Empressr has been privileged to have users from most every neck of the woods imaginable. The INSANE variety of stories posted every day never ceases to amaze us and reinvigorate our excitement for the application.

Well, beyond business implications, among the largest constituents of all presentation tools are students and teachers. Where once teachers were more apt to use classic educational methods, these days it seems more and more base their entire course plan around presentations they have made.

In fact, many are taking the initiative, getting their students engaged with new programs as they come out.  They are not only using technology to facilitate education but positioning their students to be ahead of the curve.

A perfect example popped up in Empressr today.  Teacher/Empressr user “Iritzel” posted an assignment for his students to review a recent tech article, create a basic Empressr about it, and then use the variety of tools we provide.

Check it out!

In my hast to start the weekend last Friday, I created my Empressr showing the new Adobe Kuler integration on our staging server, which of course is not accessible from the outside. My Bad. So here it is!

Today we are release version 5.3 of Empressr. What’s new is now you can choose color pallets from Adobe’s awesome product/service/social site Kuler.

Here’s a great post from Executive Travel Magazine’s website about some recession minded tips for achieving collaboration without the cost of transportation.

It list Empressr as the #5 tip due to it’s ease of use, integration of both video, audio, and visual aspects, and of course how, thanks to being browser based it allows all sorts of content to freely and easily accessed by parties anywhere on the globe!

Check out the post!

The team here at Empressr LOVE IT when people get excited about the Empressr application!!!

We are always working on making your user experience the BEST possible and making Empressr the best product it can be. Part of that comes from our users feedback; that means you guys!!!

This is a great example from Eldor Germann’s blog Teaching and Technology.  Beyond making us blush, we think he did an AWESOME job of summing up some of our great features like our 3D tranistions, direct import from YouTube, and on-slide image reflections.

Eldon also relates a great experience with tech support from @GlobalCitizen and @BryanThatcher which is something we really take pride in.

All in all its a great read and we highly suggest you check out his blog and the article on Empressr!

Last week while we were in Amsterdam at The Next Web, we released an update to Empressr. In the editor there were just a series of minor bug fixes, the big release was enhancements to the Presenters Dashboard.

The biggest change is how we integrate Twitter.

1. We now highlight questions so that they are easier to identify in the stream, we also have the ability to filter the Tweet stream for only questions if you are doing a Q&A.
2. When you manually launch a tweet to the Empressr presentation we make that tweet sticky on top of the dashboard so that it is easy to close or reference what tweet is on the screen. Launching a new one will close the existing, select the close button and it remove it from the Empressr presentation.

Be afraid, very afraid.

Particularly if your one of those still using file sharing.

Microsoft announced that the infamous PowerPoint program (Office 2003 and earlier) has been exposed to some serious security issues.  In fact, in an alert separate from that of Microsoft, the Denmark based vulnerability research shop Secunia labeled the issue “extremely critical.”

Users who click on malicious files, website links and email attachments trigger malware files on their workstations.  So far attempts to use this have been limited yet targeted.  Further it appears those with high access levels are at the highest risk.

These types of problems are easily avoidable thanks to browser-based programs!

There are numerous online-presentation tools all of which avoid such issues. Everything being embedded on a web page means there is no need to click external links, no need to open attached files, and no need to check with IT every time you wish to launch a presentation someone sends to you.

In the meantime Microsoft plans to “monitor the situation.”

-to learn go to GCN.com

Last week at Web 2.0 Expo #w2e Stowe Boyd @stoweboyd and Oliver Marks @olivermarks used Empressr as their tool to create and present their story on Enterprise 2.0. This presentation is a warm up to the bigger Enterprise 2.0 event that they are presenting in, taking place in Boston June 22-25th. The two took advantage of some of the cool new features, namely the Twitter FrontChannel to spearhead the Q & A session.

Stowe loved it because it gave him a chance to be able to choose the Tweet that was shown on the screen, users loved it because they got a chance to participate in the presentation. Stowe is going to be using Empressr around the world speaking during the next few months, I’ll keep you posted.

The Empressr

The Dashboard

Some of the features are:

• A timer so you can gauge the length or your presentation.
• You can show the hash tag on the presentation so your audience knows what hash to use.
• You can autorun the tweets, or select manual, in this mode you would launch each tweet to the screen.
• Presenter Notes, you see previous, current and next slides, they are also click-able as an additional navigation element.

Update:

A recent post on the Enterprise 2.0 Blog by Stowe Boyd
Open Enterprise 2009: Some Tweets From Web 2.0 Expo

We at Empressr HQ are excited that we will be participating in The Next Web Again this year! We are not planning on having a booth this year but we will be onstage as the presenting partner for the 10 Twitter application presentations. This is cool, what we are doing is Empressr will be the engine for the presentations, we will be using the twitter FrontChannel (name courtesy of @StoweBoyd) during their talk so that the presenters can interact with the audience in Q&A or in just commenting on the presentations.

We haven’t really talked much about the twitter integration with Empressr, we have two different ways to use Twitter. One is you can simply send a twitter message with an embedded link to your Empressr. The other is a bit more complex, when launching into presentation mode, you have an option to open the presenter dashboard on a second monitor. This dashboard has two main elements, presenter notes and a place to log into Twitter, once authenticated, you have options to have your time-line automatically be sent to the screen, overlaying the bottom portion of your presentation, you can also set a hashtag to filter the tweet stream, or you can run it in a completely moderated fashion where you choose the tweets that show up on the screen. The tweets that are shown during your presentation also get recorded to the comment stream for the Empressr presentation so you have the ability to review them at a later date. We think this is pretty sweet.

See you in Amsterdam: The Next Web Conference April 15-17 2009

Follow me @bryanthatcher and follow @empressr