May 8th, 2008
KinetiCast - online presentation and promotional tracking
Update: KinetiCast can do PowerPoint imports but you can’t edit them. I was looking at the “preview” mode in the file sharing screen but when you create a presentation you can import slides from PowerPoint.
With the meme about presentation tools and SlideShare yesterday I thought now was as good a time as ever to cover KinetiCast, a company in the online presentation space that I chatted with a couple of weeks ago. One of the things that makes KinetiCast unique is that they very consciously didn’t target the Web 2.0 world and instead started going after paying customers in areas like real estate, and the financial industry. I don’t know what their revenue numbers look like but there seem to be a number of paying customers.
The application is based on Flex and has some good features that revolve around managing a lot of presentations and tracking how well they do. You can set up email campaigns with a link back to the presentation and then analytical tools let you track how many people viewed the presentations and when they stopped looking at them. It includes the ability to save contacts and a hook into Salesforce would be good here.
The actual presentation creator is interesting but it isn’t quite as full featured as Ajax or Flash counterparts like Zoho Show or Sliderocket. It has most of the basics that you’d expect including the ability to add video, upload images, etc. Transition editing or any kind of advanced editing is limited. (Updated:) You can import power point presentations but there is no way to edit the content directly in the tool. They end up as basic images right now which works, but most of the presentation applications on the market offer the ability to import and then edit PPT presentations.
Overall it’s a good tool. The shortcomings in the editor are mitigated a bit by the fact that they have a lot of good tracking and managing of presentations. When taken as a whole, this is a quality way to promote your product and see how well it’s doing. As a standalone presentation creator it falls short. You can check out a demo here and they allow you to try it free for 15 days.
Ryan Stewart, a Rich Internet Application developer and industry analyst, recently joined Adobe's Platform Team as a Rich Internet Application Evangelist. full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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