Tweet Former Microsoft MD invests in authorSTREAM

authorSTREAM the world's second largest online PowerPoint sharing platform and a Slideshare competitor has closed its first round of funding. This funding round was led by Rajan Anandan, former Managing Director of Microsoft India, and one of India’s most active angel investor. Rajan Anandan has also joined authorSTREAM’s Board of Directors.

authorSTREAM which is far ahead of Slideshare in terms of  presentation output and provide unique features like PowerPoint to video, Present Live with a support for narrations, videos and animations has once again stressed that their main focus is on presentations and this funding will help them achieve near 100% replica of PowerPoint slideshow on the web. "This funding will help us grow authorSTREAM bigger and faster, provide seamless PowerPoint sharing experience on desktops and mobile devices, both asynchronously and in real-time. It will also help us engineer near 100% replica of PowerPoint slideshows on the web - the way their authors intended them to be with animations and multimedia elements.",  said authorSTREAM CEO – Harman Singh.

In term of numbers, every month more than 100,000 presentations are uploaded on authorSTREAM. Read full press release here.

Tweet Funding time for online presentation websites

We all have seen success of video sharing websites and now it seems to be turn of presentation websites. There are so many online presentation creation and sharing websites. Most of them have pretty good content as well as user base. SlideRocket and Prezi are two such presentation players who have raised quite good funding over the period.

Prezi lets you break away from the slide-by-slide approach of most presentations. Instead, it allows you to create non-linear presentations where you can zoom in and out of a visual map containing words, links, images, videos, etc. Prezi is quite similar to pptPlex, a Microsoft Office Labs project . Prezi has raised an undisclosed amount in Series A financing from Scandinavian VC firm Sunstone Capital and is adding Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey to its roster of company advisors.

SlideRocket, the online presentation creation solution, announced it received $5 million in Series B funding and that Chuck Dietrich, a former General Manager & Vice President at salesforce.com, has joined the company as CEO.

SlideRocket, similar to 280Slides and Google presentations is a cloud based service which lets you create slideshows online without the need of PowerPoint software. It also lets you collaborate and work in sync with your colleagues. Easy collaboration is also a main highlight of Microsoft PowerPoint 2010.

It will be interesting to see how much market share Microsoft will be able to grab with so many presentation players already in market with ample user base.