SlideFinder is wishing everyone a Happy Valentine's Day.

SlideFinder contains many thousands of presentations about Valentine and Valentine's Day if you are in need of inspiration.

Here's one that I found about Valentine's Day. It's from Taiwan so some of it is in Chinese but most information is also in english. I must say my Chinese is somewhat rusty so I can't really tell what they are speaking about on those slides.

The Story of Valentine's Day.ppt

We are currently looking for presentations in Taiwan. All I can say is: it is taking for ever...

We actually ran into a similar problems while going through Australia. I guess this is an open question but I simply cannot understand the reason for it. Taiwan is a high-tech society and should have the infrastructure in place. Given that these are universities we are scanning, one would assume they had appropriate bandwidth. If we look at Japan, that went lightning fast in comparisson.

I do have to give Taiwan a big star for making such large amounts of presentations available to the community. We have berly began and are already reaching 10.000 presentations, which compared to others is quite strong.

India was a bit of a dissapointment I must say, given that they are friends of presentations. Just take our friend Geetesh and his site Indezine.com which supplies great information about PowerPoint and presentations in general. We have scanned roughly 50 universities in India and found about 80 presentations. I must admit that, given the size of India and the number of universities we very well might have found the 50 smallest universities, but still. I simply don't know, we will surely increase our search in India and hopefully that will yield a better result.

In any case we are closing in on 250.000 university presentations. Our plans are to "complete" our first run of Europe and then move down to south-east Asia. Once that is done we move back to the middle east, we are seeing a large increase of visitors from that area which is really fun. Once that is done we plan to move over to South America, which will complete our first world tour.

Here's a short presentation on SlideShare about us.

We are glad to announce that we have released the first beta version of our new university search feature. We are still in the process of indexing large amounts of presentations from around the university world, why many of the universities may currently show a small number of presentations.

The idea here is that presentations posted on university websites will often contain high quality content. This is not to be confused with good quality presentations, but none the less, its actual content should be reliable and interesting. We are today indexing presentations from well over 500 universities world-wide in eleven countries. This will further increase during the spring of 2010 to include about 40 countries and 4000 universities.

There are currently two ways of using this new feature; you can either browse the actual university by country and university, or you could do a simple search and add site:harvard.edu for example to find presentations coming from Harvard University.

If anyone feels like promoting their country or their university then please let us know.

Microsoft PowerPoint 2010 comes with new rich media tools. Follow this quick tutorial and see how to easily integrate images and video in your PowerPoint presentation. Also, learn how to share PowerPoint presentations with remote abilities.

Along side the increased South Korean traffic we are also seeing an increase in traffic from Japan, and Japanese presentation indexing will therefore also be a priority.

We are happy to see a dramatic increase of visitors coming from South Korea. We are therefore working on indexing presentations from South Korea from now on. We still do not have a working interface in Korean so if someone feels like doing a quick translation you are welcome to contact us here.

Wow, I guess I should be used with the time it takes to deploy an application. Seems like π is still a very important factor in all time estimates. Feels like we are working on those 10% that take 90% of the time right now. Anyhow, I believe we are indeed closing in on a release. By the end of this week we should have a fully functional PowerPoint 2007 Add-in that enebles you to search the web for PowerPoint slides from within PowerPoint itself.

One of our SlideFinder Add-In tester came back to us today with a few questions. He said he loved the functionality but still was a bit unsure as to the advantage of using SlideFinder instead of Google for example. I thought I'd write down some of the advantages as I see them:

• SlideFinder will return only the slides that match your query - Google, or any regular search engine, will return the entire presentation or in fact a link to the presentation.
• You have to download the entire presentation from Google to see the slide. Let say the presentation contains 100 slides, now you have to go through the entire presentation in order to find that specific slide.
• Using the advanced search lets you narrow down your search even further. If you want a slide with a specific word in the title and a specific word in the text; simply enter that in the search form and SlideFinder will present you with a number of slides that correspond to that exact query.
• When looking at a presentation in SlideFinder, the search engine will also show you similar presentations.
• SlideFinder is simply better at finding individual slides as well as presenting them to you.

Using our Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 Add-In will further increase that experience by letting you perform searches from within PowerPoint 2007.

In order to support as many users as possible, a number of language translations have been done. We currently support English, French, German, Spanish, Russian and of course Swedish. Translating SlideFinder into Swedish was perhaps more of a test than in antisipation of reaching a larger user population. Of course, since we are Swedes we figured it be a good test.

Currently the language interface is based on your browser settings but eventually we'll be enabling you to choose on your own. The problem when you start translating is that once you've started, you have to keep doing it for every little change you do. With that said, we have set our goals high and aim to keep it at that level.

If you should feel an urge to contribute with your own language, you are welcome to drop us a line.