Presentation Slide Mastery: No Dull PowerPoint

Two major skills are essential for business: writing and presenting. The first, requires entire blogs and books dedicated to the art and craft. The latter, is through practice, experience, and inspiration. Most blogs rarely feature slides as a medium for presenting information. However, I recently ran into SlideShare, a youtube of slides on a variety of topics. It’s a great resource for inspiration

The presentation below is a great introduction on designing better slides. Follow through to SlideShare to find more presentations, on a variety of topics. There are many great presentations and many bad horrible presentations.

See the Steve Jobs iPhone presentation after the jump.

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Building Networks Can Help You Enhance Your Marketability

As a young professional, building a personal portfolio of knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSA) is important to sell yourself for a promotion or for a new position elsewhere. Young and inexperienced Gen Y’s have to quickly build those KSA’s or risk being stuck in a rut. How else can we leverage our expertise in social networking and web tools?

Building Networks is More Than Just LinkedIN

Building an online network is easy. Just point, click, and wait. But with Twitter, Facebook status updates, posts, pictures, applications, it just seems to be a shouting match. Eventually, it’s questionably spam.

As we go from one job to another job, we bring more and more experience and proprietary knowledge. We learn company methodologies, techniques, and materials. While I don’t condone “stealing” confidential information and jumping ship to share company secrets, your thought process is inspired by the newfound knowledge. Furthermore, during your tenure at a company, build relationships, both with your internal staff and with external clients as well. Foster those relationships, even if you go work somewhere else.

With this “black book” of contacts, you will be much more valuable to the new firm. It provides business relationships and possible new clients. Alternatively, those contacts can be resources for you to tap into for subject matter knowledge.

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Don’t Regret Buying iPhone 1.0

What’s new with the new 3G iPhone? Well, 3G of course and GPS. There’s a list of slightly incremental enhancements such as the black back, flush head phone jack, rounder shape, and so forth; but there’s still a few key missing features:

  1. More disk space – same 8 and 16 gig versions
  2. Better camera – same 2MP, no autofocus camera (which is almost useless for advanced features)
  3. No video recording – which might be able to be upgraded via software
  4. No MMS – are you serious?
  5. Copy and paste – a huge mistake but again, possible via software upgrade.

What is good about the 3G iPhone?

Other than the 3G and GPS as stated above, it has better battery life. 10 hours on 2G vs. 8 hours on old phone; and it has 5 hours on 3G. Oh, one more big thing, ATT is subsidizing it. The iPhone is now:

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An “Owner’s Manual” … for Your Blog?

As a shareholder of Google, I read the Owners Manual for Google Shareholders. Both Larry and SergeyGoogle Logo emulated the same technique that Warren Buffett employed with Berkshire Hathaway in his owner’s manual for shareholders. Essentially, it is a manifesto of their guiding principals for their business. It solidifies their long-term approach to business decisions and their pledge to their shareholders. It is also where the infamous phase, Don’t be Evil, came about:

We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served—as shareholders and in all other ways—by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains. This is an important aspect of our culture and is broadly shared within the company.

How does this translate into starting a blog?

The ease and low barriers to entry inevitably equates to lower quality of information, often rippling throughout the blogosphere. Content is often copied in summary or literally in plagiarisms, and pasted into the thousands of blogs on the Internet. As such, it brings to question the validity and quality of information presented in these publications.

Here is a short list, but not complete, of ways that having an Owner’s Manual for a blog may help bring forth credibility to a blog:

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Google Reader is the Tivo of Blogs

I stopped using browser bookmarks. Reading blogs by visiting the site is comparable to watching TV live. Using an RSS reader, particularly Google Reader, I am able to pull the posts and “aggregate” them into one simple to use interface. While this isn’t any particularly new technology, the new site designed for the iPhone is amazing.

The site is still in beta so visiting Google Reader on your iPhone won’t get you there. You’ll have to type in this link directly: http://www.google.com/reader/i/

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Hybrids aren’t economically feasible…yet

The Toyota Prius promises 48 miles per gallon using a hybrid of gas and electric engine. The advance technology allows it to achieve a much higher fuel efficiency. With the price of gas approaching $4.00 a gallon with no end in sight, sales to Prius’ have been rising. The reason for buying a Prius should be the desire to stick it to the Middle East and reduce gasoline consumption. However, it’s not a legitimate reason for saving money.

With some basic back of the envelop calculations (figuratively), the Prius is clearly not economically efficient. To make this determination, I took the base price of the Prius at $21,100 and the base price of the comparable vehicle, the Toyota Corolla at $15,250. The Prius is really just a fancy Corola. The difference: $5,850. That’s the “premium” you pay for sporting the “green” vehicle. Okay, gas is really expensive you say. It’ll pay for itself. Assuming that the average driver drives 12,000 miles a year and keeps the vehicle for five years, I found the following:

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