SlideShare, the content sharing platform for business documents, videos, and presentations, has grown into a sizable platform. In 2008, SlideShare was but a simple app launched on LinkedIn to allow professionals to share slides and documents with their network. As SlideShare is designed as a sharing platform for the professional community, its collaboration with LinkedIn has made perfect sense from a strategy standpoint — and has helped it grow into the juggernaut it is today. The startup has continued to work with LinkedIn to add deeper integration into its platform, which Leena covered in depth back in June.

Today, SlideShare is apparently a force to be reckoned with, as the startup has created its first-ever infographic with the help of ColumnFive, which details its exponential growth. In fact, the graphic goes so far as to call SlideShare “The Quiet Giant Of Content Marketing”. What’s more, according to none other than SlideShare, SlideShare is now the largest professional content sharing community in the world. At 60 million unique visitors a month and 3 billion slides viewed per month, it has certainly attracted some traffic, and the hockeystick growth to be found in its visitors chart is impressive. LinkedIn, what say you?

But we think the most important take-away here is that 78 percent of SlideShare’s slideshows (PowerPoint presentations, slideshows, etc.) are under 30 slides, and the average number of slides is 19. So, when you’re building your next presentation that you want to go viral and to be shared with the world via SlideShare, make sure you keep it short. Otherwise, it’s a snooze fest, and we’ll all be throwing rotten vegetables at your slides.

Content marketing is growing, and SlideShare is certainly aiming to be a significant player in that growth. But is it worthy of being called “The Quiet Giant Of Content Marketing”? You tell us.

Infographic below:

Pandora, LinkedIn, Box.net and many others are moving to HTML5 to give users a cross-platform, rich media experience. The latest to participate in this tend is SlideShare, a sharing platform for business documents, videos and presentations.

SlideShare lets anyone share presentations and video and also serves as a social discovery platform for users to find relevant content and connect with other members who share similar interests. The company also has a huge enterprise following, and companies like IBM and others use the platform to curate content from all of their employees and partners on a branded page.

Considering the trend towards content discovery on mobile platforms, it would make sense for SlideShare to have mobile offerings. But the startup has not offered any native apps and until today had a flash-based site that could be reached via the browser. Co-founder Jonathan Boutelle tells us that using the Flash-based site was a barrier for users accessing SlideShare from iOS sites. And when determining whether to build a native app for go HTML5, Boutelle said that building a mobile optimized site made the most sense because of the cross-platform capabilities to work on iPads, iPhones and Android devices.

The new HTML5 SlideShare site now renders 30 percent faster and users can view, share, and interact with presentations. Boutelle says the latest version of the SlideShare site uses a patent-pending document conversion technology that renders all the details of a PowerPoint or Word document using nothing but HTML5.

The site also allows visitors to take advantage several features that were previously available only on the desktop version of the site including the ability to copy and paste text; keyboard navigation; full-screen view; and the ability to view embedded documents. Registered users can also view private content, to view content from friends, and favorite content. Any user viewing a slide view page now has visibility into metadata such as the number of views, embeds, and favorites for each presentation, as well as related content and content by the same author. And the homepage now displays a list of featured presentations.

Boutelle says SlideShare continues to see growing engagement, and expects the HTML5 platform to increase usage as well. He explains that HTML5 made sense because the company wanted a lightweight experience for users and wanted documents, fonts, and more to look the same on various browser types. As we mentioned above, this is SlideShare’s first mobile presence and currently the startup doesn’t have any plans to expand to native apps. “We’re doubling down on HTML5 and making this better and bette so it works for everybody,” says Boutelle.

Currently, the site’s 60 million users upload tens of thousands professional presentations every day. SlideShare has raised $3 million in funding from Jonathan Abrams, Mark Cuban, Dave McClure, and Venrock.

LinkedIn posted its first earnings as a public company yesterday and in true form as a social network, the company used a number of social media outlets to disseminate this information. LinkedIn posted earnings slides on a SlideShare Pro Channel at the close of the bell yesterday, which made it much easier for bloggers and others to then embed and share these slides on their sites (we did).

LinkedIn also partnered with StockTwits for the live-tweeting of the company’s earnings. StockTwits’ LinkedIn ticker page includes this stream of information as well as the earnings presentation.

As more and more people turn to social media sites for their news, more companies are using social media tools during their earnings calls. As StockTwits’ Chris Bullock writes, Companies are actively posting 10-20 messages during their earnings call that highlight the key points – almost like a “Cliff Notes” for earnings.

As you can see from LinkedIn’s Tweet stream, the company’s chief blogger Mario Sundar Tweeted everything from CEO Jeff Weiner’s commentary to revenue numbers to traffic updates. LinkedIn isn’t the only tech company to live Tweet their earnings. eBay also live Tweets via its eBay Ink blog.

And using SlideShare for earnings presentations and annual reports makes it easier for investors and consumers to distribute this information and publicly comment. Of course, you can always go to the investor relations sites for the companies to access earnings slides, but I find most of these sites clunky and difficult to navigate. Dell also shares its earnings presentations via SlideShare.

As Bullock notes, companies have to deal with certain compliance issues when it comes to sharing financial information but I think we are going to see more and more public companies, especially those who are playing in the tech field, use social media when reporting earnings. I for one, can’t wait to see how Facebook uses Twitter, and its own site, when the company eventually goes public next year.

First, SlideShare has added a LinkedIn Share button, which is similar in functionality to Twitter’s Tweet button, to all SlideShare presentations, documents, and videos, so you can share content with your professional network in your stream. The button joins Twitter and Facebook buttons, all of which will be available on content both on SlideShare as well as embedded SlideShare content on blogs.

LinkedIn is also adding SlideShare content to its social news reader LinkedIn Today. As we wrote in March, LinkedIn Today aggregates the most shared news from professionals in your network. Now SlideShare content that is actively shared on the network can also be found in the news reader. And SlideShare is the first source of content in LinkedIn Today that isn’t from a publisher, but is user-generated.

On the technology front, LinkedIn has upgraded the ability to view SlideShare content in the Update Stream. So if you see a SlideShare document shared in your LinkedIn stream, you can view and engage with that content by clicking on a link or thumbnail, without having to leave the LinkedIn site.

Interestingly, LinkedIn and SlideShare compare their relationship to Chocolate and peanut butter for professionals. That’s also how LinkedIn described its relationship with Twitter when the network first integrated the communications platform in 2009.

SlideShare and LinkedIn as partners actually make a lot of sense considering the crossover in userbase. And SlideShare is growing fast, now seeing 55 million unique visitors a month with 3 billion slides viewed each month. SlideShare VP of business development Ross Mayfield says that there are more integrations with LinkedIn to come in the future.

Perhaps LinkedIn should just buy SlideShare with that boatload of cash the network recently raised in its IPO?

Why go through online slides alone when you can do it with other people? If you are one of the 45 million people who go to SlideShare every month to check out slide presentations like this one from Mary Meeker on mobile Internet trends, you are probably going to like Zipcast. Slideshare is launching the new service today with Zipcast buttons on every public slideshow that turns the slides into a Webcast with video, audio and chat.

There are plenty of virtual meeting services on the Web—everything from Cisco’s WebEx and Citrix’s GoToMeeting to Adobe’s Acrobat.com, which have been out for years. But Zipcast is, well, zippier. It doesn’t require a software download or plug-in, and it doesn’t take over your entire screen. Instead, it is just a tab in your browser (thank you, HTML5 Websockets).

Zipcast is also stripped down compared to other existing virtual meeting products. There are the slides, a one-way video stream of the person hosting the meeting, a conference call line for audio, and a text chat window. And if you are board during the presentation, you can skip ahead through the slides on your own. That’s it, and that’s all most people probably need for giving a pitch, presentation, or remote talk.

And to share the slideshow meeting, all you have to do is pass out a regular link—every SlideShare user will get a customized link that looks something like www.slideshare.net/erick/meeting and that can be used over and over again for every meeting that person hosts. Participants can sign in with Facebook and can choose to send their chat comments out to their Facebook streams, along with a link back to the meeting, which is a good way to gather an audience for live events. Zipcast will have its own page with an activity stream showing what meetings are going on right now , along with comments, which could also drive more people into public meetings.

There is no limit to how many people can join a meeting, Meetings can be public or private, but anyone with the link can view the presentation.

If you are a SlideShare Pro member, which starts at $19/month, you can get password protected meetings, along with other bells and whistles. Zipcast will be bundled in with the other SlideShare Pro features such as analytics and removing ads. SlideShare just launched subscriptions a few months ago, and paid subscribers are “doubling every month,” says CEO Rashmi Sinha. She plans on rolling out more premium features for Zipcast such as two-way video and the ability to embed Zipcasts.

With Zipcasts, you can see how SlideShare will start to fold in new products to tackle the enterprise market from the ground-up, using its installed base of loyal SlideShare users to spread the word about new products. Socialtext founder Ross Mayfield recently joined the company as VP of business development to help pursue this strategy.

So who else is joining the pane? Blip.tv, Rdio, SlideShare, and Dipdive. These added to the ones that launched alongside New Twitter such as YouTube, Flickr, USTREAM, and more recently, iTunes, means that less and less, you’ll have to click away from twitter.com. With these additions, they now have over 20 content partners for the right-side pane. It’s becoming quite the platform itself.

And they’re not done yet. “In the next few months we’ll integrate with more content partners,” the company writes tonight on the Twitter Blog.

While Instagram is a much welcomed addition, Rdio is also an awesome one because it means users can share full-length songs for the first time on Twitter. You’ll recall that iTunes sharing only including song previews.

SlideShare lets anyone share presentations and video and also serves as a social discovery platform for users to find relevant content and connect with other members who share similar interests. IBM is launching as a pilot partner for the Company Networks feature, with the IBM Expert Network. The page shows all of the IBM employees or experts on Slideshare page as well as content that is curated from each expert’s profile. Slideshare also allows users to feature particular presentations more prominently and categorize content from employees.

SlideShare’s CEO Rashmi Sinha tells us that the ability to create a branded company network is part of the company’s premium offerings, which were rolled out in August. She says that since moved to a freemium model, traffic has been increasing from 30 million unique visitors in August to 40 million unique visitors in October.

As we’ve written in the past, SlideShare is branding itself as a sharing platform for professional content and is steadily gaining traction as a hub for this type of content. And bringing on a big name company like IBM as a partner is certainly a coup for the company.

SlideShare,the “YouTube for presentations,” has been focusing its efforts on becoming the premier platform for professional and business content. Today, SlideShare is going freemium with the announcement of tiered, paid plans for businesses.

SlideShare lets anyone share presentations and video and also serves as a social discovery platform for users to find relevant content and connect with other members who share similar interests. SlideShare has previously offered two premium services for businesses, LeadShare and AdShare, which let users collect money from leads and ads on the platform. SlideShare’s CEO Rashmi Sinha says that these features will be folded into the tiered pro plans.

While SlideShare will still offer a basic account for free, the startup will offer subscription-based pro plans starting at $19 per month. The silver plan, which is $19 per month, includes analytics and social media monitoring, SlideShare’s lead-gen feature, and the ability to turn off ads. The gold selection, which is focused towards small businesses at $49 per month, adds the ability to create a branded channel on the platform. And the platinum level, which is aimed towards enterprises at $249 per month, gives users the control to turn of comments and more. Brands such as Dell, Microsoft and Pfizer are already using SlideShare’s pro offerings.

Sinha says that the startup aimed to provide a paid model similar to what professional social network LinkedIn uses for its account options. Keeping the core functionality of SlideShare was key, says Sinha, who adds that the platform is seeing 30 million uniques per month.

SlideShare is steadily gaining traction as a hub for professional content, and a subscription model makes sense. Plus, the pricing structure could appeal to a broad spectrum of professional users, from freelancers to large companies. And Sinha is confident that the new model is not only going to bring in revenue but also going to resonate amongst business users. As Sinha told me, “Subscriptions are sexy.”

SlideShare faces competition from Scribd, Docstoc and AuthorStream.

SlideShare, the “YouTube for presentations,” has been making a big push to become the go-to platform for professional and business content. Last year, the startup unveiled two premium services for businesses, LeadShare and AdShare. And earlier this year, SlideShare launched another business-friendly product, branded channels. Today, the startup is going multimedia by allowing users to upload and share business videos.

SlideShare lets anyone share presentations and also serves as a social discovery platform for users to find relevant content and connect with other members who share similar interests. On SlideShare now, professionals can now upload and share videos of their talks, promotional videos, screencasts, demos and webinars. At the moment, users are restricted to only five videos per month (with no limit to length of videos).

Videos on the site have same functionality as the slides and presentations, with the ability to share on Twitter and Facebook and embed on sites and blogs. Professionals can also use the SlideShare app on LinkedIn for sharing videos with their professional networks.

In terms of monetization, SlideShare video owners can integrate the LeadShare model that the startup launched last year. Currently, all videos will be ad-free but co-founder and CEO Rashmi Sinha says that the startup is still testing the business model for now.

Sinha says that SlideShare is not trying to compete with popular video sharing sites like YouTube or Vimeo and is limiting its focus on pure business content. Competitor DocStoc is also trying to make a push towards business and professional content as well.

SlideShare’s branded channels can be fully customized, with pricing ranging depending on the businesses’ preferred layout. Sinha declined to share the pricing range for the channels. As SlideShare continues to attract business users, the startup has been rolling out premium services to not offer compelling features to users but to also monetize the platform. LeadShare is a self-service tool that businesses can use to capturing leads from documents and presentations and AdShare allows users promote their content via ads on SlideShare’s platform.

Competitor Scribd also offers branded readers. In the past year or so, SlideShare has unveiled a mobile-friendly site, launched a free Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 plug-in that allows for one-click publication of your presentations to the cloud, and support for embedding YouTube videos in SlideShare-hosted presentations. The company is based out of San Francisco and raised over $3 million in capital to date, from VC firm Venrock and a number of prominent angel investors like Dave McClure, Mark Cuban, Saul Klein, Jonathan Abrams, Hal Varian and others.

LeadShare is a self-service tool that businesses can use to capturing leads from documents and presentations. To capture leads, companies currently have to work with third-party vendors to set-up complex and sometimes costly lead generation campaigns. And traditional lead gen services require end users to first complete lead information before downloading a whitepaper. LeadShare’s process takes a different twist by asking businesses to share content and then letting users choose if and when to get in touch. SlideShare’s CEO Rashmi Sinha says that the quality of leads is actually better because users who input their info are genuinely interested in the service or product.

LeadShare lets businesses setup a simple campaign in minutes and control exactly how they capture leads and the depth of information they want to capture. For example, you can ask for email addresses, names and phone numbers or capture information that is customized to your presentation or service. Leads cost between $1 to $22 for the business depending on the how in-depth the questions are. So if you only want to capture email addresses, SlideShare will charge $1 per email address. But if you want to capture a more detailed question such as geographic locations, this will cost a business more money. You can capture leads on SlideShare.net, on your own site and anywhere the content gets embedded. Leads are captured in a dashboard that SlideShare creates for each LeadShare campaign.

The second service for businesses, AdShare, lets users promote their content on SlideShare’s platform. SlideShare will place a “sponsored content” box next to presentation and documents that are contextually relevant. The platform will charge businesses $0.25 per click. If content is clicked more often, it gets promoted more and vice versa. Similar to LeadShare, AdShare is a self-service product that businesses can manage on their own. And of course, the two services are complementary to each other—you can use AdShare to get more views and potentially capture more leads.

This is SlideShare’s first play at premium services, and both seem compelling to businesses who are looking not only create leads but to find a cost-effective way to market presentations and documents while harnessing social media. According to Quantcast, SlideShare gets over 20 million visits per month and is steadily growing. Currently, the platform only makes money through advertising on the site. Sinha says that the new features are aimed towards the business community; enabling both small businesses and individuals get the message out about their products, services and content on a social media platform.

Competitors Scribd and Docstoc both make revenue from content selling models. Docstoc also lets content owners share revenue from Google AdSense advertising alongside the document.

Over the past year, SlideShare has unveiled a mobile-friendly site, launched a free Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 plug-in that allows for one-click publication of your presentations to the cloud, and support for embedding YouTube videos in SlideShare-hosted presentations.

The company is based out of San Francisco and raised over $3 million in capital to date, from VC firm Venrock and a number of prominent angel investors like Dave McClure, Mark Cuban, Saul Klein, Jonathan Abrams, Hal Varian and more.

authorSTREAM.com, a PowerPoint sharing platform, is rolling out a premium service that’s ideal for enterprise clients. Similar to SlideShare, authorSTREAM is a web-based free platform for sharing PowerPoint presentations through blogs, websites, and on sites like YouTube or an iPod. authorSTREAM is giving one month of its Premium membership free to the first 100 TechCrunch readers who use this code P1304TC when signing up to buy the premium service here.

authorStream’s premium version, which costs $9.95 to $29.95 per month per user, has added a few interesting features which makes it worth a look. The platform adds support for creating animations in the slide presentation, allows users to upload 200-500 private presentations (depending on the type of premium membership), and lets users access unlimited video credits, to extend video length, when presentations are converted to video. Each credit allows you to create a video of up to 45 minutes (Free account users can only create videos with a maximum duration of 5 minutes). One useful feature the premium service allows for is the ability to create a branded presentation player. You can also earn money with Googe AdSense revenue sharing off of the branded page.

authorSTREAM lets free users create their own “channels,” for PowerPoint presentations and is like a personalized Web page where you can showcase your presentations. Free users can create up to 2 channels (but videos are embedded with ads) but premium users can create ad-free videos and up to 10 channels, depending on the type of membership. Both types of premium services let you embed your brands’ logo in all videos.

authorSTREAM is a direct competitor to popular slide sharing site SlideShare, which doesn’t have a premium service offering. authorSTREAM’s feature to create branded channels could be useful to businesses. And the ability to convert slides into video format and share to YouTube is very useful for marketing purposes. And the ability to monetize via AdSense on presentation pages also makes authorSTREAM’s services compelling. SlideShare has also rolled out some nifty features recently like mobile support, and the ability to embed YouTube videos into their flash-based presentations. SlideShare also launched an impressive new cloud-based feature that ties your native PowerPoint client your SlideShare account. Other players in the slide sharing space include SlideRocket, Scribd, and DocStoc.

Note that the mobile version is in beta at this point and was hacked together at Open Hack Day India last month (using Yahoo’s Blueprint platform), so there may still be some technical issues, warns the company.

At the mobile site, you can take a look at the latest, featured and popular presentations if you’re using any smart phone and/or on all phones that have Opera Mini installed, and you can also search for slidedecks. There’s no requirement to download or install software on your phone, and it lets you log in to your account to view your favorite slidedecks and messages from your contacts. Comments are currently not displayed yet, and it doesn’t support upload from mobile phones, but other than that it works like it should; on my iPhone at least.

Update: here’s a short presentation about SlideShare Mobile from … SlideShare

To the best of my knowledge, this is the only mobile website that does this at this point, and considering SlideShare is one of the most popular cloud-based presentation sharing services there’s bound to be a heap of great content you can watch on the go. If there are any others, speak up in comments.

SlideShare’s been doing some cool stuff lately, like launching a free Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 plug-in that allows for one-click publication of your presentations to the cloud, and support for embedding YouTube videos in SlideShare-hosted presentations.

The company is based out of San Francisco and raised over $3 million in capital to date, from VC firm Venrock and a number of prominent angel investors like Dave McClure, Mark Cuban, Saul Klein, Jonathan Abrams, Hal Varian and more.

(Thanks to Christian Heilmann for the tweet tip)

My TechCrunch internship has ended, and for my final TechCrunchIT post, I wanted to connect the dots I see within the enterprise space. Thanks for the wonderful time.

When Writely and Zoho Writer launched three years ago, some quickly predicted the end for Microsoft Office. It seemed so obvious: free beats paid, ubiquitous access beats the device-centric, thick-client model.

But IT departments worry about security, Excel junkies remain skeptical of reduced functionality, and airline travelers are only now getting in-flight broadband. Given enough time, these problems will be solved.In the meantime, Microsoft isn’t a dunce. Once the lumbering Redmond giant shifts to a SaaS model and monetizes at the edges, these online clones of Microsoft Office will become commodities. Do you
prefer vanilla or chocolate frosting… Google or Microsoft?

Office documents are dead.

Not because Zoho Office and Google Docs are free. But because when office suites went online, they grabbed hold of the content creation method and promptly tipped it on its side. Writing a document shifted from multiple, one-shot drafts to a single draft with multiple revisions. Online office suites killed the static document model–and file formats. (Perhaps even toolbelt office suites.)

Historically, technology goes mainstream by solving a specific problem. Word processors replaced typewriters because they could fix typos. Dropbox removed worries about my hard drive failing. Online FAQ’s replace help files. Google Docs frees me to work from any browser.

Once mainstream, new technology shifts from facilitating work-flow to rewiring the process. I used Google Docs for several months before realizing the power to co-write. Instead of copy/paste, three of us worked on a single document from separate computers. (Lotus Notes pioneered this functionality twenty years ago, but it required Notes on each machine.)

Suddenly corporate wikis are maintained by users, links to Dropbox replace e-mail attachments, and the idea of a static document is dead.Slideshare is a classic example. What began as an online repository for slidedecks–a souped-up FTP for PowerPoint–is now a destination site. For now, the metadata–tags, favorites, comments, views, downloads, etc–sits on top of a static slideshow. But how long until Slideshare adds editing capability? Then I leave a comment by altering the wording, removing a non-Presentation Zen image there, adding an entire slide here.

When Slideshare spawned its own storytelling meme, “Meet Henry,” users made modified clones of the original slideshow to suit their needs. What if they could alter the original? The line between data and metadata could get very blurry. (The ensuing copyright nightmares are beyond the scope of this post.)

No matter which side of the firewall, it’s a living document–Rashmi from Slideshare told me: “Lots of companies use SlideShare privacy options for sharing and to embed into their intranets… we cannot dig
into it (for privacy reasons)–but one of our large referrers is Microsoft.”

Similarly, wiki’s are morphing from solving today’s problems into tomorrow’s new way to create, aggregate, and filter content. According to Chris Yeh, PBwiki has a long-term vision, “to be the really simple glue across an enterprise. By adding context on top of specific buckets–Salesforce, e-mail, documents, etc–wiki’s become a powerful form of enterprise search.”

Slideshare, wiki’s, SaaS office suites–what happens when they’re integrated? (Already you can view Google Docs from PBwiki and Slideshare from SocialText.)

After the inevitable confusion, the oil and water of new technology and old workflow will coalesce into a new perspective on information. Realtime collaboration will kill the static document model. The line between documents will feel artificial–much like a database view merely constrains the output. When the community can create metadata, “Word documents” become “a print-view” of the wiki
page”–perhaps excluding comments, or maybe limiting them to only comments from the marketing team within the past week. (Prezi is already rewriting the rules on UI and interaction.)

For Microsoft, using “.doc”, “.xls”, and “.ppt” in the same sentence as “floppy” and “AOL” is a frightening prospect. And yet maybe it shouldn’t be. If you can’t dominate a platform, the next best thing is making sure your competitors can’t win either. When files become generic, platform ownership is impossible–examples include .html, .txt, and .jpg.

RIP .doc, .xls, and .ppt. You’ll be missed.

Back in 2006 when we first introduced SlideShare, we called it a mix between PowerPoint and YouTube. Today, that statement gets even more accurate.

SlideShare will now allow users to embed YouTube videos into their Flash-based presentations – an oft-requested feature that has countless potential uses. Users will now be able to include personal introductions to their slideshows, offer video that supports the contents of the rest of the presentation, or (in the case of startup pitches) include demonstrations of a website’s features. In the past users wishing to include video in their presentations have been forced to include links to separate video files, which sort of defeated the point of having a dead-simple way to share PowerPoint presentations.

The feature seems to work as advertised, though I have a few gripes. It isn’t currently possible to make a video auto-play (though CEO Rashmi Sinha says this will be coming soon), and users will also have to deal with YouTube’s standard ‘feature’ of linking to a video’s YouTube address whenever you accidentally click outside of the ‘play’ arrow. Other than that, it’s a great addition to the product. We should also note that while this is the first time SlideShare has supported embedded video, the site has allowed users to embed audio alongside their slideshows since 2007. You can check out a sample slideshow with YouTube video embeds below.

Last month SlideShare also launched an impressive new cloud-based feature that ties your native PowerPoint client your SlideShare account.

Other players in this space include SlideRocket, DocStoc, Scribd, SlideSix, and SlideBoom.

SlideShare, a startup that we’ve likened to a YouTube equivalent for PowerPoint presentations, has released a new plugin for Microsoft Office 2007 that allows users to edit and publish presentations directly to their SlideShare accounts. You can download the free plugin here.

Beyond publishing new PowerPoint documents to the web, the SlideShare plugin can import SlideShare files from the cloud (both your own and those that are shared by others), which can then be modified on your native PowerPoint client. The plugin features an integrated search so you can browse through files from your SlideShare contacts and groups, as well as support for Twitter and FriendFeed so you can broadcast a new presentation without leaving Office, adding a social component to PowerPoint that extends beyond typical group collaboration.

SlideShare’s plugin offers a peek into where cloud-based document editing is probably ultimately headed for most consumers. While most online-only services like Google Docs are free (Office isn’t), the vast majority of computer users have been using the Microsoft suite for years, and aren’t keen on learning a new interface loaded with new quirks. Even with the offline capability afforded by Google Gears, Docs still feels foreign. Expect plugins with functionality similar to SlideShare to emerge for all of Microsoft Office (Microsoft already offers its own similar service) as consumers desperately look for familiarity as they make their first steps into the cloud.

Other players in this space include Scribd, DocStoc, and SlideRocket (a cloud-based PowerPoint alternative).

Sometimes the simplest ideas are best. While a number of startups are working to bring the whole process of creating presentations online, SlideShare recognizes that many people are mostly satisfied with PowerPoint or Keynote. They just want an easy way to share their traditional presentation files with others.

The company, which launched in 2006 and later added audio synchronization, took the YouTube strategy of creating a place where people could upload, share, and embed their media. And now they’ve raised a $3 million from Venrock and a handful of notable angel investors in its first major round of funding, which should help them pursue that strategy further (i.e. build as massive user base as possible). Oh, and fight off future denial of service attacks and increase capacity.

Individual investors include Dave McClure, Ariel Poler, Mark Cuban, Jonathan Abrams, Hal Varian, Yee Lee, and Saul Klein. Many of them actually came to know SlideShare as normal customers and only decided to invest once realizing how handy it was. David Siminoff will also join SlideShare’s board.

SlideShare is using some of the money to relocate from Mountain View to San Francisco, where they’ll have a larger office. It will also grow its team from about 10 people to 18, mostly with local hires even though the bulk of its development occurs in India.

Of course, we’ve been given a press release in the form of an embeddable slideshow, inserted below. Way to go on the blatant self-promotion, Dave.

SlideShare, a Mountain View-based startup that lets you upload and embed PowerPoint presentations on the web, appears to have stirred the red dragon last week.

About ten days ago the company began receiving anonymous requests to delete slideshows that were deemed “illegal” by the requesters. The SlideShare staff checked out these slideshows and discovered them to be quite innocent. While some described ways to fight corruption in China, none of them violated the company’s terms of service, and so SlideShow did nothing to fulfill the requests.

SlideShare soon began receiving a different type of request from the same people, who could now be identified by their email addresses. This time they were pretending to be users who had lost their passwords. Once again doing nothing, the company got a very demanding, and almost threatening, call to its Indian office on Wednesday, one that insisted that the company grant access to an account.

After these three failed attempts, SlideShare experienced a massive distributed denial of service attack starting at 10pm on Thursday, one day before the CNN website was attacked by Chinese instigators in apparent backlash to its coverage of the Tibetan protests. We’ve been told that the attack reached a peak of 2.5GB/sec and consisted entirely of packets sent from China.

Not long after the first attack subsided, SlideShare was hit a second time on Friday and the site went down again until Saturday morning. Since then there have been no more attacks, but the company continues to receive fake password recovery and illegitimate takedown requests at a rate of about 5-10 per day (it has accumulated about 50-60 total).

There’s a lot of speculation around just what has happened here since no one knows for sure who is behind the requests and attacks. However, it seems likely that they were from the same hacker groups – possibly linked to the Chinese government – that attacked the CNN site (and later called their attack off after getting too much publicity). Some of the slideshows with takedown requests have been viewed many times recently, so their popularity seems to have landed them on the Chinese government’s radar.

SlideShare insists that it will do everything it can to protect its users’ freedom of speech. As such, it has no plans to remove any of the content in question.

The Sports Network was also recently taken over by Chinese hackers who mistook it for CNN sports.

Update: Just as I finished writing this post, I received word from the company that a third attack had begun.

Look! They’re so sad they’re soliciting sex online!

This is a thankless job. We can’t make fun of everything equally every day and we definitely can’t go back and see how our flip frivolity and vituperative vitriol has affected our poor, mewling victims. But now we see what we’ve done and friends we are sorry.

Take Slideshare, for example. They posted a story bemoaning their fate:

Running a site like SlideShare, you get used to all the PowerPoint jokes. Heck, we enjoy them! When we first came out, the best coverage was comments like: Bore people around the world. We have been told that we are the worst website in the world (I have met the person who made the comment and he’s rather nice (and uses SlideShare now .

That was us. We wrote “Bore people around the world.” And look at them now…

Scene: a dreary start-up office in a run-down strip mall in Mountain View, California. It is raining — snow is on its way. The partners are down to four and the employees consist of one emotional wreck who is nursing a ficus back to health and the CEO’s cousin Jimmy who once ran a cigarette stand in Greece. The CEO, Dr. Rashmi Sinha knows she’s out of her depth. She has a PhD, sure, but that never prepared her for the ribbings doled out by a gang of cretins on the Internet. She Googles Slideshare again and finds that that same story, headline SlideShare: Bore People Around the World, pops up. A tear trickles up and is already riding down her face when COO Amit Ranjan stands up to scream and scream and scream and then runs for the plate glass. His bald pate makes contact, bounces off, and he falls backwards into dreamland where CrunchGear doesn’t exist and his family still loves him. The team opens another bottle of Jack — Sinha eyes the drain cleaner in the break room but decides that’s no way for a former eBay consultant to go — and they drink.

Friends, this scene is real. This is what happens when you blog while under the influence of multiple narcotics, cough medicines (the same as narcotics, if cooked right), and Cafe DuMond coffee ordered from Cajun Grocer (the sell great Turducken) and drunk daily by the carafe full. Please. For the love of Pete, be kind to your targets.

SlideShare

We first wrote about Slideshare when it launched last October. It provides a useful service by allowing users to upload and share powerpoint presentations. Tomorrow they’ll announce a much-requested feature – synchronization of audio files with slides.

This is a great additional feature. We’ve had lots of requests to upload presentation decks to Slideshare after I’ve spoken at conferences. Now, if I can get my hands on a MP3 file of the talk itself, I can add that too.

An example is embedded above. More examples are here.