Canonical
on 16 January 2012
While we were sprinting in Budapest, we had the opportunity to meet the team responsible for such an interesting and inspiring product. We have in fact been lucky enough, thanks to some interesting connections, to be invited at Prezi’s! Of course this only after a hard day of work! 😉
Prezi is a presentation tool which will make your PowerPoint presentations look embarrassing.
The back-end of Prezi is unsurprisingly powered by Ubuntu but, regardless of what it is under the hood, Prezi deserves the spotlight in its own right.
We visited their offices with a delegation of designers and cloud engineers, not only to discuss our products, but also to exchange stories and ideas. We were welcomed very warmly with beers and pizzas in their office, which is, especially architecturally speaking, very inspiring (lots of indoor green).
Prezi is a web application and uses a zoom and pan metaphor to move from a slide to another, it basically produces a ZUI (Zoomable User Interface). This not only allows you to be more creative but gives your slides more “context”, making them part of a bigger picture.
While Prezi is not an open-source project as we know it, and still requires Flash Player, it encourages the sharing of your prezis source.
Some of the functionalities, e.g. the typography, can seem quite limiting but overall the editing is very straight forward and the result can be very, very, effective!
For the purpose of the meeting I quickly put together a prezi and shamefully showed it to the real experts!
This presentation is targeted at people who never heard about Ubuntu, taking advantage of our beautiful logo (font included).
If you want to see what Prezi is capable of, have a look to this presentation their team put together:
Internally we have other tools that we have to use for collaboration purposes, but it is clear that Prezi is definitely a powerful medium and, after having talked to the creators, I can guarantee you it will keep improving (and also moving to different platforms).
