcolini’s was appalling and felt like it was hacked together ten minutes before the start.

I wonder if professors take the attention of pupils for granted and therefore develop no ability to interest them – that being the case, we should not marvel if the quality of our schools are going down.

I have said before how I believe ANY presenter in ANY situation has a moral duty to show respect to his audience and appreciation for the time they are investing in him: this means clarity of intention, intelligent and value adding use of technology (notice I did not say “advanced” or “fancy”); in general make me feel my investment was a worthy one: inform me, entertain me, motivate me.

This day did none.

What makes an excellent presentation?

Click to view

This post is the result of Jacqueline asking some advice for putting together a customer seminar on “Memorable presentations”; as I had the opportunity to say before, delivering memorable presentations is a noble art and a worthy human endeavor for anyone who has the responsibility of speaking in public.

During my years I have learned a few things, and I thought I might as well collect these random thoughts into one compact post. First of all, I will NOT talk about mastering good presentation software, although I think sloppiness is NOT a sign of attention or respect to your audience. If you do not have the time to properly prepare your slides, you might be much better off writing words on a flip chart (this will help you decrese their number, BTW).

So the skinny on presentation software is: yes, I think it’s important. And yes, I think Keynote is far superior to Powerpoint, if nothing else because the minute attention to detail and quality of templates will make your slides stick out. But no, I don’t think an excellent presentation requires an excellent presentation software. Most notably, I do think corporate templates should be banned, as they are designed exactly to make each presenter look the same, a crime worth of the worst punishment.

This is to say that all my notes here are software-neutral, but if you are interested in tips on presentation design, a good book to read on this topic is Garr Reynols’ “Presentation Zen”.

Speechless

Everybody raves about the great speakers that use no slides and just breeze through their points thanks to their prodigious memory, but what if you actually need or want to put words on the screen? How can you make that more interesting? How can you write a presentation that does not need you? In this example, I tried to use nothing but words and I also tried to build a presentation that would be meaningful even without the presenter.

Technology (with a purpose)

Integrating multimedia has become so easy that now anybody can do it. Which sometimes makes our life as attendees even more miserable because of inane movies and pointless animations. Using multimedia should be with a purpose and not just “because I can”, and clips should be chosen in such a way as to underline the points you are making. In this example, I used short clips to highlight each slide main point; should you decide to use that technique remember it is most effective if the movie clips you select have something in common (i.e. they feature the same actor, or – as in this case – they all come from animation movies)

(showing) Passion

if you don’t feel about what you present, how you’re expecting your audience to? If you are not attempting with all your heart to convince the audience you’re right, how do you expect them to believe you? In those twenty minutes your objective is to talk to both sides of their brain: yes, you need to give them some rational arguments to believe you, but you must also speak to their emotions, and how will you do so without showing yours? Of course, this means exposing yourself to the risk of NOT convincing them. Baring your soul and then having people laugh at you is painful, but it’s the price every effective presenter pays each time s/he goes on stage.

Space

(How do you spatially use your body) – most speakers do not dare to use space for fear of becoming ridiculous; in fact the reason why most unexperience speakers love the podium is because it hides them from the gaze of the audience, Their aim is to become an incorporeal voice commenting the slides. In doing so, they deprive themselves of one of the richest expression medium: their own body. In this example “mad scientist” Clifford Stoll shows us a presentation which is more akin to a ballet as he prances around the stage and uses the palm of his hand as a memopad.

Clifford Stoll: 18 minutes with an agile mind

Take that, all those who complain about me jumping up and down on stage all the time!

Love his “notes”, love his remark about taking computers off schools, love is “think local, act local” pun. A lunatic, but love everything about him.

Boring charts

A telltale sign of a clear and present danger of impending Death By Powerpoint are the boring charts – boxes, bars, or the worst of them all, the dreaded Mondrian ! It took him or her so much time to slot every little piece in there that you know they will comment every single box, oblivious of the pre-comatose gaze in the suffering eyes of the audience, all intent in the hormone-driven onanistic pleasure to TELL YOU.

Whether you care or not.

Whether you understand or not.

If you would like to at least visually separate yourself from that pack, you might want to try Lovely Charts. free, web-based, truly idiot-proof, it took your idiot the whole of three minutes including registration to do this:

A lovely test chart