Slideshare - Upload and Share Slideshows
This has been the pseudocode for my day so far:
while (Cool AWS Stuff In Inbox)
{
Read About It
Visit It
Take A Picture
Blog About It
Delete Email
}
Today's newest find is Slideshare.net, a site for storing and sharing slide shows, powered by Amazon S3. The slides are served up directly from S3, so this image-heavy site probably doesn't have any heavy duty proprietary server infrastructure behind it.
There's some pretty cool stuff in there already, including Paul Kedrosky's Sheer Hype By Desperate Men.
Each slide can have a transcript, and it is easy to navigate to related slide shows, similar slide shows, and other slide shows with the same tag. The site accepts uploads in PowerPoint and Open Office format.
-- Jeff;
Update: The CTO of Slideshare posted a must-read note in the comments!


Heya!
The stuff we're storing on S3 are actually Flash files (swf), rather than images. This is pretty cool, because it means we can use vector graphics to make presentations that can be diplayed on a big screen without losing quality!
It was a big help for us to be able to go live without having to figure out how to serve those files in a scalable fashion. S3 handled that technical challenge for us. We took a techcrunching without any problems at all.
Using S3 also means that our costs increase linearly with usage: we didn't have to pre-invest in expensive hardware. For a cash-strapped startup like us, this is a really big deal.
All in all, great stuff. I can't wait to see what else Amazon has planned!
Jonathan Boutelle (CTO: Slideshare)
Posted by: Jonathan Boutelle | October 25, 2006 at 01:46 PM
This is brilliant! Thanks for sharing.
vkn
My Dhaba
Posted by: VK Narayanan | October 28, 2006 at 09:53 AM