Presentations are abundant throughout the corporate world, academic settings, and organizations. The default for these presentations is usually PowerPoint because the program provides an easy, digital, chronological progression of ideas and points that presenters would like to address. However, the attributes of PowerPoint, namely its linearity, seem to have made it a crutch for many presenters. To put in another way, PowerPoint presentations seem to merely be a polished version of the presenter’s notes.  Instead of using the presentation tool to clarify or illustrate a point, PowerPoint is often used as a replication of the speakers’ ideas which he or she merely reads off the slides.  Presenting with a visual aid or chart that provides significant clarification of a point appears to be a thing of the past.  However, a new tool called ShowLogic, developed by The Catevo Group, seeks to change this view of presentations.  Tina Deatherage, Vice President of Sales & Marketing for ShowLogic,  asserts, “ShowLogic is a different way of thinking about how to present, that goes back to the fundamentals you learn when you are younger – using visual aids to support a point.”

ShowLogic is a new presentation tool with a unique platform that enables presentations to become more fluid by incorporating many different types of media into a presentation, enabling the presenter to skip around and tailor relevant information to the audience. The tool can utilize 15 different media types and a presentation can either be developed from the documents already existing on a computer or be built from scratch on ShowLogic itself. The tool can be used in distance meetings as well as live meetings, and is also touch-screen enabled for tradeshows. One profound way in which ShowLogic is different than PowerPoint is the presence of statistics that are seamlessly incorporated on the back end of program.   The statistics measure which section is the most popular and which pieces of media are most useful to the audience.  This advantageous feature provides feedback to presenters for future presentations by allowing the presenter to understand which aspects of the presentation were most interesting or useful to the audience.

The current customer base of ShowLogic mainly concentrates around tradeshow organizers and event planners, but the future market for this product is essentially endless. Presentations are ubiquitous.  The education sector, especially colleges and universities, utilizes presentations for multiple purposes—teachers’ lectures, student projects, organizational meetings, board presentations, and countless others. Deatherage is currently working with a professor at Indiana State University on future integration of ShowLogic into schools and universities.  However, outside of education and tradeshows, this tool can be used virtually in any industry that utilizes presentations.  The corporate world is likely to become a market for this tool, as well as law and medicine.

However, how difficult will it be to adapt to this tool?  ShowLogic gives 30-minute lessons on how to use the tool and typically, by the end of that time frame, users can create their own presentations.  To exemplify its ease of use, Deatheridge points out that her six- and seven-year old children have already learned to master the tool.

ShowLogic, concludes Deatherage, “is a very unstructured tool that allows for greater structure to the presentation.” The layout of the tool includes tabs on the left side of the page along with breadcrumbs along the top, allowing for presenters to skip around to different parts of the presentation and does not inhibit the flow of the presenter. Since the ultimate goal of ShowLogic is to give presentations more freedom, and thus make it seem more like a conversation, the tool enables a presentation’s order and structure to be determined by the needs and wishes of the audience.