Google Launches Powerpoint Competition, Web Ads for Mobile Devices

fullstop writes "Google has finally launched their online presentation tool to complete its office offerings at Google Docs." Relatedly several users have also mentioned that Google plans to start selling ads for cell phone-targeted websites. "The company said that its new product, AdSense for Mobile, would establish a cellphone advertising network in which Google would match ads with the content of mobile Web pages, much as it does online. Other Internet giants, including Yahoo and AOLTime Warner, as well as some start-ups, have also created advertising networks tailored for mobile phones."

Comments

Not shabby

[TrippTDF]

The Presentation tool isn't bad- simple interface, but there's a limited number of themes, and it looks like no way to create your own, other than uploading an existing PowerPoint deck. It also doesn't support transitions. However, the integrated sharing ability is what really make this a winner. If anyone is shaking in their boots, it should be WebEx, as this makes it much easier to view a deck than using their software.

Still, it seems that the adoption of Google's tools is pretty slow. Most people I talk to are still skeptical of them.

Re:Not shabby

[pato101]

The thing comes with a "save as zip" option, which saves the html, images and javascript files, cleanly classified into folders, that allow the presentation to be shown completely offline.

Example is reasonably impressive

[Random BedHead Ed]

If you don't want to RTFA about the presentation app, the example presentation is still reasonably worth checking out. It's impressively like viewing a PowerPoint doc in a browser. The ability to easily publish on the web like this is kinda neat, and the source code of the presentation is surprisingly tidy.

Re:too risky, no multi-display presenter tools

[Kristoffer Lunden]

About the first point - assuming there is nothing wrong with how the presentation looks and works so it's a fair replacement in that area - Google Gears combined with exporting.

About the second point, you are absolutely correct - when it comes to that small small subset of people who actually use that functionality. I've seen it demonstrated but can't remember one single live occasion when someone has actually used it. Usually the presenter stands in the middle in front of the presentation and if he/she needs to sync the talk they just glance over their shoulder. Many even make a show of pointing to stuff on the big screen while they do the talk. Oh, I'm sure it is used, and you can cite multiple occasions, but I don't see that as a common case.

Offline backups

[teslatug]

Google really needs to offer an easy way to do offline backups. Right now I use their POP3 functionality to back up my emails, but this is a manual process. And the only way to save these documents is to do so one by one. They need a desktop client to synchronize an offline copy. Maybe a Firefox extension (though their Google Sync extension is pretty badly implemented as it loses bookmarks all the time for me) or maybe some Java app (so as to be cross platform), but either way there is no way I would use Google Docs without being able to easily have my documents. What happens if Google Docs is unavailable, Google decides to close it, or I just plainly want to migrate off of it? If I had thousands of documents stored there I would find myself in a really painful situation.

Haha, I'm a loser

[temcat]

transitional -> transitive

Online collaborations

[jpflip]

A large number of the complaints on this thread seem to amount to "I would never trust the internet for a presentation! Give me my trusty laptop any day!" I think these folks are missing the point of this product.

I work on a scientific collaboration that spans several institutions across the country. We use weekly teleconferences for specialized subgroups and occasional online meetings of the whole group to keep coordinated on what each other are doing. For these occasions we're always dealing with distributing presentations over the internet in a reasonable way. We usually post PDFs or HTML on the web, but we've had problems in the past with our own servers going down during telecons. We're also often editing our talks at the last minute, and we can have problems where someone downloads their PDFs before one of us posts his or her last changes.

For collaborations like ours this is a very intriguing product. I trust Google's servers more than my group's, to be honest, and we can always post backups on our own server. A consistent-looking presentation that I could easily edit right up to the last minute (or even collaboratively) is appealing. I grant that there are other solutions which may be better in some cases and that I'd probably never use this for a conference talk, but it's still intriguing for groups in our situation.

Re:Offline work?

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Alrighty. 'll give yout he pros and cons version:

Pros:

- Typically I work across 3 different computers. Work, Home desktop, Home laptop. Also, from time to time, I'm asked to use other machines at work. GDocs is central and easy to get to. For this reason, I often use it for scratch stuff. For example: I recently purchased a computer. I created a spreadsheet at home with all the components + prices I wanted. Then, at work, one of my coworkers told me about a brand of product I'd probably like better. I spent a few minutes on my lunch break looking into it, agreed with him, and modified that spreadsheet. (It wouldn't have occured to me to upload that spreadsheet from home to my server since I didn't expect to want to modify it from work.)

- I can 'publish' documents, which means they basically go up on the web as HTML and people can view them. I get a kick out of this because it's like quickly putting up a web page. I can write out a doc, attach pics, etc, and just hit 'Publish', then I get a link I can send people.

- I've never personally used this, but GDocs supports collaboration. Other people can edit the documents if you enable this. You can also restrict who can look at it, and there's even mention of using RSS propogation for it. I haven't personally used that but I imagine there's some interesting uses for this.

- GDocs automatically saves every few seconds. That makes it hard to lose a lot of data if your net connection suddenly dies. It also shows you the changes/revisions you've made over the life of the document. As a matter of fact, I just checked, and all those revisions from stuff I've written last Xmas are there. (I think Word has a similar feature, but I'm not familiar with it.)

- You can Google Search through your docs. I've never really used that, but that feature is absolutely killer with email.

- If you're a fan of how GMail organizes its emails, you're in for a treat. In my opinion, it's a lot more intuitive than storing files in a folder structure. (Without losing the benefits of the file structure.) Actually, I think this is what Microsoft had in mind when they were talking about the new file system for Vista that they never got around to finishing.

Cons:

- Yeah... if the net breaks, GDocs is useless. I've bumped into that a couple of times.

- This shouldn't be a 'con' so much as just a little warning to you. I don't do a lot of formal docs with GDocs. I don't know how effective its page layout tools are. If you need to do something that's print sensitive, I cannot guarantee you that it'd satisfactorally replace Office.

- Excel's interface is definitely more repsonsive than GDoc's Spreadsheets. For simple stuff it's good, but I've ached for Excel on more than one occasion.

- I can export as XLS, DOC, etc. But I cannot guarantee you the quality of the save. Since I personally haven't tried it, I listed this as a con instead of a pro.

- If you hate how GMail stores its docs, you won't like this much.

- Microsoft's integration is a lot better. You can copy/paste from an Excel Spreadsheet to a Word Doc, and it'll retain the cells, formulas, etc. No such luck with Google Docs.

- Office's UI is just more intuitive. GDocs' isn't so bad it's unusable, but I do ache for it occasionally. Spell check, for example, is a lot friendlier in Office. It's rather basic in GDocs. Oh well.

I hope that's interesting to you. :)