SlideRocket, which offers an online tool for creating and sharing presentations, is introducing a new feature on Friday that should help you avoid stale presentation -- it's opening the applications to plug-ins that incorporate real-time data.
Chief executive Chuck Dietrich told me that his goal is to make presentations less static and more responsive to the most up-to-date information. For example, of you're giving a presentation about a company, you could bring up a slide that shows the current stock price, rather than the price whenever you made the presentation. Or if you want to interact with your audience, you could ask them to post comments and questions on Twitter using a particular hashtag, then include live results as a slide. Ditto the results of a poll that you conduct via text message.
Now, you may have attended presentations with features like this already, but the difference is that they're not in the presentation itself -- someone would have to leave their slides and jump to the website in question. Plus, Dietrich said, more and more people are sharing presentations online, to be viewed at the user's convenience. In those cases the presenter has include everything in the slides themselves, and it's probably not a great idea to make a slide that says, "Go to Twitter and search for X."
SlideRocket is launching its new plug-in system with a polling plug-in, a Twitter plug-in, and a plug-in for checking the most up-to-date stock prices and other RSS feeds. There should be others soon, built by SlideRocket and outside developers. (The polling plug-in was built by PollEverywhere.)
The new data plug-ins will be available to SlideRocket business and trial users. The company says it will be rolling out the features gradually, but they should be available to all users by mid-March.
SlideRocket has raised $7 million in funding and says it has 1,200 paying customers. It's also the official presentation tool of the South by Southwest festival.