Posts Tagged ‘html5’

SlideShare Evolves into Virtual Online Meetings with Zipcast

Thursday, February 17th, 2011 by admin

As the world’s largest community for sharing presentations, the 45 million users that visit SlideShare every month enjoy powerpoints, PDFs, and documents between professionals and educators. With the launch of its newest service, Zipcast, the site now also provides videos and webinars.

Although virtual meetings are nothing new in this day and age, Zipcast brings its faster and quicker features to the industry. By utilizing HTML5, users can avoid downloading a plug-in to use the service – all it takes a separate tab within the browser.

The features provided with Zipcast make it easier for pitches, presentations and remote talk. Between the slides themselves, a one-way video of the meeting host, a conference call line to provide audio, and a window for text chat, most users have everything they are looking for. Additionally, users have the ability to skip through on their own, should they be bored throughout the presentation.

One of its simplest features is the ease of sharing these meetings. While other services require a login, or meeting organizer to send along the required steps, Zipcast provides a straight-forward link that can be shared between an endless number of users – ultimately increasing the audience and the traffic to the presentation. Another way to increase traffic and add a social twist, the Zipcast website offers a streaming list of current meetings that can easily be viewed and shared, while giving users the option to post to their social channels which presentations they are currently viewing.

While these meetings can be public or private, SlideShare members have a low-cost monthly fee to have password-protected meetings, along with analytics and the option to remove ads.

As the millions of SlideShare users begin to utilize the new upgrades with Zipcast, a major increase in traffic to the community sharing site is anticipated. While online meetings push the threshold on a virtual community, we can only assume what the future of online has in store for us.

HTML5 Paves the Way Towards the Future of the Internet

Wednesday, January 5th, 2011 by admin

Technology never sleeps with the continued evolution of the Internet. And with that, we now have HTML5. Many people probably hear “HTML” tossed around in conversation, and with good reason. This stands for Hyper Text Markup Language and without it the Internet just wouldn’t be the same. HTML5 is the next cycle of the Internet and how it works – so yes, it’s a pretty big deal.

Behind almost every Internet site, you will find HTML. It could be considered the backbone of these sites, and it just got a nice little face-lift. In the previous version, HTML4, it struggled with plug-ins as they created obstacles for multimedia integration. Now with the new HTML5 launch, added features provide a better user experience.

Two of the most anticipated capabilities are its’ media playback and offline storage features. While HTML4 did offer the ability to play music or show a video, a Flash was required. One major issue that came of this was the lack of support from Apple, especially on mobile devices; it quickly dropped the support completely as a way to provide better functionality and reserve battery life. Now with HTML5, sites can directly embed media within the HTML tag such as: “<video>” or “<audio>”, no plug-ins required.

Additionally, its offline storage feature is attracting a lot of attention. As most desktop applications require an Internet connection, HTML5 avoids this obstacle. With the support of Google, users can now create files in Google docs or an email draft that will be automatically synced upon their next sign-on.

HMTL5 also included advanced drag-and-drop features now available in Gmail, that allow users to do just that: drag-and-drop. No more searching through files on your computer to figure out which attachment is correct; find it and drop it into the email message.

Many users may not even realize it, but they are already using HTML5 – browsers such as Safari, Google Chrome, and Firefox 3.6 already support it. The movement from Flash to HTML5 has begun, and time will tell what the future holds. Nothing suggests that Flash will disappear yet, as it is still widely used and supported. However, now is the time to be prepared for the future of the Internet because its already prepared for us.