Sliderocket Positions Itself For The Mobile World

Sliderocket (see previous CloudAve coverage), the company that made presentations interesting, announced today the release of HTML 5 media player to help users with iOS devices, especially iPad, deliver their presentations on these devices. With iPad selling in huge numbers, this is a clever move by Sliderocket and I am pretty sure iPad users are going to love it. This move has a potential to change how presentations are done and may even hit the final nail in the coffin of powerpoint.

The Problem

We have a completely different landscape than what we had few years back. The mobile workforce is exploding and smartphones and tablets have replaced laptops as their main work device. Sales presentations have moved from Boardrooms to Bathrooms (yes, literally). The release of smartphones like iPhone and Android started this shift initially and iPad has finished it off, changing the mobile workforce landscape forever. Even an individual professional like me rely on iPad more than Laptop for my travel needs and with the release of version 4.2 of iOS, this is only going to increase further.

It is not just the increase in the use of smartphones and tablets that makes the story but also the mental shift on how and where presentations are done. Today’s CEOs or CIOs don’t mind listening to an impromptu pitch at the airport or the hotel lobby. With this mental shift, the importance of giving the mobile devices and necessary presentation tools in the hands of sales teams becomes all the more important. They should be ready with their presentations whenever (and wherever) the opportunity knocks.

The SaaS era also had a mindshift among the users in the way they do presentations. Many have completely moved away from Powerpoint as a presentation tool to SaaS tools like those from Google and Zoho (disclaimer: Zoho sponsored CloudAve from day one of this blog but this is my personal independent opinion). Sliderocket came in with a completely different take on the presentations and disrupted the market with their vision of more dynamic and interactive presentations.

When Apple introduced iPhone and then iPad, Steve Jobs took it upon himself to keep Flash Player away from these devices. Even though I am not a fan of Jobs’ “draconian approach” to user experience, I do support him on this Flash issue. Even though Adobe is a great company, flash simply sucks. I hated it when I was living with Linux and Windows in my life and I just can’t tolerate it even a bit after I shifted to Mac. The performance degradation on my machines when I use flash has pushed me over the edge many times. With Jobs keeping out Flash from iPad and the popularity of iPad among the mobile workers, it dawned upon the SaaS and other web services vendors that they need to find an alternative to push their services to iPad and other mobile devices.

The Solution

HTML 5 has turned out to be the savior for this problem. Many providers from Youtube to Vimeo to Scribd has embraced HTML 5 to reach the millions of iPad users and, also, other smartphone/tablet users. Even if Android supports flash, no one wants their device to hang or function badly during a crucial presentation. HTML5 seems to be an ideal solution for all these mobile users. With most of the browsers supporting HTML 5 and Microsoft even going out of the way to showcase what they can do with HTML 5 during PDC, it is just a matter of time before SaaS providers and other web services providers move to this technology.

Today’s announcement by Sliderocket (check out Robert Scoble’s video on this) enables businesses to engage audiences and close deals by accessing compelling presentations anytime, anywhere and with any device. SlideRocket is the first to offer such a rich media presentation player, including integrated video playback, 3-D transitions and artistic builds for iPhone and iPad platform. Now Sliderocket users can deliver their awesome presentations using iPhone and iPads without any need to carry a clunky laptop with them. According to Chuck Dietrich, CEO of SlideRocket,

With support for HTML5, our media player takes face-to-face meetings to a new level. Sales teams can effortlessly walk prospects through a presentation complete with captivating visuals when the opportunity is right rather than relying on memory or wasting valuable face time setting up a laptop or struggling with a finicky projector

Conclusion

Whether anyone likes it or not, iPads are seeing large scale adoption inside the enterprises. The trend is going to increase further and further and any SaaS vendor failing to address this trend are bound to have trouble. Sliderocket needs iPad more than vendors from any other category and this move is a welcome move and will help Sliderocket gain more marketshare in the business world.