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It’s not too often I get com­pletely wowed by a new piece of tech­no­logy but Prezi has com­pletely bowled me over.

In a nut­shell, Prezi is a Flash-based present­a­tion sys­tem that allows users to cre­ate incred­ibly dynamic present­a­tions. Present­a­tions where you can zoom in and out across a large area (no slides), cre­ate motion paths, embed images and video and do things that pre­vi­ously needed a pretty com­pet­ent Flash developer and a whole chunk of time. It kicks tra­di­tional slide­ware way into touch.

And it is very, very easy.

Here’s a quick snapshot:

[youtube=http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=oIJ2cH9EyhA]

Prezi is cur­rently in private beta but I got to spend a bit of time this after­noon play­ing with it. I took my recent writ­ing academy deck (which you can see on Slide­share here) and put it into Prezi. You can see the res­ult here (as long as I’ve got the shar­ing right) – simply click on the right arrow at the bot­tom right of the screen to move through the presentation).

While I’ve gone a bit zoom-tastic, con­sider this took just a couple of hours and required that I only had to watch a few 1 minute videos to work out how to do it. And I can down­load a final ver­sion of the present­a­tion as a stan­dalone file.

There are lim­it­a­tions in terms of fonts and col­ours at the moment (which the developers are work­ing on) but even as it stands, it is very cool.

So there you go, zero to fan­boy in a single afternoon.

I can’t remem­ber a worse year than 2009. Every news­mon­ger has told me how bad it will be before it even star­ted. The world eco­nomy has expired like an untied fest­ive bal­loon. Envir­on­mental issues are threat­en­ing civil­iz­a­tion. What can improve the status quo?

I spend most of my time in Lon­don, which is an infernally dif­fi­cult city to sur­vive in. Travel dif­fi­culties, hous­ing costs, and pop­u­la­tion dens­ity are a few of the chal­lenges that Lon­don­ers endure every day. But the pain is off­set by the cul­tural and eth­nic diversity, which makes this heav­ing met­ro­polis one of the most fas­cin­at­ing cit­ies on the planet.

It’s impossible not to revel in the bub­bling caldron of racial vari­ety that touches every Londoner’s daily life. True, I’m not black, or gay or a Muslim or any other oppressed minor­ity. I don’t know pre­ju­dice and I have never exper­i­enced hatred. And in 2009, why should any­one else? Why is it not pos­sible to see the world’s rain­bow of col­ours and range of reli­gions as a source of joy rather than a reason to go wild and get violent?

Finally Barack Obama has become the Pres­id­ent of the world’s most import­ant coun­try. Unlike his pre­de­cessor, Mr Obama can speak in sen­tences and val­ues détente more than det­on­a­tion. But most inter­est­ing of all is that Mr Obama is a man of mixed race – neither white nor black – a man who can speak to every­one from a broader per­spect­ive than most of us.

We live in a world, fraught with prob­lems. But if we could only work together, for the com­mon good, there is noth­ing we couldn’t fix. All we need, as John Len­non and every reli­gion in the world will tell you, is love.

OK, so I’m prob­ably one of the few people in the world not to see the whole she­bang live but read­ing the tran­script in the paper today I was awe­struck by the writ­ing. It man­aged to be grand without being too gran­di­ose. It felt fresh but still hit the right tone for a world-stage occasion.

There were some beau­ti­ful phrases:

To those who cling to power through cor­rup­tion and deceit and the silen­cing of dis­sent, know that you are on the wrong side of his­tory; but that we will extend a hand if you are will­ing to unclench your fist.

And:

Now, there are some who ques­tion the scale of our ambi­tions – who sug­gest that our sys­tem can­not tol­er­ate too many big plans. Their memor­ies are short. For they have for­got­ten what this coun­try has already done; what free men and women can achieve when ima­gin­a­tion is joined to com­mon pur­pose, and neces­sity to courage.

And:

As we con­sider the road that unfolds before us, we remem­ber with humble grat­it­ude those brave Amer­ic­ans who, at this very hour, patrol far-off deserts and dis­tant moun­tains. They have some­thing to tell us, just as the fallen her­oes who lie in Arling­ton whis­per through the ages.

Lovely stuff.

The speech uses many of the rhet­or­ical rules and yet knows exactly when to break them for effect.

The papers are all count­ing up the most used words – the word ‘ter­ror’ gets just a single men­tion for instance. Of course, online there are bet­ter ways of doing this using the likes of Wordle which pro­duces this:

You can see the ori­ginal (and make your own) here.

And for the word geeks out there, I’ve also done a quick mark-up of the speech itself to pull out some of the tech­niques I find inter­est­ing. You can down­load a PDF here.

The Eco­nom­ist has an inter­est­ing (and reas­on­ably uplift­ing) art­icle com­par­ing the bright shiny new reces­sion of 2009 with the been there, done that tech crash of 2001.

In a nut­shell, the art­icle describes how in 2001 the tech­no­logy industry ‘imploded’ going from 16% growth in 2000 to a 6% decline in 2001. In com­par­ison, For­res­ter pre­dicts IT spend­ing to decline 3% in 2009 – and when cur­rency weight­ing is taken into account this could actu­ally mean an increase of 3%.

Now of course it would be a reck­less per­son who breaks out the Cham­pagne just yet. These are, after all, just pre­dic­tions. But, so far, this time feels dif­fer­ent from 2001. In that year, we had one of our best first quar­ters ever. Then, at the begin­ning of April, everything stopped. And I mean everything. Scary isn’t the word.

So far this year, and we are let’s face it not even out of Janu­ary yet, we’re busy. Cli­ents are kick­ing off new pro­grammes that will see us remain pretty busy into the fore­see­able future. Friends at other B2B agen­cies are report­ing being pretty stacked too.

The Eco­nom­ist art­icle points to the fact that last time round, IT com­pan­ies had argu­ably over­sold to the mar­ket (Mil­len­nium Bug any­one?) and helped inflate a bubble that then burst spec­tac­u­larly. These days, IT depart­ments are less prone to throw­ing money at prob­lems and don’t have the reserves of kit to fall back on. As such, they need to keep invest­ing to deliver against crit­ical busi­ness require­ments (which in places are becom­ing more crit­ical by the day). The art­icle quotes Mark Raskino of Gart­ner as say­ing ‘IT is cer­tainly not sac­rosanct, but fairly low on the list of things to cut.’

The win­ners in all this, accord­ing to the Eco­nom­ist, are likely to be the soft­ware as a ser­vice (SaaS) com­pan­ies and open source soft­ware pro­viders. I’d add in that green tech pro­viders may also do well as long as they can com­mu­nic­ate the cost bene­fits of going green over the per­cep­tion that it is a nice to have lux­ury that boosts com­pan­ies’ CSR activities.

We’ll see if the pre­dic­tions hold true. So much depends on how long this ride will last for and how deep it will go. But, I’d main­tain that tech­no­logy is still one of the crit­ical means for busi­nesses to cre­ate a tan­gible com­pet­it­ive advant­ages. And the tech com­pan­ies that stay the course, who demon­strate their rel­ev­ance and who offer tan­gible bene­fits to cus­tom­ers (not simply hype and jar­gon) will come out strong in the innevit­able upturn.

Just a quick post to point to an inter­est­ing art­icle by Nate Elli­ott at For­res­ter that looks at tag­ging video to gain a high page rank­ing for organic blen­ded res­ults on Google.

This will cer­tainly be a case of get it while it’s hot. Once every­one is doing it, things will get a whole bunch tougher again.

Net­books are big news just now – the ball that ASUS set rolling with the eeeeeeeeeeepc has swept almost all the other laptop man­u­fac­tur­ers along with it (as well as cre­at­ing a few new entrants along the way). With one not­able excep­tion – Apple.

Steve Jobs has been quoted as say­ing that Apple will wait and see how the mar­ket devel­ops. In the mean­time we’ve seen new 17″ Mac­Book Pro’s announced – which are as about as un-netbooky as it’s pos­sible to get in a laptop. Then there are the rather lovely new external screens to go along with the rather lovely Mac­Book Air – both of which our very own Rod Ban­ner has had gra­cing his desk in the office (ah the perks of being the Chairman).

But still, it has to be a mat­ter of when rather than if.

To deliver a truly Apple net­book, the com­pany would need to team up a damn-pretty, user-friendly 3G device with a way for users to work primar­ily online.

The device shouldn’t be a prob­lem – although the ques­tion is whether it would look like a scaled down Mac­Book Air or a scaled up iPhone. Or per­haps a dual-screen clam­shell offer­ing a couple of mul­ti­t­ouch screens that can adapt to dif­fer­ing uses (ok, calm down now). As a side­line, chip-maker Frees­cale has been repor­ted as get­ting ready to ship Apple just the sort of pro­cessor such as device will run on.

The there’s the whole online exper­i­ence part. Cer­tainly, there’s plenty of options already around from Google, Adobe, Zoho etc. But then Apple simply faces the same prob­lem as Microsoft as it kisses a chunk of soft­ware rev­enue good­bye. They will want to deliver a dis­tinct­ively Apple experience.

So it was inter­est­ing to note in yesterday’s announce­ments the new ver­sion of iWork (Apple’s Office clone) which now fea­tures iWork.com, an online shar­ing space – although not yet offer­ing online ver­sions of the soft­ware. Team this up with the MobileMe plat­form and a new stripped down OSX (as prom­ised by the next release Snow Leo­pard) and it gets more inter­est­ing. Then add a net­book App Store (sim­ilar to Linux’s Apt Get fea­ture) and it’s pretty close to being job done.

But when? That’s the real question.