Prezi business
Being a certified Prezi Expert truly has its benefits. It takes some high quality prezi designs and you will have to spread the prezi religion more often than a priest spreads the words of the bible, but prezis favor in return is worth every bit it.
The annual visit to the Prezi HQ in Budapest is an exciting event and it usually provides us with some great insights and previews regarding updates to come.
Announcing Prezi Business
This year however they had a big surprise for us. We were about to kick of the first expert session when we received a press release about Prezi launching an all new tool called Prezi Business. From that point on we knew what the two days in Budapest were going to look like.
A proud Prezi CEO Peter Arvai
First person to speak was Prezis founder and CEO Peter Arvai. He looked like a proud magician still enjoying the response on his surprise trick. He showed us a steady growth of the regular Prezi tool (75m users at this point!) before talking about the increased usage of Prezi amongst business professionals and sales teams in particular. This explained the massive decision to create an all new business tool like Prezi Business. The prezi team now refers to ever growing traditional Prezi as "Prezi Core".
Prezi founder and visionary Adam Somlai Fischer.
Next up was Adam Somlai Fisher. A true creative with a clear vision on presenting in a future perspective. He is an unique man because he has the tools and skills to turn his ideas into actual products. A powerful skill that brings Prezi to unprecedented (or should we say unprezidented) heights. The coolest part of his Prezi Business presentation was the comparison of his very first Prezi back in 2007 and the design principles of Prezi Business. It still comes down to a single thing.
Conversational Presenting
Prezi Expert program supervisor and the organizer of the Budapest event Spencer Waldron told us about the power of conversational presenting and why it is revolutionizing presenting as is. Simply put, why still present like it's 1996 while Prezi is reaching out to you with a tool that allows you to communicate like actual human beings are supposed to do. Make it a conversation by randomly click a slide of interest.
The Prezi Business Software, a first impressions.
After seeing three Prezi Business presentations we noticed some cool new stuff immediately. A small summary before we start talking about our user experience.
The first things that caught our eyes while watching a presentation in presenter mode;
Zoom reveal: when zooming in, the traditional overview disappears and a new layer appears.
HTML5: much smoother running transitions and blazing fast loading. RIP Flash, finally.
Prezi/live. Presenters are now able to stream a presentation using a simple prezi/live/username sharing link.
Fade Outs. Something hardcore prezi users have been begging for ever since fade ins (called Animations) were introduced back in 2013.
Circles. Circles, circles everywhere. It looks like Prezi Business is all about getting your content in a smart structure of bubbles.
In-depth and hands-on Prezi Business review.
Time to get our hands dirty!
A short introduction by the developers of Prezi Business already showed us the following big new features in edit mode:
Prezi Business Analytics
The new tool is all about getting the most out of your teams presentations. Prezi Business Analytics is a very cool feature that will show you how your presentations, slides and colleagues perform. It looks and feels much like gamification of presenting.
Slack integration
Collaborating just became even easier by using Slacks messaging and file sharing services while inside the editing mode.
Top Menu: Prezi is growing up by wisely ditching the creative menu bars and go for a more common top menu bar. This will definitely help companies and professionals to get used to Prezi Business.
Prezi Smart Structure and Circles
Back to the circles. In edit-mode the circle structure turns out to be the actual framework of any presentation. Lines show you how the circles are connected and therewith replace the traditional Prezi path. Circles and lines are easily added, dragged and dropped.
Creating our first couple of slides and editing our first pieces of text felt very familiar but also smoother.
For now the Prezi team decided business users will always start with a template. This template however is fully customizable and blank a starting point will be introduced soon. The result, its isn't hard to understand how this tools works and presentations can be created blazing fast. Both were a top priority for Prezi and they really nailed it with Prezi Business.
What's not to like about Prezi Business
There's a lot of new and very great stuff going on. Too much to dive into every detail if you ask us. We did however dislike a couple things that we consider to be business presentation basics and are yet to be added to Prezi business:
Inserting movies in Prezi Business
For now Prezi Business only supports Youtube. Having just this solution for video is not going to satisfy the business professionals needs. Inserting and playing movies offline is a must, period. Prezi’s answer "Top priority so we expect to see this added asap."
Speakernotes in Prezi Business
This will continue to be something on top of our wish list. It looks like Prezi is not going to add this to either Prezi Core of Prezi Business anytime soon.
Inserting Custom Fonts in Prezi Business
Something regular users are not able to do and this isn't going to change with Prezi Business. A big must-have however considering the brand guidelines most organizations have. Luckily we can help you out with this while creating a custom designed Prezi Business presentation for you. Together with Prezi we can get your font pop up in your organizations presentation by uploading it via de Prezi servers.
Inserting excel Spreadsheets in Prezi Business
Playing with facts and figures by importing excel sheets will remain something of the long term future.
Bugs and instability
Prezi is well aware of the fact the new tool isn't bug-free and lacks some stability every ones in a while. However, for a product launched a day before out testing sessions the tool performed amazingly well. To give you an indication, after two days of pushing the tool to its limits we weren't able to find a bug the prezi team wasn't already working on. Thanks to role playing and involving all 250+ prezi employees, the company tested every scenario and feature possible.
Pricing of Prezi Business
Prezi was really talking business when asked about pricing. A single license will cost $600,- a year. A huge increase compared to the $159,- for a Prezi (Core) license. When compared to the enterprise solutions competitors offer, the price is actually very reasonable.
What to expect from Prezi Business in the near future?
A lot of (automatic) updates to further improve and stabilize the tool during the months to come. Thanks to two week sprints, Prezi will be able to move very fast. Prezi combines this with the ambition to integrate more business solutions anytime. Also note there's enough ammunition left to run an impactful and highly targeted marketing campaign during the next 18 months. So in short, it really like Prezi is about to really shuffle the cards in the (corporate) presentation industry this time. They finally showed us their teeth and they're planning to eat the competition alive.
Conclusion
Prezi Business has the potential of not being a presentation tool but an actual presentation platform providing its users with crucial data on how to improve their presentation materials and increase impact. The ability to easily introduce the principle of conversational presenting will hopefully have a positive effect on this data. If your organizations is looking for a way to start taking presentations seriously, start using Prezi Business, now! If you're an individual professional, you are not going to benefit from most of the new features. It's still a newborn tool but we're confident it will grow up fast.
Want to get started with Prezi Business?
At this point Prezi Business can't be purchased online so just give us a call or send us a mail and we'll be happy to hook you up.