Last week I scribled some thoughts on presentation slides, and got some very good comments. Thanks!
One comment referred to Guy Kawasaki and something he wrote blogged last year: The 10/20/30 Rule of Powerpoint:

a PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points.

He also writes:

As a venture capitalist, I have to listen to hundreds of entrepreneurs pitch their companies. Most of these pitches are crap: sixty slides about a “patent pending,” “first mover advantage,” “all we have to do is get 1% of the people in China to buy our product” startup. These pitches are so lousy that I’m losing my hearing, there’s a constant ringing in my ear, and every once in while the world starts spinning.

I’m not a venture capitalist, but I can easily see that that’s the truth (plus I like it when people actually say something is “crap” when it is ;-). However, I do wonder about these startups spending time on patents and venture capital. It’s overhead. Definitely not their core business, they’re diverting resources from actually getting to market and truly exploiting the “first mover advantage”.

Contrarily, Greg Gianforte of RightNow Technologies did it all without VC, and he’s doing just fine. He wrote a book about how he (and others) did it: Bootstrapping Your Business: Start And Grow a Successful Company With Almost No Money.
I think there are good lessons there, particularly for Web 2.0 and OpenSource-based companies (either developing or using): “Be smart and fast, instead of drooling over VC” (my words ;-).

Some of the companies out there have really interesting ideas, but absolutely no business model. Somehow they got VC anyway…. I don’t know if I should respect that accomplishment, or consider whether VCs are perhaps heading towards a bust again. In the best case, the VCs are betting on a lot of different things, knowing that only some will survive and pay off. So, congrats to you, startup! You are now actually someone’s lottery ticket! How’s your business going?

Did you realise that… having fewer slides for a presentation actually is more difficult than having lots of slides?

Difficult in the sense of more work also… and I notice that most speakers are lazy; hence you get to see slideshows where people read from their own slides slower than you do. So I always wonder what such speakers are actually doing there… if I get those slides anyway, they’re not adding anything, are they? Perhaps someone could record it and make a podcast, but no need for the audience, really.

I have a few talks that are less than 10 slides, including first and last pages. I always use the first page to introduce the topic, my name and such, and possibly the event – and no, I don’t even need to look back at my own slide when I say “hi, I’m Arjen…” ;-) The last page wraps things up asking for questions and such, possibly some more contact info and resource links.

Such a small deck of slides is good for a 45-60 minutes session, easily. They merely illustrate what I’m saying. I “make up” what I say on the spot, based on prior sessions and any feedback from the audience. For some talks I have some notes that I hold in my hand (I like to move around while talking). Of course, the more I do a presentation on a certain topic, the more slick the session will be ;-)

Sessions with some code examples may need more slides, but again it depends on what the purpose of the slides is… will the code actually provide more insight in the topic during the talk? Will the attendees get a copy anyway? Could it be a separate handout, or could they just get a URL to get the code? Lots of options there.

Generally, I reckon the old rule of about “1 slide per 5 minutes” still holds.

Every time I’m travelling (for a conference, or teaching a training course), I wonder how the hotel operators envisage the use of the iron and ironing board.

The problem is of course that one actually needs to plug in the iron. But finding a socket in a place near where you can sensibly place the ironing board…. it’s just one of those very curious things.

Interesting… Slidy by Dave Raggett.

Despite it being a pest, PowerPoint is of course still “the standard”. Yes, Apple’s Keynote is very nice. OpenOffice.org just clones PowerPoint and thus suffers from the same problems… the main issues I have: maintenance, collaboration, and reusing components.

With a decent system that uses XHTML as its format, distributed revision control would sort out the maintenance and collaboration, and as one would be able to chop things up, that deals with re-use (and single source for one component that exists in multiple presentations). Nice. Haven’t (yet) looked at this in detail, but it seems more sensible than some other frameworks that have been created earlier.
Simple is good!

This interesting write-up was brought to my attention. It’s about user interfaces, and the author (Hugh Fisher) believes there is compelling historical evidence to suggest that on Linux we need to get a grip on a single user interface, or else lose out completely. He notes that various specific other platforms that have had multiple GUIs in the past, each all lost to a third platform.

Your own thoughts on this? Feel free to comment and discuss!