PowerPoint minus the laptop

Posted
by
Kyle McInnes
on May 10, 2007, at 2:23 PM
in News
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Comments: 12 responses
12 Comments

Thanks, Impatica! You've made me extra-snazzy.
Impatica won the CTIA Most Innovative Wireless Device award before WES this year for their portable presentation solution, and has partnered up with DynoPlex for some data handling. The Showmate hooks up to a projector and receives the presentation from your BlackBerry, which you can use for presentation notes and as a slide changer. If you’ve got the BES hook-up offered by DynoPlex, then you can view the full presentation on your device beforehand. If only BBs had laser pointers built-in, eh?

“PowerPoint presentations stored on the DynoPlex Online File Storage service are automatically impaticized (XTREME MARKETING! – ed.) or converted into Impatica’s compact format and downloaded over-the-air to BlackBerry smartphones from Research In Motion (RIM) (Nasdaq:RIMM; TSX: RIM). Once on the handheld, the PowerPoint presentation can be viewed in full fidelity on the BlackBerry handset or projected using Impatica ShowMate.”

The Showmate will run you $249.99, for any of you spiffy PowerPoint salespeople out there.

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  • Opus2

    “Impacta won the CTIA Most Innovative Wireless Device award ….”

    It’s Impatica, not Impacta.
    http://www.impatica.com/

    And Most Innovative shouldn’t be confused with most cost-effective. $250 for an add-on powerpoint widget? Dude, I didn’t pay that much for my 8700!

    What’s this company going to do when RIM supports powerpoint in the OS? (only a matter of time, I figure). Remember Fulcrum? Of course you don’t. They developed and sold full-text search engines, till Microsoft included the same capability for free in Windows.

    Things that make you go hmmmmm……

  • Opus2

    “Impacta won the CTIA Most Innovative Wireless Device award ….”

    It’s Impatica, not Impacta.
    http://www.impatica.com/

    And Most Innovative shouldn’t be confused with most cost-effective. $250 for an add-on powerpoint widget? Dude, I didn’t pay that much for my 8700!

    What’s this company going to do when RIM supports powerpoint in the OS? (only a matter of time, I figure). Remember Fulcrum? Of course you don’t. They developed and sold full-text search engines, till Microsoft included the same capability for free in Windows.

    Things that make you go hmmmmm……

  • http://www.blackberrycool.com/ Blackberry Cool

    Correction’s made, thanks for spotting that. As for the pricetag, I wouldn’t pay that much either, but if I had a company willing to get it for me…

  • http://www.blackberrycool.com Blackberry Cool

    Correction’s made, thanks for spotting that. As for the pricetag, I wouldn’t pay that much either, but if I had a company willing to get it for me…

  • goneyukon

    ok, to clear up confusion…

    the coolness of impatica showmate is the actual box that you attach to the projector. the software itself for viewing PPT on the device isn’t that great. i believe the $249 price tag is for the hardware mostly.

  • goneyukon

    ok, to clear up confusion…

    the coolness of impatica showmate is the actual box that you attach to the projector. the software itself for viewing PPT on the device isn’t that great. i believe the $249 price tag is for the hardware mostly.

  • BlackberryBeard

    Having tested Impatica, the biggest issue with it–that I have discussed several times with them, is that for this to work they require a policy to be opened that most companies will not open. Specifically they require “‘Allow Third Party Apps to Use Serial Port’ set to TRUE” for USB access. This is documented at http://www.impatica.com/support/transferfaq-sm.html#4 as a known issue. Good luck trying to get your BES administrator to open this up.

    The other logical way to get PowerPoints on your Blackberry would be to use the Desktop Manager “Execute Add-in actions” feature. I have talked to Impatica several times about this. They have it on their honey-do list but it is so low as to not really exist.

    I feel its a very promising product that in my opinion is still in beta.

  • BlackberryBeard

    Having tested Impatica, the biggest issue with it–that I have discussed several times with them, is that for this to work they require a policy to be opened that most companies will not open. Specifically they require “‘Allow Third Party Apps to Use Serial Port’ set to TRUE” for USB access. This is documented at http://www.impatica.com/support/transferfaq-sm.html#4 as a known issue. Good luck trying to get your BES administrator to open this up.

    The other logical way to get PowerPoints on your Blackberry would be to use the Desktop Manager “Execute Add-in actions” feature. I have talked to Impatica several times about this. They have it on their honey-do list but it is so low as to not really exist.

    I feel its a very promising product that in my opinion is still in beta.

  • http://www.dynoplex.com/ Sergey

    Small correction – the main advantage of our partnership with Impatica is for BIS users. Impatica has a BES server already, but for individual users DynoPlex allows to download PPT files from emaill attachments or from online file storage without anything installed on the BES.

  • http://www.dynoplex.com Sergey

    Small correction – the main advantage of our partnership with Impatica is for BIS users. Impatica has a BES server already, but for individual users DynoPlex allows to download PPT files from emaill attachments or from online file storage without anything installed on the BES.

  • BlackberryBeard

    Sergey,

    My point is that the target market for this product would seem to be corporations. I would think that an overwhelming majority of corporations use BES and then use that BES to push limiting policies to connected individuals’ Blackberries. The very good intentioned purpose for restricting this and several other policies is so malware does not either infect the people’s blackberry units, or worse use that unit as a gateway to compromise the larger network.

    Knowing that the target market is the one least likely to open this policy on the units should make them push the Desktop Manager alternative to the top of their priority queue, but somehow I was unable to sway their thinking that this was an extremely low priority item.

    Bottom line: If people cannot get the PowerPoint presentation onto the blackberry, they will never be able to show the presentation to anyone.

    If their target market is BIS users, then Impatica will work, but their potential number of clients is diminished.

    I wish Impatica the best of luck and really want them to succeed with this product.

  • BlackberryBeard

    Sergey,

    My point is that the target market for this product would seem to be corporations. I would think that an overwhelming majority of corporations use BES and then use that BES to push limiting policies to connected individuals’ Blackberries. The very good intentioned purpose for restricting this and several other policies is so malware does not either infect the people’s blackberry units, or worse use that unit as a gateway to compromise the larger network.

    Knowing that the target market is the one least likely to open this policy on the units should make them push the Desktop Manager alternative to the top of their priority queue, but somehow I was unable to sway their thinking that this was an extremely low priority item.

    Bottom line: If people cannot get the PowerPoint presentation onto the blackberry, they will never be able to show the presentation to anyone.

    If their target market is BIS users, then Impatica will work, but their potential number of clients is diminished.

    I wish Impatica the best of luck and really want them to succeed with this product.