SlideShare Opens “The World’s Best Presentation Contest 2008″

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SlideShare Opens “The World’s Best Presentation Contest 2008″
Winners Selected by Industry Luminaries Guy Kawasaki, Nancy Duarte, Garr Reynolds and Bert Decker

SlideShare.net, the world’s largest community for sharing presentations, today launched The World’s Best Presentation Contest 2008. The judges include a renowned group of presentation development experts including venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki, design consultants Nancy Duarte and Garr Reynolds, and communications specialist, Bert Decker.

The World’s Best Presentation Contest is an annual competition open to all individuals and organizations, recognizing the most insightful and uniquely designed digital slide presentations. To participate in the challenge, contestants can upload their presentation files to SlideShare.net, and people from across the world will vote for their favorites. Judges will choose the winners from among the top voted presentations. Contest entries can be uploaded until July 30, 2008, and results will be announced on August 6, 2008.
“All you ever hear about PowerPoint presentations is that they suck. Here’s your chance to prove the naysayers wrong. Show us your best stuff,” said Guy Kawasaki, who is a judge and co-organizer of the contest.

Four luminaries from the world of presentation design and coaching will be judging the contest:

• Guy Kawasaki is a managing director of Garage Technology Ventures, and founder of internet start-ups – Truemors.com and Alltop.com. He is also the author of eight books including The Art of the Start.
• Nancy Duarte is a principle of Duarte Design, a global leader in business presentations whose clients include Adobe, Cisco, Citrix & HP. Her firm has also worked with Al Gore for his award winning documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.”
• Bert Decker from Decker Communications is author of the best selling book You’ve Got To Be Believed To Be Heard. He is a frequent commentator about Presidential debates on NBC’s Today Show.
• Garr Reynolds is the founder and director of Design Matters Japan and the author of the bestselling book Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design.

Last year, the World’s Best Presentation Contest received more than 400 entries and thousands of votes. The contest unearthed presentation gems such as “Shift Happens” and “Meet Henry” which have become viral hits on the web and have spawned a whole new genre of web-only presentations that are made for SlideShare.

This year, the contest also includes categories like Business, Technology, Educational, Creative/Offbeat, Picture Slideshows, and About Me. Contest participants have a chance to win several prizes. The first, second and third prizes are a MacBook Air, Amazon Kindle and iPod Nano respectively. Winners in each category will receive an iPod Touch.

“We wanted to recognize the breadth of topics that the SlideShare community is passionate about and will also award prizes to the best entries in six individual categories. We are excited to uncover the presentation hits for 2008. If you’ve got a killer slide deck, this might be your chance to make it big!” said Rashmi Sinha, CEO, SlideShare.