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.

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

Super cute @Marlooz, originally uploaded by stevenvanwel.

Prolific Dutch video blogger shows off her MacBook Pro emblazoned with an Empressr stickr

A video interview of Mike talking about Empressr.
Go here to read the entire post of “The Next Web in Amsterdam”