View Presentations On The iPhone And Edit On The iPad With New Prezi Apps

Prezi has a new iPhone app and has enhanced its iPad app for editing on the go. The company has also released some data from a recent survey of its users that shows how deep mobile is reaching into companies that just a few years ago would not equate the presentations they make with any kind of mobile device.

The new iPhone app is read-only, designed primarily to consume presentations. It plugs into Apple TV or a projector for viewing. The iPad app has previously provided the capability to do minor updates. With the enhanced version, a user can create a new presentation, work offline and then update it.

It’s the concept of the idea economy that has driven much of Prezi’s vision for what it wants to become. Mobile devices have a liberating aspect that correlates with the Prezi presentation technology. People work from home. They can go on the road, traveling light, without a laptop. If need be, they can show a presentation. Mobile is a catalyst for the new workplace. Apps like Prezi fit with this lifestyle. The service is cloud-based and has enough richness in its feature sets for people to use no matter where they are.

It’s this new concept of the way we work that makes Prezi viable. But more so, Prezi is functional in a mobile context. The editor has a Zoom User Interface developed by Co-Founder Adam Somlai-Fischer, an architect and visual artist. It fits naturally with the editing capability of iPad and the easy portability of iPhone.

The latency of cloud applications will always dog a service like Prezi. But that seems to be of little concern for the 1.3 million users who have downloaded the iPad app since its launch. Prezi’s architecture is the greater concern. It’s Flash-based, making it vulnerable to services that use HTML5. As a native app, the service is viable as it is independent of Flash in that context. But in a web environment, it is reliant on Flash, making it a potential dinosaur in the fast competing world of productivity apps.

Prezi competes with Apple Keynote and other presentation tools such as Powerpoint, Google Docs and Zoho. The company has $14 million in funding from Accel Partners and Sunstone Capital with additional investment from Magyar Telekom.