Spring cleaning: de-personalizing your laptop

If you use your laptop to present slides in presentations, it is time to let go of all that personal screen real estate such as cute family pictures. Screen savers kicking in with images of you in the pool with your 2 year old son, instant message popups, wallpapers showing off your new motor bike are all very interesting to you, but not to your audience. Spring cleaning time.

A few tickets left for my NY seminars next week

I am very happy with the signup rate for my NY seminars next week. There are still a few seats left, you can sign up here using the "ideatransplant" promotion code. I am preparing for my flight and hope to get to see some of my New York readers in person next week.

Memory and stories

Joshua Foer, the author of Moonwalking with Einstein (affiliate link), shows an interesting technique to memorize a string of unrelated object: imagine them one by one positioned on a familiar path. Boiled egg on the driveway, duck at the front door, 17" MacBook pro at the bottom of the stairs, etc.

Speaking of ducks, the Hebrew word for duck is ברווז, or barvaz. Imagine that duck sitting in a cafe, having a coffee, while in the distance you can see that huge red vase sitting on top of the bar. Barvas.

It shows that our spatial memory is much stronger than our ability to remember a list of bullet points. It might have something to do with our ancestors whose key to survival was to remember the location of that apple tree, and even more importantly, the way back home.

Stories are a great framework to store and memorize facts and ideas. It comes naturally. This might also be an explanation of why you can remember an entire 2 hour discussion by just looking at a messy, incomprehensible white board full of scribbles.

Send me an executive summary

When an investor is running out of time, conversations often end with "why don't you email me an executive summary".

Upon hearing that, startups wil scramble to produce the well-known executive summary format, compressing the entire pitch deck in just a few paragraphs:

• Has to fit 2 pages, so no space for visuals, use a small font or narrow margins if required
• Stuff the text with buzzwords and big numbers
• Include all the features of your product
• Spend a lot of paragraphs on CV details of the founding team

Think of this from the investor perspective: this document is boring and so dense that it would take the same amount of time to read it start to finish than to page-down through a slide deck. Here is an alternative: "I am sending you a 5 minute pitch"

• A short and visual document, but it could be longer than 2 pages
• Explaining the investment opportunity in human language
• Focus more on the problem, less on financial,  product details, and team details (that can come later)
• The objective is not to get the investment (yet), but to get invited to the next stage in the investment process, possibly a full pitch meeting

My new Macbook Pro setup

So I replaced my computing infrastructure over the past week. Things are moving fast in the world of IT.

• Laptop. A few years ago having decent graphical power still restricted you to using desktops. No longer. I have gone mobile. (Maybe motion graphics will make me regret it later). No I can use those little downtimes in between meetings to do actual useful work, rather than catching up on email or Twitter.
• 17", I compared screen sizes and concluded that as a visual designer there is no avoiding the extra weight and size to get a decent size screen
• Apple. Strangely enough it is actually the physical interfaces that convinced me. A nice machine to touch, nice keyboard, nice track pad. Something you spend the majority of your day on. Interestingly, a hardware decision, not a software one.
• Cloud. It was surprisingly simple to move to a new environment when all your critical data resides in the cloud: email on gmail, files in dropbox (affiliate link), clients and invoices in Freshbooks (affiliate link), contacts in Batchbook. Everything is in sync on my new machine, and the legacy infrastructure that I continue to use as backup. 1Password synced via Dropbox to keep track of all the accounts
• Virtual Windows/OSX blur. None of my clients use Keynote, and PowerPoint on Mac is simply not good enough (see a comparison between PowerPoint 2010 for Windows and PowerPoint 2011 for Mac). So in comes Windows, but I totally do not notice it. I use Parallels to create a virtual machine, and my Windows applications run in a Window as if I am working on a Mac. All data is shared and file management happens via OSX. It requires beefing up the hardware though. I put in 8GB of memory, of which I allocate 5GB to the Windows machine. The big customer segment for Parallels is actually hardcore gamers who want to port their favorite graphics-intensive games to the Mac. As a result, performance of a Windows virtual machine is actually very good. There is only a slight delay when you switch over.
• Adobe alternatives. Adobe software is incredibly complicated and bloated. I need basic photo editing capabilities to resize images for the web and take out backgrounds out of images. Pixelmator is a beautiful Mac app that can do all these things (and much more) in a beautiful user interface. The same with Illustrator, I need it to edit stock vector diagrams nothing more. I could not find an alternative for Mac yet and as a result kept my old Windows CS3 installed (I see no need to upgrade). It is interesting to see that I started to look at user interfaces to decide my software, not so much the features anymore (same story as in hardware).
• Legacy software. Some of my clients (mostly the large ones) are still running PowerPoint 2003. Hence I actually installed it in parallel to my production software PowerPoint 2010. (It took some time to dig up those old CDs).

Financial forecasting in VC presentations

The financial forecast in a VC pitch presentation combines two different pieces of financial information in one chart. Still, you can treat them differently.

1. The short term burn rate. This is information should highly precise and accurate. An investor is 100% sure she will "lose" this money. If you cannot be accurate, you probably do not have a clue what investment is required to build the company
   
2. The long-term dream. There is no point specifying that you will have $50,342,784.12m sales in year 5. You just don't know and claiming that you do will lose you realism points. Explain to an investor why you think it will be ~$50m 

Reuters issues a 1-page online annual report

Slowly, large publicly traded companies are starting to experiment with Internet and social media as alternatives to the dry and boring annual report. Reuters just issued a 1-page version (see it here), with a promise that over the next few days, this will be followed up with more detailed blog posts about the company and its financial results.

Early online annual reports were a pain. They basically were print documents put online and you had to keep on clicking on "next" links to get to the following page. Rendering of tables and data in basic HTML also did not provide good results. Combine that with slow page loads and you get a pretty useless experience.

New display protocols (and certainly HTML5) will give PowerPoint-like fast navigation controls to online documents. I think a hybrid of a traditional slide presentation, advanced (and fast) web navigation, video and other multi-media, plus social aspects will give a powerful distribution platform for financial data. You get the best of both worlds: PowerPoint-style visualization of data and key strategic messes, and nicely-formated text for those who want more details. Certainly for public investor presentations such as this one, but also for confidential documents. You can distribute login details to (potential) investors you want to share your data with and exclude them from the online data room as soon as the deal process has stopped.

There are also great opportunities in sales. I rarely use a PowerPoint presentation anymore to introduce my own services for example. Rather, I just take people through a few sections of my web site, either in person or via a remote presentation tool. SalesCrunch, the company that is organizing my upcoming New York presentations, is trying to create a platform for these remote sales presentations.

Back to the Reuters annual report. I learned something from the way the graphics of the financials are done. I like the dividend history chart, a bit unusual, but it shows both the trend and the detail of the numbers. The big column charts might not be the right format though. Large stable companies do not grow that fast and the columns show hardly any change. Also, the big difference in absolute size between the revenue and profit column does not look optimal. It would have been better to put the $ values as text, but rather make a graph of the % increase.

I am looking forward to the additional blog posts that will come out over the next week.

Thank you Dominic Jones for leading me to this report.

The sales presentation is only a small part of the sales meeting

A potential customer has many ways to get information about your product:

• There is information on your web site
• Your competitors bring the client up the learning curve about the industry
• In your preparation phone calls with the prospect, already a lot of information gets exchanged
• Maybe you sent the customer a copy of the slides of the sales presentation in advance
• There could be a product demo that the client already has been playing with

So, when you finally enter that meeting room, it is good to think about the value of the precious 1.5 hour of face time. Maybe it is not about information transfer. Maybe it is about giving your client an opportunity to get exposed to what they have not seen before: you in action, in person.

• What type of supplier are you?
• What about integrity?
• Can you be trusted?
• Do you understand their questions?
• Are you flexible?
• Etc.

The sales presentation is an excuse to figure you out.

A review of PowerPoint 2010 (Windows) versus PowerPoint 2011 (Mac)

I have now spent a few days doing real presentation design client work on PowerPoint 2011 for Mac. This post brings together impressions published in earlier blog posts.

The bottom line is that the average user will not notice any differences between the 2 versions of PowerPoint. Some positives:

1. The application has slightly more Mac fee to it
2. I like the organized way fonts weights are grouped together.
3. The integration with Aperture, a photo organizer is very good. If you buy images from iStockPhoto, somehow a lot of keywords are saved with the file. PowerPoint 2011 integrates seamlessly with Aperture, making the full library of images on your hard drive searchable by keyword.

The professional presentation designer however, will notice a few differences. PowerPoint 2010 can do a bit more than PowerPoint 2011:

1. The selection pane, a great tool construct complex layered diagrams is missing. (An earlier post about the selection pane here)
2. Toolbar customization could make PowerPoint 2011 crash. Especially, do not try to drag the straight arrow connector into your top toolbar. If your software has been corrupted, see this Microsoft post about how to fix things. [UPDATE, THE RELEASE OF SP 1 MIGHT HAVE SOLVED THIS ISSUE]
3. Whenever you try to move or resize an object very close to the static guides, PowerPoint will decide to move the static guide, not the object, and staying on the subject of static guides: you cannot space the interval at which you want to set static guides. 
4. Color rendering can be a bit off. When give the text and its background shape the same color, you can still read the text on the Mac, but not on the PC. PowerPoint for the Mac handles colors for shapes and text differently.
5. PowerPoint for Mac cannot embed custom fonts (PowerPoint Ninja explains what this is)
6. You cannot insert vector shapes in the Mac version of PowerPoint (see here why this is can be useful), so if you want to adjust the color of a vector diagram, you have to do it in Illustrator and import the illustration as a picture into PowerPoint.

The bottom line: professional presentation designers should check their end product on both machines before shipping it to the client. For the rest of the users (99.9%), people probably will not notice the difference.

Thank you to Pierre Morsa and Magda Maslowska for contributing some of the ideas in this post. Pierre sums up: "There are many good reasons to use a Mac, PowerPoint is not one of them."

Images from Chernobyl

The current crisis at Japan's nuclear plants triggered this morning's NYT article about Chernobyl, which will need to wait for another 300 years before it can be inhabited by humans again.

The confusion and uncertainty experienced by the people in Japan must be similar to the surreal experience I went through here in Israel while unpacking government-issued gas masks and constructing a biological/chemical shelter in one of our bed rooms just before the 2nd Iraq war in 2003. I remember taping the windows during live TV coverage of Tony Blair's speech in the House of Commons advocating military action.

This photo set on Flickr by Tim Suess is both scary and beautiful at the same time.

I think I found the cause of the Office 2011 toolbar bug

I was in the process of designing a beautiful chart on my new Mac when I got too confident and decided to modify the toolbars of PowerPoint 2011 and... lost all my work again (see my previous rant about this bug)

In sbort: if you customize your toolbar in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac, the program will crash as soon as you enter slideshow mode. Googling around reveals that many users have similar problems: corrupt toolbar files that cause crashing. I decided to dig a bit deeper and through a process of trial and error found that the offending customization button are the straight arrow ones that you find in the autoshape menu. The icon of these bars still have the old PowerPoint 2008 look, I think Microsoft forgot to update them.

They are probably not that many geeky PowerPoint users that would customize their toolbar with straight arrow connector buttons so it would have been hard to uncover the bug. :-)

I am forwarding this post to someone in Microsoft I know, but if there are any Microsoft MVPs reading this post, please pass it on and ask Microsoft to fix the bug.

The post that I originally planned to post will to have to wait a bit...

Narrow fonts: Beebas

Some fonts are suitable for small text, some for large text, and some for headlines. Narrow fonts are especially useful for the latter. You can still fit in a lot of information, even for large type sizes. See the differences below. Beebas Neue is a free font that is very space efficient, you can download it here.

Mindmapping on the iPad: iThoughtsHD versus DropMind

Triggered by the iPad touch interface, I started to use mindmapping for the first time in presentation design. Mindmapping is a process in which you jot down ideas and the connections between them quickly, and edit, clean up, and move things around later to get a more organized picture. I must say, it works a lot better than my previous approach: the pencil and a piece of paper. Especially since it is a lot harder to lose that piece of paper with your notes on it.

I purchased 2 iPad apps: iThoughtsHD and DropMind. iThoughtsHD was designed specifically for the iPad, and is the cheaper of the 2 ($10 versus $50 for DropMind). The DropMind app is an extension from an existing suite of desktop and web applications. The latter probably explains why it took a relatively long time for DropMind to come out with the app, a working iOS 4.2 version only appeared last week in the app store.

When reading my impressions remember that I am a light-weight mind mapper, just using it to structure ideas for a presentation. Reading around on the Internet it looks like mindmapping is a whole design approach taking things much further than I do.

For the purpose I use it for, iThoughtsHD works perfectly fine. The interface is straightforward and clean, and it is every easy to export mindmaps to PDF or sync them using a Dropbox account.

DropMind's user interface looks a little bit more sophisticated with more graphical options. When you buy the iPad app, they also offer a perpetual license for the desktop client, and the web app. You can exchange mindmaps between the applications. There is a wide arsenal of tools available that I did not yet have time for to explore. The one drawback I found is that when you export a map to PDF or JPG, the resolution seems to be very low (not an issue with iThoughtsHD). I think this is a bug, or maybe I did not configure the settings correctly).

The bottom line. For basic presentation outline scribbles, iThoughtsHD works just fine and costs a lot less than DropMind. Personally, I tend to favor the DropMind app, because of the cross-platform integration and the ability to start using some of the more sophisticated tools available once I have come up the learning curve (on the condition that they fix the resolution of the exported images).

Let me know your experience with mind mapping and mind mapping software.

No thank you, we will just ask questions

A story. I just finished designing a sales presentation for a client that is pitching in a major mobile-related services tender. I started off with minimalist slides for a standup presentation that would be perfect to support the facts that were all written down in the tender submission documents. Rather than focusing on the details of the system specification, I focused on the track record of the company, the many reference installations, the experience in preparing for a successful launch.

Then came the call: "Don't bother to present, we will email your slides to everyone involved and just use the time to ask some questions."

It is actually understandable. The tender issuer can read product documentation, read web sites, and is overloaded with (the same) facts about the industry from all the companies competing for the tender. It would be have been polite to let a tender candidate speak, but it is not the most efficient use of the time.

So, I u-turned on slide design, as I feared that many of the tender committee participants would not bother to read through the full documentation and would rather rely on a PowerPoint file as preparation for the pitch. I added more slides, and added explanatory text on the slides.

Lesson learned: with these multi-million dollar tenders, stay in close contact with the person organizing the pitch meetings to make sure that you carry the right type of presentation document with you.

Presentation suffering, live

Just searching for "boring presentation" in Twitter gives you an idea of the suffering that presentations are causing right now, wait a few seconds for the tweets to come in.

Clockwise or counter-clockwise

I do not understand software applications that do not use small arrows in their menus for rotating pages 90 degrees clockwise or counter-clockwise. It creates the exact same visual delay as bullet points:

1. Read "clock wise"
2. Imagine clock movement
3. Project movement on image
4. Think: "No I need the other one"
5. Select menu option "counter-clockwise"

A visual shortcut is needed (i.e., a simple arrow)

Visuals are emotional shortcuts

Visual slides are emotional shortcuts. A powerful image or visual concept unlocks something that was already (at least partially) stored in our memory. This scene from the movie Ratatouille (affiliate link)is perfect example: a taste sensation that unlocks a childhood flashback.

I will be speaking in NY 5-6 April [details]

I will be speaking in New York on 5 and 6 April (click the bullets for full details):

• April 5: How to design stunning sales presentations
• April 6: How to design powerful investor presentations

The events will take place from 18:30 to 20:30 at the NYU Stern School of Business. Tickets are $25, but readers of this blog can get a 40% discount by applying promotion code  "ideatransplant".

I am honored to be invited by Sean Black, CEO of SalesCrunch, the organizer of these events. SalesCrunch is a social selling platform in which online presentations play a central role. The business has 3 elements (my seminars are part of #3):

1. CrunchConnect  makes it easy to share sales presentations with prospects. Moreover, it tracks to what extent they are viewed and how effective the presentations are. The service blends web conferencing, presentation sharing, social networking into one platform that salesforces can use to interact with prospective clients.
2. CrunchTrainer uses presentation sharing to create a powerful online salesforce training tool
3. SalesSchool is a community that organizes events about sales-related topics, my 2 seminars are an example of these.

The logic is more important than the number

A claim in a sales presentation: "we will save you $10m over 5 years". A nice statement, but it does not have instant credibility. How can you make it credible?

• The best option: show real case studies of other customers where you managed to pull it off. Not every company has this data ready though (especially startups).
• The second best option: show the logic of you how you got to the number with a simple and transparent multiplication of a few numbers. "We save 10 minutes per procedure, we estimate you do [x] procedures, therefore we get to this cost saving." You shift the debate from arguing about the absolute number, to how your product adds value.

Khan Academy: Prezi in action at TED?

You should watch this TED talk by Salman Khan, a former hedge fund analyst who is now fully devoted to turning the education system upside down (see his Khan Academy). His key concept is to humanize the class room using technology: have kids watch videos at home at their own pace and use the time of the teacher in the class room to provide individual support instead of one-size-fits-all lectures.



Now to Prezi. I think Salman is using it as his presentation engine. I am still not convinced that it is a good large audience presentation tool (see an earlier discussion on whether Prezi is a PowerPoint killer). However, the tool does a good job in visualizing the enormous video library Salman has constructed, and the carefully thought-through construction of the curriculum he is proposing. What do you think?