Zooming presentation platform is showing increasing popularity with professionals
Prezi, a San-Francisco and Budapest-based startup, which makes cloud-based presentation software, announced Wednesday, that it has hit the 5 million user mark, since its 2009 launch. Its global reach is primarily extended to users in the U.S., Colombia, Spain, England and Hungary.
Prezi is the brain-child of Prezi co-founder, Adam Somlai-Fischer, a Hungarian-born architect and visual artist. Sweden-born, Peter Arvay joined the company as CEO in 2008.
In 2010, Gensler Architecture designed the new Facebook campus using Prezi.
Prezi was funded by TED Conferences, as well as Sunstone Capital, in an undisclosed round in 2009.
I asked Peter Arvay, CEO to join VatorNews for a conversation.
Peter, what are you expansion plans to hit the 10 million user mark?
Prezi is
hiring! We are currently growing both our San Francisco and Budapest offices. We are also growing and improving the Prezi product with new features, which will attract new users.
How do you truly differentiate yourself from SlideShare? Besides the zooming component?
The difference is the visual flexibility the "zoomable canvass" provides. In Prezi, you pan and zoom around on a large open canvas instead of using a pre-scripted slide format. This gives you the ability be more creative in how you arrange ideas and show context of ideas in more powerful way then any other presentation software.
I have to ask, what is so great about zooming?
Zooming allows you to get your ideas in relation to one another. Zoom in on a detail, zoom out to show the big picture. The visual interface puts your ideas in context and help illustrate the connections between ideas.
With SlideShare's announcement that it was dropping Flash, are you using HTLM5 , or Flash?
Prezi is currently solely built in Flash. But we are exploring different options, such as HTLM5, as we further develop the Prezi product.
I noticed that you mentioned Chris Anderson in your press release. What is Chris Anderson's role with Prezi?
TED curator Chris Anderson used Prezi in his 2010 TED Global keynote last year "How Web Video Powers Global innovation", and numerous other TED speakers are using Prezi too. The great thing about TED is that our missions are so similar. We’re all about helping people to share ideas, and they are all about ideas worth spreading. We both want to improve the state of the world through sharing more interesting ideas. We appreciate TED's support as an investor in Prezi.
What is the connection with Budapest, Hungary?
Prezi was initially developed by our co-founder, and Hungarian architect and artist Adam Somali-Fischer as an architectural visualization tool.
Adam found that a Zooming User Interface (ZUI) enabled him to present non-linearly: showing the "big picture" overview of his ideas and then zooming freely to the details, depending on how the conversation developed. Since no commercially-available zooming presentation editor existed at the time, each ZUI presentation had to be coded by hand.
So, in order to make ZUI presentations accessible to everyone, Adam, along with Budapest University of Technology professor Peter Halacsy, created a prototype version of Prezi. Then, in 2009, they recruited me. Together we have developed the product and the company.
The five million users, are they in the U.S./Canada, Europe? breakdown of the numbers?
U.S., Colombia, Spain, England and Hungary top list- although we've seen prezis from diverse countries around the globe.. I don't have the exact numbers at the moment.
Additional funding?
We are presently speaking to investors, but cannot name them.
main image: source, Prezi Inc.
Steven Loeb