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. It was acquired by LinkedIn in 2012.[3] The website was originally meant to be used for businesses to share slides among employees more easily, but it also has expanded to become a host of a large number of slides that are uploaded merely to entertain.[4] Although the website is primarily a slide hosting service, it also supports documents, PDFs, videos and webinars.[5] SlideShare also provides users the ability to rate, comment on, and share the uploaded content.
The website gets an estimated 70 million unique visitors a month,[6] and has about 38 million registered users. SlideShare's biggest competitors include Scribd.com, Issuu and edocr. 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.
History
Slideshare was officially launched on October 4, 2006.Rashmi Sinha, theCEOandco-founderof SlideShare is responsible for partnerships and product strategy. She was named amongst the world's Top 10 Women Influencers in Web 2.0 byFastCompany.Jonathan Boutelleis theCTOof SlideShare and came up with the initial idea behind the website. He wrote the first version of the site. Amit Ranjan, theCOO, heads SlideShare's development team in India and focuses on product management, content and community.
On May 3, 2012, SlideShare announced that it was to be acquired by LinkedIn. It is reported that the deal was $118.75 million.
In December 2013, SlideShare revamped its site offering more of a visual spin on the homepage, including larger images.
Zipcasts
In February 2011 SlideShare added a feature called Zipcasts. A Zipcast is a social web conferencing system that allows presenters to broadcast an audio/video feed while driving the presentation through the Internet. Zipcasts also allows users to communicate during the presentation via an inbuilt chat function.
Zipcasts do not currently support screen sharing with the presenter, a feature available in competing paid services like WebEx and GoToMeeting. Additionally, presenters using Zipcasts are not able to control the flow of a presentation allowing viewers to navigate back and forth through the slides themselves.
Using the Alexa Pro service, website owners can sign up for "certified statistics", which allows Alexa more access to a site's traffic data. Site owners inputJavaScript code on each page of their website that, if permitted by the user's security and privacy settings, runs and sends traffic data to Alexa, allowing Alexa to display—or not display, depending on the owner's preference—more accurate statistics such as total pageviews and unique pageviews.
Alexa ranks sites based primarily on tracking a sample set of Internet traffic—users of its toolbar for theInternet Explorer,FirefoxandGoogle Chromeweb browsers.The Alexa Toolbar includes apopup blocker, a search box, links toAmazon.comand the Alexa homepage, and the Alexa ranking of the site that the user is visiting. It also allows the user to rate the site and view links to external, relevant sites. In early 2005, Alexa stated that there had been 10 million downloads of the toolbar, though the company did not provide statistics about active usage. Originally, web pages were only ranked amongst users who had the Alexa Toolbar installed, and could be biased if a specific audience subgroup was reluctant to take part in the rankings. This caused some controversies over how representative Alexa's user base was of typical Internet behavior,especially for less-visited sites.In 2007,Michael Arringtonprovided examples of Alexa rankings known to contradict data from thecomScoreweb analytics service, including rankingYouTubeahead of Google.
Until 2007, a third-party-supplied plugin for the Firefox browser served as the only option for Firefox users after Amazon abandoned its A9 toolbar.On July 16, 2007, Alexa released updated ranking system, claiming that they would now take into account more sources of data "beyond Alexa Toolbar users" an official toolbar for Firefox called Sparky. On 16 April 2008, many users reported drastic shifts in their Alexa rankings. Alexa confirmed this later in the day with an announcement that they had released an