SlideRocket
The San Francisco-based company says this new offering is tailored for companies with extensive sales and marketing organizations that have many people working on the same projects. For too long, top-tier corporations with innovative projects have been depending on antiquated presentation software, SlideRocket says. In order to sell clients on their ideas, they should be able to provide media-rich "brochures" that represent their polish and savvy.
As such, the new sales and marketing version not only allows teams to pull together all types of media into professional-looking pitches, it also measures the impact the final products make on their audiences. For example, it can tell you when a presentation you've sent out as a link has been opened, whether it was forwarded to anyone else, and which slides were viewed for the longest amount of time.
Responding to its users' emphasis on security, it also integrates password protection and permissions controls so that inside information remains proprietary and certain members of the same team can't access to confidential information.
While it includes all the same tools as previous iterations, the new version provides a new feature called Slide Groups, which allows users to link certain slides together, making them easy to index, find and move in batches. This helps to streamline processes that may have too many cooks in the kitchen moving items around. Whole presentations themselves are also more portable -- users can move them via thumb drives, email attachments or CDs from one computer to the next without worrying about hardware or video player compatibilities.
The updated application also offers branded templates so that when companies send out links to their presentations, the email messages look like they are coming directly from the company, not SlideRocket.
SlideRocket charges $20 per user per month for its enterprise platforms -- which includes this new sales and marketing package. It charges $10 per month for its individual subscription, and provides a free version with only basic options.
The company has raised $7 million to date from Hummer Winblad Venture Partners and Azure Capital Partners (it last raised $5 million in July). This is pretty decent for a startup of its size in the online presentation business, but it still has some tough competition -- and not just from Microsoft PowerPoint. Google, Zoho, Apple and SlideShare are all offering, or currently developing rival tools.