LinkedIn SlideShare is an American hosting service for professional content including presentations, infographics, documents, and videos. Users can upload files privately or publicly in PowerPoint, Word, PDF, or OpenDocument format. Content can then be viewed on the site itself, on hand held devices or embedded on other sites. Launched on October 4, 2006, the website is considered to be similar to YouTube, but for slideshows. It was acquired by LinkedIn in 2012. The website was originally meant to be used for businesses to share slides among employees more easily, but it also has expanded to become a host of many slides that are uploaded merely to entertain. Although the website is primarily a slide hosting service, it also supports documents, PDFs, videos and webinars. SlideShare also provides users the ability to rate, comment on, and share the uploaded content. The website gets an estimated 80 million unique visitors a month, and has about 38 million registered users. SlideShare's biggest competitors include Zoho.com, Scribd.com, Issuu and edocr. Some of the notable users of SlideShare include The White House, NASA, World Economic Forum, State of Utah, O'Reilly Media, Hewlett Packard and IBM.
History
SlideShare was officially launched on October 4, 2006. Rashmi Sinha, the CEO and co-founder of SlideShare is responsible for partnerships and product strategy. She was named amongst the world's Top 10 Women Influencers in Web 2.0 by FastCompany. Jonathan Boutelle is the CTO of SlideShare and came up with the initial idea behind the website. He wrote the first version of the site. On May 3, 2012, SlideShare announced that it was to be acquired by LinkedIn. It is reported that the deal was $118.75 million. In December 2013, SlideShare revamped its site offering more of a visual spin on the homepage, including larger images. In October 2017, SlideShare removed the possibility of "Reupload".
Slidecast
On July 24th, 2007 Slideshare introduced a format called "SlideCast" to "make web multimedia using only a ppt file and an mp3". According to Boutelle, the word slidecast is a portmanteau of "Slide show" and "podcasting". Slidecasts was used with the "Flash rich internet application" that was built at Slideshare. It allowed users with uploaded Powerpoint, Keynote or PDF presentations to synchronize them to mp3 audio. The audio synchronization process could be started using the editor's "Edit slidecast" link. The application was said to be "the hardest technical and design task" Slideshare has taken on, as of 2007. On February 7, 2014, less than a year after its acquisition by LinkedIn Corporation, Slideshare announced that Slidecast will be shut down on April 30, 2014.
Zipcasts
In February 2011 SlideShare added a feature called Zipcasts. A Zipcast is a social web conferencing system that allows presenters to broadcast an audio/video feed while driving the presentation through the Internet. Zipcasts also allows users to communicate during the presentation via an inbuilt chat function. Zipcasts do not currently support screen sharing with the presenter, a feature available in competing paid services like WebEx and GoToMeeting. Additionally, presenters using Zipcasts are not able to control the flow of a presentation allowing viewers to navigate back and forth through the slides themselves.
