SlideRocket brings web presentations to iPhone and iPad with HTML5

Since the dawn of time, traveling professionals have sought easier ways to present on the go. Pico projectors! Netbooks! Converting presentations to video to show them on iPhones! Then there was Keynote on the iPad, and it was good. Not great, however: presenters with libraries of PPT content have had to convert them over, and keeping your decks up to date with the latest and greatest from the sales department is a drag. Wouldn't it be better and easier if there was a nice cloud-based solution that played well with Mobile Safari?

Enter SlideRocket's new HTML5 player; the freemium web service now supports playing back (not editing) presentations on iPhone, iPad and iPod touch with full-screen video, a handful of good-looking builds and transitions, and all the analytics and version control you want. While the normal SlideRocket player requires Flash or AIR to show content, this one works fine without them.

Click on to learn more about SlideRocket's capabilities, and see a video demo of the HTML5 playback in action.

SlideRocket's workgroup and enterprise features mean that presentation designers can update shared slides and have the changes instantly reflected in all the active decks; that's a big win for compliance-centric industries like financial services and healthcare. Account administrators can also pull analytics showing which presentations have been shown most often, to assist with account planning and content refinement.

Some of the snazzier interactive features of SlideRocket aren't available in the HTML5 version of the player, like polling and attendee comments, but that's probably not a showstopper, since an iPad presentation is more likely to be a one-on-one opportunity for you to present to someone on the fly. You can see all the HTML5 authoring tips in a presentation (of course!) right here. Here's a pro tip they don't mention: if you want to show your slides on a projector or big screen via the iPad's VGA adapter, Safari won't output your content -- but the US$1.99 iCab Mobile browser will.

SlideRocket offers a 14-day free trial, followed by a choice of a free Lite plan, $24/mo Pro plan, or an enterprise subscription. If you're finding yourself in need of a presentation option for your iPad, check it out.

SlideRocket's demo video: