Company: Brainshark, Waltham, MA
Entry Submitted By: Davies Murphy Group
Company Description: Brainshark enables companies to improve productivity with cloud-based presentation solutions for sales, marketing and training. With Brainshark, businesspeople can transform static content such as PowerPoints into dynamic, mobile-ready content and video presentations, and measure the effectiveness of their communications. One Brainshark presentation is viewed every second all over the world.
Nomination Category: Products & Product Management Categories
Nomination Sub Category: New Product or Service of the Year - Software - Mobile On-Demand Application

Nomination Title: Brainshark's SlideShark 3.0

1. Tell the story about this nominated product or service (up to 525 words). Describe its function, features, benefits, and performance to date:

Since being introduced to market, SlideShark has solved a critical problem: PowerPoint's incompatibility on the iPad. With PowerPoint the #1 business presentation tool, this lack of functionality (which still exists, at the date of this submission) had hindered sales reps, marketers, healthcare professionals and other road warriors across industries- who always had to lug their laptops or else contend with garbled decks.

Problem solved:
SlideShark lets iPad users view/show PowerPoints the way they're meant to be seen- with fonts, animations, graphics, hyperlinks and videos intact. Having filled this void, SlideShark has introduced other major presentation features- far outside the scope of what PowerPoint offers, and making the app much more than a PowerPoint viewer. With the introduction of SlideShark 3.0 (March 26, 2013), individuals and companies in 155+ countries rely on the app for so much more.

SlideShark 3.0 has supercharged adoption- with capabilities that have firmly entrenched it in corporate culture- and enables users to:

* Broadcast their presentations, live and intact, over the Web- an important industry-first. Mobile presenters can invite others- across the table or across the globe- to follow along via Web browser in real-time, and get data on who attended/how long. Companies report that this functionality is changing the face of their business meetings. According to PCWorld, "SlideShark Broadcasting... is as practical as it is cool." Leading blog iPad CTO says it's "pushed the science of presentations to new heights."
* Draw on and annotate slides. * Take advantage of integrations with Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Citrix ShareFile and more.
* Share decks and track viewing activity- alerting sales reps, for instance, to when prospect interest is hot.

With SlideShark 3.0 capabilities, companies who use the business version (SlideShark Team Edition) can do even more:

* Provide central, secure and permissions-based access to approved presentations.
* Track who's presenting what and when- getting otherwise unattainable insights into sales content usage/activities.
* Eliminate version control issues. When a presentation is updated, the latest copy is automatically pushed out to everyone with access to the deck, overriding the previous version.

Another big first for SlideShark:
Mindful of its far-reaching functionality, resellers across the world (Tech Data, Softchoice, En Pointe, ICT123) inked deals last year to resell the business version to their customer base.

On March 18, 2014, and in response to strong corporate demand, SlideShark expanded its scope and impact further with the introduction of SlideShark Anywhere. Browser-based and part of SlideShark Team Edition, SlideShark Anywhere extends SlideShark's benefits to PCs, Macs and Windows 8 tablets as well. Users can now access and present content on the most convenient device at hand. Organizations, in turn, benefit from content management and tracking capabilities on a much larger scale, no matter which device the presenter is using. With the addition of these features and more, SlideShark reached a number of important milestones during the last year:

* 6.5 million+ decks and 180 million+ slides uploaded to the service.
* 1 presentation viewed every 3.6 seconds worldwide (25,000 viewed daily!).
* 40+ industry awards. * 1,000+ media mentions.
* NASA used the app last September on a deep-sea training mission. *

And more.

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2. Provide a brief (up to 125 words) biography about the leader(s) of the team that developed this nominated product or service:

Brainshark, Inc. is a leader in cloud-based business presentation solutions, with millions of users relying on its technology to improve sales, marketing and training communications. To meet the needs of companies around the world- and enable business professionals to show, broadcast and share PowerPoints from iOS and other devices, and track presentation usage– Brainshark developed SlideShark using internal resources.

Staff who collaborated to build, test and promote the app (including SlideShark 3.0 and SlideShark Anywhere updates) include members of the product management, engineering, development/QA, design, IT, technical support, marketing and executive teams.

Key individuals include:
* Joe Gustafson, CEO
* Greg Flynn, President
* Chris Caruso, CTO
* Andy Zimmerman, CMO
* David Klein, VP of product management
* Gerry Praysman, SlideShark product marketing manager