Making sense of the unknown unknowns

By Richard John   It was US politician Donald Rumsfeld who coined the phrase ‘unknown unknowns’. The comment was well-made. Depending on your role in this fine industry, if you’re not finding out what’s out there in terms of event technology, you’ll not be able to educate your clients, your suppliers or even yourself. Even the most brilliant people don’t admit to knowing everything, which is why I was impressed by a blog on the Bizzabo website listing ‘30 conference presentation tools to help speakers wow attendees’. I won’t bore you with all of them, and I’ve already written about Prezi, and Keynote. But what about Haiki Deck, an app for mobile devices that offers more creative presentations with the ability to bring in media from sources such as Dropbox and Facebook, as well as access to millions of images from Getty and Creative Commons? And while Google Glass may be history, the ubiquitous company is offering Slides. Similar to PowerPoint, it allows for “cross-device collaboration and integrates into Google’s Cloud saving platform, Drive”. Clearly the first task of any new package creators is to come up with an irritating name. So, there’s Visme, which creates presentations but enables presenters to easily edit graphs and infographics. Then, there’s Duuza, which allows the presentation to be seen on all devices. Zoho allows the easy importation of material from a host of different file types and makes them look uniform. And Bunkr is perfect for “conference organisers who want a flexible platform with all of the necessary templates, customisation options and integration”. Slidebean will just take your text and create remarkable slides from its own warped digital imagination. Or there’s Emaze, with a wealth of templates to choose from to create “an amazing visual experience for your attendees”. Projeqt claims it can “bring presentations to life with integrated live tweets, blog feeds, interactive maps and video streaming” so de rigueur now. And we all know about death by data, so go for Oomfo, which creates graphs and charts. And there’s Knovio which pulls out data from Excel spreadsheets and makes it fly. By now, you may feel the urge to stop reading, and rush off to start finding out about all these packages. Me? I have an overwhelming urge to play Scrabble…