Month: May 2007

Found & Read: Awesome!

jonathanboutelle1 Comment

The new found and read blog is an amazing resource for startup folk. The recent series on vesting hacks has been incredibly useful.
The site uses an innovative approach where members can suggest topics or stories, and the community votes on whether they would like to read that article. The best ideas are then turned into articles. It gives the site a real feeling of community, and makes sure that the articles are laser-focussed on the needs of that community.
Found & Read is powered by public square, Christina Wodtke’s cool new CMS, which makes this kind of open-source editorial process super-easy.

Meet Henry (and Charlie, and Josh and…)

jonathanboutelle

A few weeks ago, a really cool presentation (“Meet Henry“) was uploaded to slideshare. It was a pitch for Ethos3 Communications, told through the introduction of two characters (Henry and Erica). Henry is the stereotyped MBA: Erica (the protagonist) kicks his ass because she uses Ethos Communication.
I don’t even know what Ethos3 is, but the slides were really cool. They stood by themselves: they don’t need a presenter to be effective. The presentation was so effective that Guy Kawasaki and the other celebrity judges on the “Worlds Best Presentation Contest” gave it 2nd prize.

The interesting thing is that the presentation seems to have spawned it’s own genre. Soon after that presentation was uploaded to slideshare, Scott Gavin uploaded “Meet Charlie“. Meet Charlie is a nice introduction to Enterprise Web 2.0, told in the same style as Meet Henry. In fact, Scott credited “Meet Henry” in the description.

Now there’s a french translation of meet charlie, and meet josh, a pitch for Union College. These presentations are built for the web, not for live talks. They tell a story using simple graphics and words, and they’re pretty effective. Neat!