- School District Builds Own Software — By taking a not-for-profit approach and using freely available open-source tools, Saanich officials expect to develop openStudent for under $5 million, with yearly maintenance pegged at less than $1 million. In contrast, the B.C. government says it spent $97 million over the past 10 years on the B.C. enterprise Student Information System — also known as BCeSIS — a provincewide system already slated for replacement.
- Giving a Presentation From an Apple ][ — A co-worker used an iPad to give a presentation. I thought: why take a machine as powerful as an early Cray to do something as low-overhead as display slides? Why not use something with much less computing power? From this asoft_presenter was born. The code is a series of C programs that read text files and generate a large Applesoft BASIC program that actually presents the slides. (via Jim Stogdill)
- AirBnB TechTalks — impressive collection of interesting talks, part of the AirBnB techtalks series.
- Gawker’s Realtime Dashboard — this is not just technically and visually cool, but also food for thought about what they’re choosing to measure and report on in real time (new vs returning split, social engagement, etc.). Does that mean they hope to be able to influence those variables in real time? (via Alex Howard)
"presentations" entries
Four short links: 21 January 2013
School District Saves With Open Source, Apple ][ Presentation Tool, Tech Talks, and Realtime Dashboard
Putting conference distractions to good use
The Donahue app aims to sync conference presenters and audiences.
A new app created by Tim Meaney, partner at Arc90, and Christopher Fahey, founding partner at Behavior Design, taps into and harnesses conference distraction. Here's how it works.
Ditch the jargon and back away from those tired slides
Nancy Duarte on the art of engaging an audience.
Nancy Duarte, author of"slide:ology" and CEO of Duarte Design, says it's time to stop hiding behind business presentations. We need to connect on a human level.
Four short links: 11 February 2010
USB Monitors, Presentation Secrets, Upload Widget, Government Data Flood
- Mimo Monitors — USB-powered external monitors for your laptop or desktop, and you can daisy-chain them for multiple external monitors. Opens the possibility of task-specific monitors (one for chat, one for email, one for shell, one for code, …). Monitors are 7″ (800×480) and there’s even a touchscreen option. (via James Duncan)
- The Secrets of Malcolm Gladwell — how to give a talk like Malcolm Gladwell. A short read and interesting. (via thestrategist)
- Plupload — a nice widget to handle file uploads (drag’n’drop, resizing, etc.). Has backends for Flash, Gears, HTML5, Silverlight, and Yahoo’s BrowserPlus, selects the best that’s available. (via Simon Willison)
- The Coming Data Flood (Sunlight Labs) — Three and a half years after their launch of data.dc.gov They’re looking at incredible exponential growth. Last year they saw more than a doubling of new datasets being released. It isn’t crazy to suspect we’ll see the same exponential curve of data growth coming out of the federal government and other municipalities as they follow suit.
Free The Facts: Critical Issue, Killer Presentation
Dave Gray's Free The Facts presentation is a must-read, must-share for anyone who cares about either science or open access. It's also a masterpiece of presentation economy, and a fantastic demonstration of how to make a text-heavy presentation into something magical. Reminiscent of the work of Michael Wesch. (It's also a fascinating demonstration of the convergence of YouTube, Flickr, and…
Web Meets World: Privacy and the Future of the Cloud
Yesterday I gave a talk to the Privacy Forum in Auckland, New Zealand, titled Web Meets World: Privacy and the Future of the Cloud. The talk was intended as a scene setter for a discussion with the audience, about 70 lawyers, technologists, consultants, and public policy wonks. They responded well to the challenge, and we talked about the nature of…