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"Whether presenter or presentee, many of us have sustained minutes of stinging silence as human and machine grapple to cooperate. Such is the cliche of pairing laptops with projectors for the purpose of narrating PowerPoint slides in a somewhat restless room. But a new, pocket-sized adapter may replace all those hassles with smart simplicity. The WeKast is designed to be plug and play, instantly casting presentations from a mobile device without the need of Wi-Fi, cables, or a laptop. Wireless HDMI cast devices have been out for a few years. We've seen the Apple TV and have reviewed Google's Chromecast, the Roku Streaming Stick, and Amazon's Fire TV Stick. Each are useful and powerful in their own right - at least when it concerns home media and entertainment. Although possible to use such devices for professional boardroom presentations, the process may end up more time-consuming and complicated than not. Unlike those other wireless adapters, WeKast is designed with the business market in mind. Simply plug WeKast into any HDMI or VGA port (e.g. TVs, projectors), connect a smartphone or tablet via mobile app (available for Android and iOS), and then select any presentation to start. Since WeKast provides its own Wi-Fi and doesn't require internet access, users won't need to worry about restricted, unreliable, or nonexistent wireless networks. The WeKast mobile app handles the launch and remote control of content to be presented. With smartphone in hand, users can more openly engage audiences than by leaning over a laptop. Files are meant to be uploaded onto mobile devices first, be it from a computer, Google Drive, or Dropbox account. No data is stored on the WeKast dongle itself, and communication is encrypted through a secure connection."

" The easiest way to create HTML5 presentations and animated videos. Professional looking results in just 5 minutes Infinite canvas & unlimited Zoom and Pan effect Smooth transition animation with 3D Camera. Tons of pre-designed templates and styles. Build-in animation tools with dynamic characters. Create, share, and present from anywhere. Custom Whiteboard Animation, Scribe&Explainer Videos Tons of Advanced Features(details)"

"Domo has a new upgraded app, called "The Business Cloud," announced at today's Domopalooza event in Salt Lake City. It takes all of the data that Domo has gotten so good at importing from other business apps and lays it all out in a slick interface. James says it lets a customer manage literally every aspect of their business, in real-time.  This souped-up system has been in the works since Domo was founded in 2010, James says, and has taken over $500 million in R&D investment. "

"eady a major player in enterprise file sharing and hosting, Dropbox is launching a public version of its new Paper service to make a name for itself among collaborative productivity suite providers such as Google Docs and Microsoft's Office 365. Paper, which has been available in beta since last year, is aiming to win converts from the big names in the space with a user interface that the company said makes collaboration between coworkers easier. The cloud-based platform will allow users to manage shared documents by assigning different tasks and deadlines to various collaborators. Making Collaboration Easier The service also includes a variety of features designed to make collaboration between team members easier, no matter where in the world they're located. A Paper app is coming to iOS and Android devices to enable users to work on documents even while offline. The Web interface, meanwhile, is currently available in 21 languages, an important feature for multi-lingual teams. These new capabilities join other recent additions such as presentation mode, a feature that turns documents into presentation slides and integration with Google Calendar to make it easier for teams to create and share notes. Paper has already reached early enterprise adopters such as InVision, Ben & Jerry's, Shopify, Campaign Monitor, Getaround and Patreon, according to Dropbox. But the company appears to be positioning Paper to steal market share away from Google Docs and Microsoft Office 365. New Business Plans Going head-to-head with such well-established players will likely be a tall order. To help make Paper more attractive to its enterprise clients, Dropbox is also making its file hosting environment more enterprise-friendly. The latest version of the Web interface, which was released in conjunction with Paper, is more streamlined and potentially easier to navigate. Dropbox has also introduced a new feature that allows users to see others on their teams who have viewed their s

"The Best of Microsoft Productivity If you're like me when you work, you want to really get things done. We need to be able to seamlessly move between our work and personal needs. Building on our success of more than 200 million devices running Windows 10, the Lumia 650 puts Microsoft's smooth, responsive and most productive OS in your pocket. Our business customers continue to send great feedback on Windows 10 and are compelled by the mobility of the Windows experience across devices. Lumia 650 runs the latest Microsoft Office apps right out of the box, allowing you to create and edit documents on-the-go and sync them to the cloud via OneDrive. It's also perfect for picking up on email and an important presentation during your commute. And with Cortana, your very own personal assistant, you're always organized and prepared for the day ahead."

"Want to learn how to plan, publish, and promote viral infographics? You're in the right place. But let's start by making something clear: If you're thinking, "I'm not a natural designer" or "I've never made an infographic before," you're not alone. However, instead of making excuses, answer this: Have you ever made a presentation in PowerPoint or Keynote? Great. Believe it or not, you've got the skills to make an infographic. And now that I know you can do this, I'm here to walk you through the seven steps that I take when creating infographics. The plan is to cover each of those steps in detail so you know exactly how to create and launch infographics for your business as well. Let's dive in. How to Create Shareable Infographics Using PowerPoint or Keynote"

"Pilarinos is one of dozens of startup founders who have graduated from a two-year-old boot camp run by First Round, a venture-capital firm that focuses on early-stage tech startups. The two- to six-week program drills its cadets in important lessons that are part Sales 101, part human psychology seminar, and part tutorials on practical tasks like creating slide decks. The goal is to help startup founders, who may have spent months or years engrossed in arcane product details, sell their vision to the people with the money. And in a funding environment in which the easy money has dried up, the CEO boot camp, known as Pitch Assist, could become increasingly critical as startups fight to secure more financing. Going straight for the jugular The coaches at the boot camp, who are basically First Round partners, don't pull any punches. On the first day, CEOs are put on the spot and made to answer the burning questions investors will have - especially the tough questions for which the CEOs might not yet have answers. "Some of the questions are the sort of holes in the business," First Round partner Bill Trenchard said. "No company is perfect. There's always a weak point in the architecture." First Round First Round normally does only seed rounds of fund-raising. Pitch Assist helps those companies go on to raise their next round. Young CEOs aren't used to talking about those holes. No one starts a sales call by going over their weaknesses. When pitching investors, however, those weak points have to be addressed head-on in the presentation. "If you try to play games or try to hide things, any reasonable investor will notice," Brett Berson, First Round's vice president of platform, said. "And once you've lost that credibility, there's no coming back from that." Berson estimates that it takes about two hours of work to go through each question, but after that startup founders can step back and see the overall picture. The questions become the plot points - the m

By Mitch DeFelice Recent announcements from Google and Microsoft regarding machine-learning capabilities will provide the ability to transform corporate Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system from a simple unstructured data repository into an oracle of corporate data. In their book Smart Customer Stupid Companies…Why Only Intelligent Companies Will Thrive, and How to Be One of Them - the authors Michael Hinshaw and Bruce Kasanoff articulate how customers are becoming "smarter" with technology advancements.  The book presents a sound case that companies that do not evolve with their customers will become irrelevant. There have been two recent announcements that have occurred (November 9th, 2015 and November 12th, 2015 respectively) that have the potential to turn the metaphorical phase "Stupid Companies" to mean literally that.

"April 21, 2016: In February of last year, Fortune magazine writers Erin Griffith and Dan Primack declared 2015 "The Age of the Unicorns" noting - "Fortune counts more than 80 startups that have been valued at $1 billion or more by venture capitalists." By January of 2016, that number had ballooned to 229. One key to this population growth has been the remarkable ease of the Unicorn fundraising process: Pick a new valuation well above your last one, put together a presentation deck, solicit offers, and watch the hundreds of million of dollars flow into your bank account. Twelve to eighteen months later, you hit the road and do it again - super simple. While not obvious on the surface, there has been a fundamental sea-change in the investment community that has made the incremental Unicorn investment a substantially more dangerous and complicated practice. All Unicorn participants - founders, company employees, venture investors and their limited partners (LPs) - are seeing their fortunes put at risk from the very nature of the Unicorn phenomenon itself. The pressures of lofty paper valuations, massive burn rates (and the subsequent need for more cash), and unprecedented low levels of IPOs and M&A, have created a complex and unique circumstance that many Unicorn CEOs and investors are ill-prepared to navigate."

"Enterprise adoption of Microsoft's Office 365 suite is very high, according to a recent poll of IT decision makers by market researcher Gartner Inc. About 78 percent of the survey's participants reported their organizations are either currently using or planning to use Office 365 software and services. That figure represents a 13 percentage-point increase from the results of Gartner's last Office 365 study, which was published back in 2014. The results were described in Web presentation Thursday by Larry Cannell, an analyst with Gartner's Technical Professionals Group."

An amazing article about Marc Andressen and his a16z VC firm on Sand Hill Road. Covers the entire story and provides a great insight into how Silicon Valley and VC industry work. It's long, but nevertheless a must read. Very enjoyable! " At his firm, Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capitalist routinely lays out "what will happen in the next ten, twenty, thirty years." CREDIT PHOTOGRAPH BY JOE PUGLIESE On a bright October morning, Suhail Doshi drove to Silicon Valley in his parents' Honda Civic, carrying a laptop with a twelve-slide presentation that was surely worth at least fifty million dollars. Doshi, the twenty-six-year-old C.E.O. of a data-analytics startup called Mixpanel, had come from San Francisco to Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, where many of the world's most prestigious venture-capital firms cluster, to pitch Andreessen Horowitz, the road's newest and most unusual firm. Inside the offices, he stood at the head of a massive beechwood conference table to address the firm's deal team and its seven general partners-the men who venture the money, take a seat on the board, and fire the entrepreneur if things go wrong. Marc Andreessen, the firm's co-founder, fixed his gaze on Doshi as he disinfected his germless hands with a sanitizing wipe. Andreessen is forty-three years old and six feet five inches tall, with a cranium so large, bald, and oblong that you can't help but think of words like "jumbo" and "Grade A." Two decades ago, he was the animating spirit of Netscape, the Web browser that launched the Internet boom. In many respects, he is the quintessential Silicon Valley venture capitalist: an imposing, fortyish, long-celebrated white man. (Forbes's Midas List of the top hundred V.C.s includes just five women.) But, whereas most V.C.s maintain a casual-Friday vibe, Andreessen seethes with beliefs. He's an evangelist for the church of technology, afire to reorder life as we know it. He believes that tech products will soon

"Microsoft quietly updated its Office 2016 Preview apps for early adopters over the past two weeks with a slew of new features the company announced in a round-up Wednesday. The new features let people who have installed the public beta of Microsoft's forthcoming productivity suite update try out real-time collaboration capabilities that will be rolling out more broadly later this year, along with other changes that make it easier to find particular functions and gather contextual information about what they're working on. IT Resume Makeover: How to add flavor to a bland resume Don't count on your 'plain vanilla' resume to get you noticed - your resume needs a personal flavor to READ NOW Word 2016 now has support for Live Typing, which allows desktop users to see the edits their colleagues are making to a shared document in real time. It builds on a feature unveiled last month that let users see where colleagues were working within a document, but didn't immediately show the words they added. Similar features should be coming to other Office apps with future updates, so that people can work in real time on Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations. Microsoft already offers a real-time, co-authoring feature inside Office Online, but this update brings those capabilities onto the desktop for the first time within Microsoft's productivity suite. It will be possible for people to collaborate in real time across Office Online and Office on the desktop when Office 2016 launches later this year, but until then, users will have to choose between collaborating inside a Web app or inside a desktop app. That feature set puts Office in closer competition with Google's productivity suite, which has grown in popularity and features robust support for real-time collaboration. "

"What is an app? Most people think of them as the little, self-contained bits of software on our phones. They have shiny icons, and we get them through app stores. Sometimes they are useful. Often they are amusing distractions. But there is another way to think about apps in terms of the data they consume and create. In this view, apps are what will turn the global network of smartphones into a massively distributed computing platform. Everything we know about user experience still applies in this world, but reducing friction for each user is only part of the problem. The bigger issue becomes how to coordinate the data bouncing around between all of these devices and servers in the cloud. This coordination is the primary problem that the JavaScript app platform Meteor has set itself to solve. In order to scale, the solution must be simple. Skilled app developers and data scientists are already in scarce supply. Software may be eating the world, as Marc Andreessen says, but not, in fact, nearly fast enough to keep pace with global problems it could be solving. Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), has invested in both Meteor's A and B rounds (Matrix Partners led the B round with total funding now more than $30 million). Pointing to the road not taken by the browser company he co-founded, Andreessen has said "Meteor is what we should have built in 1994 at Netscape.""

"SaaS/subscription businesses are much more complex than traditional businesses, and SaaS performance cannot be measured in the same way as traditional businesses are measured. Based on a talk given at the SaaStr Annual Conference in San Francisco, this slide deck offers a comprehensive and detailed look at the key metrics that are needed to understand and optimize a SaaS business, and how these can be used to drive SaaS success. This presentation includes information on: An intro to SaaS metrics Unit economics LTV and churn: An in-depth look Variable pricing axes Months to recover CAC The primary unit of growth: Sales Understanding public SaaS companies"

"Microsoft has held its dominance in the software market in part because it is the go-to provider for many business solutions. Word, Excel and Powerpoint are essential pieces of software across almost any industry, whether they are used for presentations and memos or tracking expenses and marketing products. However, enterprise apps from competitors are growing in popularity, according to a new report from Okta, with apps and services filling gaps left by Microsoft's products. That doesn't mean Microsoft is losing ground, though. In fact, Okta found that Google Apps and Microsoft Office 365 use overlaps at more than 40 percent of companies."

"Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) posted the following to its Office blog on Tuesday: This month, we're announcing several new Office 365 investments to help people better collaborate. This includes the much anticipated Skype for Business Mac Preview, new Yammer external groups and improvements in our Office Mobile apps on Windows Phone, iOS and Android. Please read on for details. Introducing Skype for Business Mac Preview Today, we are excited to announce the start of the Skype for Business Mac Preview. This new app offers a simple yet powerful experience that brings our Mac customers into the modern era of Skype for Business. "

"Microsoft loves subscriptions. Moving a corporate customer from "transactional" purchases of Office -- the once-traditional practice of purchasing one-time, perpetual licenses that let workers use the suite as long as their firms want -- to Office 365 rent-not-buy subscriptions results in almost a doubling of revenue for Microsoft. "Over the lifetime, the increased reach, the increased frequency in this example, as well as some yield, adding some incremental services, results in a 1.8 times lifetime value of that user in the transition," said CFO Amy Hood in a meeting with Wall Street last week."

"I've purchased the latest Microsoft Office for every computer I've owned. It was a foregone conclusion. Dating back to when Word was white type on a blue screen, I used it so often I could recite the shortcuts. (Thesaurus? Shift-F7.) But Microsoft has run out of reasons to keep me paying. How we get work done on computers has fundamentally changed. For the new Office 2016, Microsoft wants you to pay $150 for collaborative capabilities that others already do better, free. It brings little new to people who rely on deep features in Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook. Its mediocrity led me to a larger conclusion: It's time for Microsoft to press Control-Alt-Delete on the whole concept of Office. My relationship with Office started to sour as smartphones carried my work everywhere while my Office files stayed in the cubicle. I began emailing myself instead of fretting about scattered .doc files. Google ran with the work-anywhere idea early. Its free Web-based word processor and spreadsheet allow people in different locations to edit a document together. With Google Docs and Sheets, there's no more emailing drafts back and forth."

The articles about Charles Jolley and Strobe continue.  This time it's ReadWriteWeb.  They do a much better job explaining Strobe and the business model Strobe seeks to implement.  IMHO, Strobe's concept for mitigating the exchange of data across server domains could be ODBC for Cloud Productivity. ODBC and OLE are of course inter-application processes essential to the desktop productivity environment and the creation of compound documents.  I'll try to contact Charles and discuss this. "One of the big reasons I left [Apple] is because I really believe that the next great app ecosystem for mobile especially, but also for PCs and television, is going to be built around HTML5," Jolley tells RWW. "If you look at the people who are building mobile apps today, 70% of those people will say they want to use HTML5. But a lot of them don't make it to market, except for a few large companies like Amazon and Financial Times, most people aren't able to deliver HTML5 apps." The Apple platform for apps delivery is rich and compelling, Jolley points out. Unlike an ordinary "open" platform that, almost by definition now, is all self-service, Apple provides direct, personal business services to help developers organize themselves and get on their feet, even if their employer is already recognized around the world. Then Apple provides hosting and deployment services, managing user entitlements and licenses. It creates an ecosystem and then nourishes the entities that live within it, and that's why Apple's platform works as well as it does. "Apple makes it very, very easy for someone to build an app and take it to market. You have these small groups of one or two people who can create businesses around them. And today with HTML5, that's simply not possible," says Jolley. "Even though there's a huge benefit to HTML5 - you can be in any app store, you can go direct to the consumers, you can build any kind of business model you want - if you're going to reach all the 1.2 billion p

"Hey there, Slack. This won't be easy, but it's for the best. As you and I both know, things started out so wonderfully. Me with my exploding inbox, you with your (very sexy) ambition to make email obsolete. Only, I don't know if we're so good for each other, after all. Or, more to the point, I don't know if firing up a relationship with you ever really fixed what was broken in my other one to begin with. Everyone knows email and I had our issues. Email started as a frisky exploration into a whole new world and quickly escalated to a scale beyond anyone's expectations. Next thing I knew, email and I had not only put a ring on it, we'd bought a minivan and moved into a little place in the suburbs. Was it rushed? Sure. I think if we'd known just how big the relationship was going to become, email and I would have set things up very differently from the start. Still, a commitment's a commitment, and we'd settled into a routine we could at least call our own. Then, out of nowhere, here you come riding into my life like a goddamned Clint Eastwood straight out of Bridges of Madison County. The personality! The colors! You were all promises, rose petals, and sex appeal. And SO much more responsive to my needs. Soon, we were messaging every day. It wasn't long until it was hard to think of a time I'd ever gotten things done without you. "