Mid Term Exam Revisited

Yesterday in our ENTR200K class @ Purdue, ten teams presented their version of video interviews with an entrepreneur. The presentations in general were very well done and ranged from newsletters for parents of children, to a 40 year old construction company in Chicago, to high techs at Purdue Research Park. Certainly, a broad range of subjects and interests.

One of the teams used a startup that I had not heard of before, zentation.com to display both their video and PowerPoints about the video on the same panel. Previously I have been able to accomplish this feat via software, but this is the first Web 2.0 company I’ve seen to do so totally via the web. The major drawback to their offering is they require videos to be hosted on Google Video. Their FAQ states:

Google Video is currently the only major video sharing service that allows the user to jump to any point in the video even if it has not downloaded that far yet. This capability is critical to the user experience of Zentation. Once other video sharing sites provide that capability, we will investigate integrating them.

Users of Viddler know this not to be the case. Viddler very easily supports deep tagging, which many student presenters used effectively in their presentations. I have emailed Donna about Zentation, and suggested she form an alliance with them. Meanwhile, an embedded version of the team’s presentation is provided below so readers “who weren’t there” can see for themselves what I am talking about. Hank