A Seattle area startup by the name of 9Slides has raised a tiny bit of angel financing that it will use to roll out a new service that synchronizes videos from presentations with slide decks. San Francisco-based SlideShare already is a juggernaut in that arena, boasting some 55 million unique visitors. It is backed by Venrock, Mark Cuban, Dave McClure and others.
9Slides is very much in the early stages of development, and founder and ex-Microsoft program manager Ruchit Garg plans to unveil more details next month. Garg, who previously worked on Xbox Live and Windows Phone, said that he’s raised less than $200,000 for the new Redmond company.
“This will just keep me running for a few months, and the idea is to spend more time and traction on this project,” said Garg, who just left Microsoft earlier this month.
9Slides describes itself as a “powerful communication tool, which allows users to create unique online experience(s) using their existing presentation videos and slides.”
With 9Slides, the online video gets tagged with the slides so that they are merged together into a single TV-like experience, Garg said.
9Slides plans to launch its beta program on October 11th, charging customers based on how much storage they use.
UPDATE: The company provided this comment about competition in a FAQ about its service:
It’s a highly fragmented market with bunch of companies working in similar space with focus on enterprise, requiring big licensing fees to get started. We believe that independent professional, small and medium sized businesses, schools, colleges can very well use our platform to create compelling online experience at fraction of the cost of what is available today, without spending lot on IT.
