A high-tech presentation was promised. As I settled in, and the lights dimmed, one of the "old boys" sitting next to me said: "Calm down. He’s just going to do what all these ‘ginks’ do – stand with his back to us and read through PowerPoint slides that are more crammed with words than a dodgy, tourist-trap restaurant’s menu."

I recall being mortified when he was proven correct.

Are we getting better at communicating through presentations? Are the latest gizmos helping or hindering that process? Will the nervous amongst us (which the surveys show is the overwhelming majority of presenters) ever get to a point where we enjoy the experience?

These are some of the thoughts and issues I’ll touch on in this review of presentation technology – along with trends and techniques.

If you are in the travel industry, primarily serving the business traveller, the news is not good; the trend is to digital collaboration – the airplane warrior is being grounded, possibly permanently.

Never mind Donald Trump and The Apprentice, the surveys in the US, UK and Europe indicate that employers want fewer superstars and divas, and more "collaborators".

How about: ‘Collaboration is IT’, to get your attention? As technology converges and every device, even the most basic, now seems to have more and more USB ports, IR, RF and Bluetooth connections, the overall trend is to sharing and co-operation. Interoperability is more than just data exchange.

The message is one which the All Blacks understand; use it or lose it. Quite simply, if what you do on your personal computer cannot be shared with others in a real-time association, you might be advancing your career but you are not advancing the "cause" quickly enough. Gone are the days of iterations of a document moving backwards and forwards around the building. The smart operators are cutting the copies down or removing them completely with real-time collaboration.

As Rob Love, a senior consultant with Smartboard distributor Manzana puts it: "From a technology perspective the second half of this decade will be seen as a period in which technology moved to support collaboration. Whereas for the past five years the computer industry has been focused on providing computing for the individual (PC + laptop + notebook + PDA), the emphasis is now firmly on connectivity, communication and collaboration."

Certainly there is no place for the drone from head office reading you through his slides in this scenario.

Love again: "What makes this possible is the convergence of various technologies. Consumers experience this as computers, computer networks (Internet – but think VPNs, intranets and extranets), software and telephony."

Aside from Windows 2000 and XP – Bridgit (www.smarttech.com), Webex (www.webex.com), Breeze (www.macromedia.com) and many others are facilitating the new trend.

"There is a raft of web-based solutions using the Internet and coupled with voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) technologies which challenge not just the large video conferencing giants (Tandberg, Polycom, Sony, etc), but also the national and international telcos. And, of course there is Skype," says Love.

You can also add that Adobe, with its acquisition of Macromedia earlier this year, is expected to become a dominant "web design and content player" with the marriage of its ‘pdf’ and PhotoShop to the latter’s Flash (already huge) and latest offering, Studio 8.

And there is more bad news for the business travel industry. The latest form of virtual meeting (called "reservationless conferencing") is seen as a step up from the conference call and almost as intimate and direct a contact as a face-to-face meeting. Bridgit (bridge-IT) lends itself to this particularly well.

The good news is that all these solutions are relatively low cost and within the range of small to medium businesses, with the so-called ‘smartboards’ down to $3000, including GST and software. Since larger organisations – looking to cut costs from IT and travel budgets while still boosting productivity – are increasingly going this route, prices are trending down.

But what about the traditional toys that have dominated the presentation and meeting business? It seems projectors still rule – the worldwide projector market grew 19 percent from 2004Q1 to 2005Q1 and overall projector sales increased 29 percent from May to June 2005. That’s healthy growth in anyone’s language.

The driver for this continuing growth has been the need to view computer generated content in groups, in business, and in the education and training sector.

In New Zealand, the Ministry of Education has undertaken a program of negotiating the supply of projectors on behalf of schools, similar to the earlier laptop computers-for-teachers project, with the ultimate goal being a data projector per teacher.

Again, the price movement is down. Projectors can now be classed as a commodity item at the low- to mid-range (Dick Smith, The Warehouse, Noel Leeming, etc). Prices between SVGA and XGA also continue to narrow.

Manufacturers are being forced to add new features to sustain price and competitive edges. The standout features to watch for on new machines are colour and 3D reform. If you are into gimmicks, add a "lens-less" projector to your boardroom. (These projectors sit close to the screen/wall and produce an almost flat tile result without shadow.)

If you are in the "ultra mobile market", or just want to be able to take the projector home to watch the big rugby matches, talk to Plus Vision, Canon, Sony or Epson.

PLUS’s latest projector out this month is the V-339 which continues its theme of producing very light, very small machines. This time, however, it has equipped it with 1300 ANSI lumens of brightness in XGA resolution.

According to James Major, director of Acme Office Supplies, the PLUS distributor, they are "expecting a big take up in the mobile market". At the top end of their range is the U7-137 which is a 3500 ANSI lumen XGA projector with wireless connectivity.

Canon claims to be pushing the other end of the envelope on what it believes is "the best, smallest and brightest, LCOS (liquid crystal on silicone) projector around".

"This little beauty is of a higher quality than LCD and single chip DLP projectors, with a 1000:1 contrast ratio, and what NZ Business readers, in particular, will be pleased about is that it is going for less than eight grand, including GST," says Canon’s business development manager Dave Gee.

Sony has just launched the long-awaited VPL-CX20/VPL-CS20 highly portable and lightweight range of projectors with superior image quality, user-friendly functions and stylish design. The auto setup capabilities also allow for quick and easy setup (previous settings are on auto recall) and shutdown procedures (no noisy fans running post presentation).

Kane Silcock, Sony New Zealand’s project manager, says the 3LCD panel projection technology which integrates portability and strong performance is already proving a winner with small businesses, and sales and marketing executives, with the CS20 retailing for $2799.95 and the CX20 just $700 more.

Epson offers an impressive entry-level multimedia 3LCD projector that has an RRP of around just $1599. It features a new E-TORL lamp which combines an ellipsoidal reflector with an aspherical lens and hemispherical mirror to eliminate leakage and minimise light diffraction. Business people will like its five second start-up and instant shutdown too – and yes, you can take it home to watch the rugby.

Across the projector sector, the reverse of Moore’s Law is still being played out: with each successive increase in performance, capacity, luminance, etc, the prices continue to fall.

On the overall presentation equipment front, the final countdown to LCD screens taking the mantle of the "now" technology from plasma has dropped to single figures. If you want to sound informed on the subject, casually drop into your conversations with those you seek to impress, that "once the ‘tile’ sizes break through the next barrier, it is game-on".

If you really want to show off, you can speculate on the imminent arrival of "organic LED" or OLED. It’s currently being grown into plastics that will roll up like a mat. Palm Pilot is already effecting quantum leap developments with it, and it will be the medium for the interactive newspaper/magazine the world has been waiting for.

It’s a case of back to the future with the trend to ‘touch’. Some two decades after the Control Data Plato computer-based education and training system introduced the touch screen, surveys in the US and Europe show that nearly 90 percent of 18 to 34 year olds believe the immediate future is touch, with nearly three quarters of European automation customers saying they expected to be using touch by next year.

Apparently it is explained by our brains being hard-wired to understand the gestures of others, particularly those that involve the hand. Watching another person touch their content – be it a computer slide-show, PowerPoint presentation, medical diagram, spreadsheet, or a photo of a product – allows our brain to resonate with the presenter’s.

In a number of countries the public telephone is now appearing with touch screens allowing the user to access rich visual information via the Internet. Large (42 to 62-inch) interactive plasma touch screens are in shopping malls ("Help. I’m lost") and office buildings (touch the screen to contact the person
you want).

These tools are beginning to appear in New Zealand. Those in the know claim that Graham Henry (that wily former headmaster-turned-master-coach) has the ABs stepping up and touching a board to commit those razzle-dazzle moves to memory (and thereby become instinctive).

Convergence plus touch, equals simplicity – the ‘holy grail’ of the often over-complex presentation industry.

No story on presentation equipment would be complete without a call to Maggie Eyre, New Zealand’s now internationally recognized presentation expert. Fortuitously, she happened to be in the country (waiting for her UK work permit to be cleared).

As would be expected of the author of "Speak Easy – the essential guide to speaking in public", she has taken London by storm in the past
nine months.

What has she learnt in England? The stakes are so much higher, with London being the financial capital of the world, the home of the ‘megadeal’ and the centre of gigantic mergers and acquisitions. So much hangs on presentations that financial institutions will put in up to six weeks of preparation to produce one dynamic hour.

Technical experts are involved from the outset, ensuring that the technology serves the desired outcome. Although it is not always a question of money-being-no-object, largely people are prepared to spend to achieve an "extraordinary, rather than just a good, presentation".

But that’s not to say that the same problems do not appear at the next level down. There’s the same old story of misspellings in over-wordy slides, presenters apologizing at the outset for how much they hate doing presentations, and, technology still overtakes the message.

Eyre has developed an A-list based on her most recent experience:

• Be AWARE of audience
expectations;

• ACT like a host at a private
gathering, concerned for their
comfort and well-being;

• Be an AUTHORITY on the subject;

• Only use APPROPRIATE language;

• Inspire people with your positive
ATTITUDE;

• Be AUTHENTIC – be yourself to be
believed;

• Use ANECDOTES – create a story

• AWAKEN their interest at the outset,
and end with something
memorable.