I had a lot of fun yesterday at the Institute of Fundraising National Convention (#iofnc). A quick thank you to everyone who came to the talk I did with David Knights from Anthony Nolan.

The slides from the presentation and the relevant research are available to download. I also put the presentation on slideshare but, after several failed attempts to upload, what’s there is a bit font-mangled. Come on slideshare – sort it out

I was fortunate enough to see Guy Kawasaki on his feet yesterday, talking about the Art of The Startup at Edinburgh Informatics. He’s a Silicon Valley venture capitalist and ex Macintosh brand evangelist. He also part of the team behind Alltop, the online magazine/news aggregation site that answers the question “What’s happening?”

Over the course of an hour he talked through 10 themes that summarise his view on what makes for a successful start-up. There’s little point in me recounting in detail what he said because Ewan McIntosh was live blogging and has pretty much nailed it on the 38 minutes blog.

So enough about the content, what about the delivery?

This was most definitely a gig, and had several things in common with the musical kind (all good).

1) VIP, access all areas style wristband.

2) Guy played a great set. It was clearly not the first time he’s spoken on this topic, but his familiarity with his material made for a compelling 60 minutes. He was most certainly not going through the motions.

3) His material was good. Interesting points, well made, with examples that were new to everyone. Peppered with candid and personal anecdotal asides. The equivalent of a continuous series of crowd-pleasers with no duff tracks off an unfamiliar new album.

4) If his ten themes were the equivalent of ten songs, then the linking banter between them was spontaneous and tailored to the audience. He wasn’t afraid to go off piste for a while.

5) He’s a natural front man. OK so there was no band behind him but he owned the stage.

6) His slides were his supporting act and he was the headliner. Like all really good presentations, this was about him not his Powerpoint. How many times do you see the reverse in action?

7) Encore. Courtesy of Mike Coulter in the Q&A, we were treated to an encore in which he speculated on the monetisation of Twitter. He suggested that Tweets could be treated like text messages. Say 250 free Tweets per month and $5 for more than that. The audience seemed to react well to this idea.

I presented to the West Lothian eBusiness Group yesterday. The subject was Blogging for Business, based mainly on our own experiences here on the Blonde blog. A nicer, more appreciative audience you’d struggle to find.

It was also an opportunity to road test Prezi – a potential antidote to death by Powerpoint.

Prezi describes itself as the “zooming presentation editor”. It aims to avoid the linear narrative (stuck on rails) progression of Powerpoint by using a zooming approach to navigation. It really is a case of zooming pictures painting a thousand words because I won’t be able to do it justice by describing it here. The site is well worth a visit because the simple visual tutorials will quickly give you a good idea of what it’s all about. Basically, though, it avoids the use of slides by arranging the content of your presentation on an “infinite landscape”. You then progress through by zooming in and out

My Blogging for Business presentation can be viewed here. You can follow the path I created by clicking the next arrow, or zoom out using the magnifying glass and click on any element that interests you.

Based on the interactive tutorials I was able to get up to speed and put a presentation together in less than a morning. The main drawback, as far as I can tell, being that some elements of presentation structure are hard to change retrospectively. There’s an Undo button, but undoing everything after the component you want to change to get back to it can be frustrating to say the least. The secret, as with all presentations, is good planning before you start creating.

I have upgraded to a Pro account which gives access to a desktop version (the first presentation was put together on the Prezi site) and a huge amount of extra memory space on their site.

Well worth a look and a play.