Slideshare
SlideShare is a Web 2.0 based slide hosting service. Users can upload files privately or publicly in the following file formats: PowerPoint, PDF, Keynote or OpenDocument presentations. Slide decks 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. The website was originally meant to be used for businesses to share slides among employees more easily, but it has since expanded to also become a host of a large number of 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 current list of SlideShare’s investors includes Venrock, David Siminoff and Dev Khare.
The website gets an estimated 58 million unique visitors a month, and has about 16 million registered users. SlideShare was voted among the World’s Top 10 tools for education & e-learning in 2010. SlideShare’s biggest competitors include Scribd.com, Issuu and Docstoc. 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.