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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:

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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.

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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.

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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%.

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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).

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