Powerpoint Presentation Tips
- Introduce the topic. Why should audience pay attention to this presentation ?
- Provide the facts, context.
- Whenever possible use the 10-20-30 rule. 10 slides, 20 minutes, 30 as the font size (from Guy Kawasaki)
- Contrast the colors – background and foreground.
- Never use fonts that are hard to read.
- Don’t put too much of text (unless its training slides).
- Don’s use more than one picture in a slide.
- If you use pictures or graphs then provide the credits.
- If there are multiple presenters, make sure that there is a natural transition.
- When starting a presentation or ending it, make sure its done gracefully. Don’t do them abruptly.
- Choose examples wisely. Don’t use too many examples that may lead to more questions
- Spell check the content. It seems silly but many presentations has misspelled words.
- Make sure that the sentences are complete. The presentation slide deck itself should be self-sustaining.
- If you use a graph/statistic make sure that you describe what it is. Don’t just put the graph there.
- Acknowledgement and source of the facts, figures and graphs should be mentioned “somewhere” in presentation.
- Finally, provide takeaways, summary.
Good luck for your next presentation! Remember that everyone wants to present like Steve Jobs. But there is/was only one.
I would be glad to hear other view points.
Goodreads give away : IBM Rational Team Concert Essentials book
Goodreads Book Giveaway
Ibm Rational Team Concert 2 Essentials
by Suresh Krishna
Giveaway ends December 25, 2011.
See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.
Honeymoon with iPhone 4S is over!
From iPhone 3GS it was a natural upgrade for me to 4S. I was so happy to be getting the 4S mainly because of the camera and #Siri. But not anymore.
- Battery drains too quick. I keep it charging the whole night and when i take it to office the next day morning, it lasts only till 3.00pm to 5.00pm. Yeah.. yeah.. i did remove the location based services and all.
- iOS 5 hangs frequently. Unfortunately this is the least I would expect from #Apple’s software.
- When you are on a call and then you open Camera, my phone almost always goes into “dead” mode. The only way it comes back is when all the batter is drained. Till that time I can not even force restart. None of the buttons work.
- At times I see funny scroll of numbers on the event notifications. I attached my company outlook to my 4S and during certain situations, the time on the event notification message just rolls randomly.
- I was very exited about Siri initially but not anymore. Especially, for my Indian-English accent, Siri is not the best voice recognition software that i would rely on. Instead, when i use my wife’s #Samsung #Galaxy S 2, I thought #GoogleVoice has a better capability than Siri.
May be i should have got the Samsung’s Galaxy S 2 ? I am still confused.
RIP Mr.Jobs
My family remembers Steve Jobs in many ways…
- Connecting the dots. Highly inspirational (and philosophical) beyond religions and beliefs : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1R-jKKp3NA
- When rest of the world is still on Sony walkman, Apple/Steve introduced iPod.
- Touch sensitivity, cool factor, utility, usability in one device – iPhone. Unfortunately even after 5 years, no one could introduce a similar phone.
- The inspiration and motivation to achieve excellence through design.
- How can a business do the best possible through design, technology, innovation and sexiness to demand higher margins.
- The design effectiveness gets validated when my daughter at 1.5 started playing games on iPhone effortlessly.
- Introduction of iPad made it even more difficult for the desktop and laptop manufacturers. How do they catch up with the Apple’s futuristic designs and usability.
- How else our kids have watched great moves from Pixar and taken them to dream world.
- Beyond any religious beliefs, i remember what he said… “You can only connect dots in the past and not in the future. If you do what you love, they somehow get connected”.
Steve is definitely larger than life! He has showed us that we could change the world with design and technology. Lets take it forward!
A new chapter in life (Aug 2011)
My exciting journey with Oracle has come to an end yesterday. I am glad to have so much fun helping customers adopting the Oracle Technologies and Applications. I am taking my passion on building platforms, SDKs and working with Agile teams a step further to the cloud. Starting tomorrow (Aug 15th 2011) is going to be a chapter in my life and I am joining Skire in Menlo Park, CA. Incidentally, India’s independence day falls on Aug 15th too 
This move will bring me more closer to the customers, product strategy and cloud. I will be helping the Skire to move forward and accelerate the next generation platform in cloud. I will post more updates on the company and how i am doing there in a while. But for now, i am very excited to see the new team and especially with the great Product Management Team at Skire.
For those who is interested about the company…
Skire Home : www.skire.com
Skire Platform : http://www.skire.com/index.php/platform/
About Skire : http://www.skire.com/index.php/company/about/
Good Boss & Bad Boss (mindmap)
A quick mindmap on the good boss and bad boss. Do you guys feel the same too ? Please leave me your feedback if i missed something.
My take on Android phone (Samsung Infuse) vs. iOS (iPhone 3gs)
I have been using iPhone since 2007 and thought of moving to Android. Unfortunately, this did not happen. After 2 days of playing with the Samsung Infuse with Android, I returned this device in favor of iPhone 4.
Background : In the past 4 years many called me Google and Apple fan boy. In general, I am passionate about how technology changes our lives and Google and Apple definitely had their share in this world. With Google, I am a daily user of the GMail, Calendar, Docs, Chrome, Google TV, Sites, Picasa, Blogs, Youtube, Reader and especially in the past few days the Google+. As a user, i get much more out of Google for “free” (?). Yes, people might argue on this “free” stuff from Google, but that’s a separate discussion. The first time I bought an Apple product is in 2007 ( I know, i was introduced to Apple pretty late) with iPhone (EDGE). Then I moved from EDGE -> 3G -> 3GS, in spite of expensive upgrades from AT&T and Apple.
All these years, I used products from Apple and Google enough to form some opinions and evangelize my thoughts. The fact that Google was my “window” to Internet world and Apple was the inventor of “cool” gadgets, I never had them as competitors. Until the introduction of the Android mobile platform from Google. With Apple’s iPhone – “Software and Hardware engineered to work together” and with Google’s Android – “Mobile OS became a commodity”. With Android, technically any mobile phone manufacturer can come forward and start using the Android OS with their hardware.
I hated iPhone : Yes, right from 2007, so many people around me have this iPhone thingy that i slowly started getting “sick” of iPhone. Every year, there is a new release and if you don’t upgrade, you look like an old 70′s guy these days. As a user, I would like to have unique phone (at least in thoughts) or at least a phone that’s popular and not many people have. With iPhone, this sense of “premium” is lost. I live in Bay Area and when you walk in the streets of San Francisco/San Jose, you will know what i am talking about. However, in the mean while, i never realized how i got used to the iPhone UX. Its not just the user interface, but the elements of hardware in iPhone is what i think is the novelty.
I loved Android : For many doing businesses, it is a intuitive part to think about “giving choices” to users. Yes, Android did that. You could choose from LG, Samsung, HTC and others as mobile vendors and any mobile carrier at least in US. The Android applications are raising in numbers fast enough to touch or surpass the iOS applications and of course many are *free*. Many phones that had Android OS had better features “on paper” compared to a iPhone 3GS or 4G. e.g. Camera resolution quality, front/back camera, video quality, integration with Google Apps and others. And then, I love technology and I am a java programmer. So, i thought that going to Android would give me the “virtual” power of choice, software upgrades, and play with the applications as and when i want.
Something Changed : Last week (06/30/2011), i got my Samsung Infuse and played with it for few days. Its a great phone with 4.5″ Super AMOLED Plus screen looked great with emails, pictures and in general the screen looks very bright and lovable. Its very light and thin that i can carry it in my jeans. Believe me, for the screen size of the phone, I expected a lot of weight. The 8MP still camera and 720p HD video camera are very usable as if i don’t need any camcorder or digital camera (which i love that idea). But it was not the same when i used it for the most what i do – email and phone calls. The biggest WIN for the iPhone is that i got used to it unconsciously to the “simplistic” approach of the UX.
Rest is a history and please see the below video to see why i say “UX of iPhone is a lot better than Samsung Infuse phone”. Again, these are my views. Not many people may use the phone as i use and not many may see UX differences. When i used Samsung Infuse, i realized what i love about iPhone and what i got used to with Apple’s UX design. Its not just the software but the hardware too (a single button interaction for all the 4 generations of phone).
I love both the companies Apple and Google for their novel products and the ability to bring in a lot of innovation. I love Android technology and iPhone for my personal use.
Rational Team Concert Book is featured on Jazz.net website
My recent book IBM Rational Team Concert 2 Essentials has been featured on the jazz.net site. Check this out if you are having problems with integrating several development tools and have a hard time in implementing the process in your team. Rational Team Concert and Jazz Platform answers these issues by having a Application Life Cycle Platform and integrating Process in to the tools.
Below is on the http://jazz.net/library/ website.
Below is on the Jazz.net website.
Agile Development in Rational Team Concert
Scrum is a concrete discipline of Agile software engineering. While Agile methodologies place emphasis on the principles and benefits of the iterative and incremental software development, Scrum constitutes a concrete set of management practices for highly flexible and productive teams.
Scrum is a popular form of Agile methodology practiced these days. In this article, the BookManager application uses the Scrum development template.
Please read more at … http://www.packtpub.com/article/ibm-rational-team-concert-agile-development
Cost vs Price – The bottom line
For a consumer both the terms “Cost” and “Price” seems to be synonymous. Very often we see friends asking “What’s the cost of that Mp3 Player?” or simply put “What’s the cost”. While we use it inter-changeably, it has a huge significance for businesses.
Price refers to the amount of money that you have to give up to acquire a good or service. e.g. price of an iPhone 3GSwith 2 year contract is $200
Cost is the amount of money the that a manufacturer incurred to produce that good or service.e.g. Cost of an iPhone for Apple to manufacture it is $150
So, what’s this difference? As you can imagine it is simple and/or complex. It has the following components hidden in it and depending on the organization and the good it is selling.
- Profit
- Value Chain Costs
- Supply Chain Costs
- Govt. Regulation Costs
- others..
Below is a very simplified demonstration of how the $ gets distributed. As you see the Price = Cost + others. Again, this gets more complicated when you do Cost based vs. Value based pricing.
So, why are we talk about it. As a manager when you talk about increasing the profits, you are basically talking about TWO things.
- Decreasing the Cost (Cost of Goods Sold)
- Increasing the Profit Margins (possibly by increasing the Price and NOT the Cost)
Note : Above graphic illustrations are completely “imaginary”. Clearly, the real allocations will/may vary.