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My first reaction when I came across this websites was that maybe I’m staring at a screenshot of Apple’s Keynote application from iWork. But 280 Slides apart from an inspiration in design doesn’t take much else from Keynote.

280 Slides is a startup by 280 North consisting of 3 graduates from the University of Southern California. It  allows you to create presentations and take them anywhere without any need of physical storage media, so it’s a web based presentation application plus storage. It provides support for Microsoft Powerpoint 2007, so you don’t have to worry about compatibility issues, plus the Open XML format ensures that your slides will have a very small size making it faster to download the presentation. Although this wont be necessary as 280 Slides provides basic presentation functionality built right into the application so you can just load up the website and start presenting in a pretty interface. Another feature, which I found very interesting is the integeration of media search, so that you can add photos and movies to your presentations directly from popular web services such as Youtube and Flickr. This can turn out to be a pretty handy feature which isn’t available in desktop presentation software yet.

Slides can also be shared on the Internet either through Slideshare , email it to a friend or you can also embed the presentation in any website.

All is good so far, but a couple of things I noticed were that the interface felt a bit dull when compared to Keynote. I would love to have it brighten up the interface and make it a bit more colorful. And although I could easily download the presentation files, I couldn’t find any option to upload them. Also support for more online services would be welcome as well as animations which aren’t there yet. Also I couldn’t find some of my favorite fonts such as Segoe and Calibri in the font choices. Highlighting and pen/marker options would also be a welcome addition for the presentation feature. But as the service just launched and is in beta, we can expect more features to come up.

For some inside detail we contacted 280 Slides for some of our queries.

StartupMeme: Can you provide us background information about your company and number of employees and education backgrounds.
Ross Boucher: 280 North is a team of three people: Francisco Tolmasky, Tom Robinson, and myself.  We all graduated from the University of Southern California together.

StartupMeme: Will you make animations available for slides?
Ross Boucher: Absolutely.  I’m not sure what the timeline is on this, but hopefully in the near future.

StartupMeme: How much maximum storage capacity will you provide?
Ross Boucher: Right now we don’t have storage limits, and we don’t have any immediate plans to add them.  We’re monitoring the site for abuse, but we want to allow normal users as much storage as we can afford.

StartupMeme: Do you plan to keep it free?
Ross Boucher: 280 Slides today is going to remain free, but we may add additional features in the future that we would consider charging for.

StartupMeme: Is Apple’s Keynote an inspiration for you ?
Ross Boucher: Both Keynote and PowerPoint are certainly inspirations for our software.  However, we’ve though a great deal about every component of 280 Slides, and we really sweat the details. Every feature and UI element we’ve included was carefully considered and designed by us.

StartupMeme: Do you plan on competing with Google Docs and Zoho in online Office Suites ?
Ross Boucher: Google Docs has been traditionally focused on real time collaboration features, something we’re not going to be releasing in the immediate future. We focused 280 Slides on being the best tool to create presentations on the web, and we think it is.  As we continue to improve the experience of creating slides, we’ll start to consider more collaboration oriented features.

StartupMeme: Future functionality?
Ross Boucher: We’re working on a lot of things, but we’d love to hear what our users want next.

StartupMeme: Compatibility with Open Office and Open XML formats?
Ross Boucher: Right now we support the Microsoft Office Open XML format (PPTX). We’re definitely working on supporting other formats in the future.

We hope to see and hear more from this the 280 North team. We’ll keep our visitors covered with exclusive news on 280 Slides. It seems to be a contender for a good solid online presentation application if it can work on the features lacking so far that have been described above.