TEDx Presentation Event in Beijing, November 2009

TEDx is coming to China for the first time! Click here to register to attend TEDx or here to suggest a speaker who has 'an idea worth spreading'. This event will showcase some of the leading thinkers and innovators living in China. TEDx is a self-organized event following the same TED guidelines as the world's premiere presentation conference.

You may also follow leading presentations on the TED Blog.

Top Ten List for Pecha Kucha Success

Top Ten List for Pecha Kucha success:

1. Direct the story toward the audience not yourself
2. Interact - ask a question, give a prize, show a demo
3. Lose the laser pointer. Lasers belong in Star Wars films
4. Never read notes - shows lack of preparation/respect
5. Don't deliver the presentation in two languages - there is no time
6. Speak loud enough into the microphone
7. Clip Art is dead. It is childish. Leave it in the 1990s.
8. Avoid stock photography - it is artificial. Develop your own slide.
9. One presenter is better than two. Unless an actual performance.
10. Your presentation should help 'solve an existing problem'

On Sept. 12, eleven speakers were given 6.40 seconds to share ideas about architecture, environmental activism and local music. A successful speaker needs to deliver each key point on the slide as briefly as possible. No extra explanations can be added - there isn't enough time. Beginning a sentence with the wrong point, is like a sprinter taking off from the starting line on the wrong foot - the momentum will be lost and the sprinter will finish last. Pecha Kucha is a mental endurance test. As a sprinter requires active practice and training, a Pecha Kucha speaker should dedicate hours to rehearsing their presentation. The audience deserves nothing less.

Speak to Both Sides of the Brain

An effective presenter must appeal to both the right and left sides of the brain to be successful. A presentation should include a balance of scientific facts, rational data, and credible sources, as well as a coherent storyline, vibrant visuals and emotional language to reach the whole human mind.  Scientists do not know the extent of how the left sides of the brain control literal analytical thought while the right side of the brain contributes to emotional collective understanding.     But all scientists agree that both sides of the brain's processing functions are inter-connected.  

Knowing that the brain requires both logic and emotion, analsysis and intuition, text and illustration, means that presenters must include a balance of all these factors to be effective.  An engineer may fail to connect with an audience if only data and figures are used without a visual story.  Likewise an artist's presentation will not be as powerful without credible analysis. Deliver a presentation that is relevant to both sides of your audiences' mind and promote understanding of new ideas.  

Brain Image Credit:

Can head trauma really cause amnesia? by Katherine Neer

Redux Picture Blog, Visual Storytellers

A presenter must understand  how to visually tell stories.   Photos are commonly used on presentation slides, so it is important to study the masters of photography.  An excellent resource is the Redux Pictures Blog.   This blog includes pictures from many of the world's best photographers.   

My favorite photographer on the site is Ben Baker.   Ben's photos are frequently on the covers of news, entertainment and sports magazines.  Above you can see Ben's photo of President Obama used across the world for Fortune Magazine in the U.S. and Fortune China.   

Add the Redux Picture Blog to your Google Reader and learn how to visually tell stories in your presentations.  The Redux photographers know that each photo they share cannot bore their audience.  And the articles in the blog will help teach you current topics that are shaping our collective culture.  All of which will make your presentations stronger.  

A Remote Improves Presentations

The compact Communicator presentation remote fits in your hand like a smooth pebble. and includes Forward, Backward, Black Screen and Escape functions. That is all the remote functionality you need for a presentation. If you want a complex remote, than buy a Wii videogame console. And if you insist on using a laser pointer, I suggest buying a light saber and trying out for Star Wars The minimalist 'VersaPoint Communicator' by Interlink Electronics is one of the least expensive remotes on Interlink's website, costing $59 USD. The Communicator allows you to walk up to 30 feet (9 meters) away from your computer.
A presentation remote gives you the freedom to leave your laptop, reduce distraction and keep the audience focus on your message.

Other excellent presentation remotes?

A Powerful Presentation Book

Slide:ology is the definitive book on how to create and deliver audience centric presentations. Nancy Duarte and her large professional team of presentation designers at Duarte Design know the 'art' and 'science' of visual storytelling. Duarte Design accumulated experience by serving the presentation needs of Silicon Valley's top firms for decades. Recently Duarte Design supported the top presentation event in the world, TED the Technology Entertainment Design Conference. Duarte Design was the consultant that perfected the presentations used in for Al Gore's oscar winning Inconvenient Truth, a documentary on global warming. As an instructor of executive presentation design and visual communication, I can say with confidence that Slideology 'gets it'. For the price of two movie tickets, Duarte Design enables you to learn the vital skill of delivering impactful public presentations. This is essential reading for any presenter in the workplace.

Pecha Kucha 20 slides x 20 seconds ea. = 6.40 sec Presentation

Pecha Kucha is a system of delivering a six minute and forty second presentation in 20 slides @ 20 seconds per slide. Two expatriate architects based in Japan named Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham developed the Pecha Kucha method in 2003 as a means to get to the core of the message from design presenters.

Today Pecha Kucha events welcome creative speakers from all backgrounds and has spread across the world from Tokyo to San Francisco. In Dec. 2008 Pecha Kucha was hosted at the trendy Song Bar in Beijing, which attracted hundreds of spectators including members from my presentation course at Peking University MBA school. A pupil of mine named Stone Shao saved the day by providing a ThinkPad electrical supply cord to power the event's PC! This weekend in Beijing, Pecha Kucha ペチャクチャ, which means 'chit-chat' in Japanese, will showcase the essence of what presentation innovation is all about - creating new methods to clearly communicate.

Compress a Large PowerPoint File

Save email space and simplify the experience for your audience. How many times have you prepared to send your PowerPoint file and found that it is 5, 10, 20 MB or more? Often a corporate inbox will not be able to receive large files. The solution is to compress your photos in the PPT file. Here's how:

1. Save a newly named copy of your PPT file
2. Open the PPT file and right click on any photo image.
3. Click Format Picture
4. There will be a menu with five tabs. The tab Picture should be open, on the lower left hand corner click Compress
5. 'Apply to' All pictures in document
6. 'Change Resolution' Web/Screen. Click OK and you're done.

This will change every image in the PPT deck to 96 dpi from 200 dpi, effectively reducing your file size by 50%.

To further reduce your file size, open a New Folder on your Desktop. Next right click and save each photo image as a .JPEG file, into the New Folder. JPEG image sizes take up the least amount of space compared to .bmp, .png or the enormous file size .tif.

Then delete all the original photos in your slide deck. Next click insert photo, and Select All images in the folder. This will batch insert all the photos onto a slide in your deck. Then manually cut and paste each image into its original place in the deck. Finish and Save your file. Click on properties and see how much space you saved. I recently reduced an 80 MB file full of .tif images into a 2 MB file.

Visualization for the 21st Century

Cooliris is a revolutionary browser based visualization tool that changes how people communicate by moving the PC from a text based interface to a rich interactive visual experience. Expect to see Cooliris visualizations across websites like Amazon.com, news sites and in classrooms. By assembling the web into a visual pictoral menu that can easily be searched and then drilled down, the Palo Alto, California based Cooliris succeeds by speaking to the Left and Right sides of users brains , which control logic and creativity.

As Internet interfaces transition from lines of text, your presentations must also use more visual communication to remain relevant.

Presentation Tip: Cooliris will save you hours of search time by quickly laying out photos that visualize ideas, concepts and emotions in a continuous cinematic stream. Use a mind map to arrange your presentation ideas on paper. Next, structure by key message, supportive points, and credible examples. Launch Cooliris and type in keywords that describes your key points to find photos and websites that can be used in your presentation. Communicate better with visual photos and impactful ideas, which will engage both sides of people's brains!

*Remember to ensure credibility by crediting any photos and websites that you use in your presentation.

Useful Book for Presentations and Life

1. Reduce Simplicity by thoughtful reduction

2. Organize System of many appear few

3. Time Save time and feel simplicity

4. Learn Knowledge makes things simpler

5. Differences Simplicity & Complexity need each other

6. Context Outside simplicity is not peripheral

7. Emotion More emotions not less

8. Trust In simplicity we trust

9. Failure Some things cannot be simplified

10.The One Subtract obvious, add the meaningful

Maeda, John. The Laws of Simplicity : Design, Technology, Business, Life. New York: MIT P, 2006.