Andrew Jaffe pointed me to prezi.com. It looks like a new way of making presentations. Andrew made an example here in just a couple of minutes. Here is one about Coca-Cola.
Things I like:
- I go to a lot of Beamer/Powerpoint talks, these presentations at least look different and could be interesting.
- It is cool how it is easy to arrange slides in a non-linear order and potentially avoid clicking forward a few slides then back a few slides
- I also like how the “global picture” of the talk can be shown in a display.
Things I’m not worried about:
- All the zooming and panning might start to drive people nuts, like slide transitions in powerpoint.
- There is serious potential for confusing presentations, organization is already a problem with some talks.
- There is potential for people to spend too much time on making the prezi look cool and less on content.
Update: From the comments Abhijit points out that David Smith put together a presentation on the R ecosystem using Prezi. Check it out here.