Ignite and Pecha Kucha style presentations

We might all have sat through boring presentations in our academic and professional life where the talkative speaker just goes beating around the bush and takes a good 10-15 minutes to arrive at the point. I know I have and have also dozed through many of such presentations. In this age of real-time instant gratification, how can corporate presentations be left behind? So welcome to the new world of presentations, a new style that is creating a buzz around the world - present all your ideas in a slotted time of 5-10 minutes in 20-25 slides or less. This brainwave is said to have started first from the Pecha Kucha style of presentations. In Japanese, Pecha Kucha stands for "chit chat" and the aim is to come to the point as quickly as if you were chit chatting with a friend. Recently Mumbai hosted its first Pecha Kucha night and the newspapers were abuzz with news about the presenters and their topics from that night. The presenters on Pecha Kucha night in Mumbai were mostly from the fields of architecture or design.

Taking a cue from this style of presentation, the IT and business world are also fast moving to adopt a style of brisk paced presentations. "Ignite" nights are being held all over the world and sometime in November 2008 and January 2009, Bangalore held its first two nights of Ignite presentations. The format for the Ignite style of presentations is to present your ideas in 20 slides, at the speed of 15 seconds per slide. That would give each presenter 5 minutes altogether to present their ideas. The presenters for the Bangalore Ignite night spoke about topics very diverse from wildlife to mountain biking. There was not a specified range of areas where the speaker had to limit himself to. The Ignite nights in Bangalore have been a huge success and were followed by Ignite nights in Pune, and there are some networking groups looking to bring Ignite to Mumbai next.

Our firm too started on a similar presentation pattern lately, and to introduce the firm members as to how to get used to a brisk presentation style, we held our first session of 'Lightning talks' similar to the Ignite format yesterday. The firm members had to pool in with their topics and an abstract by a particular date, out of which 10 topics were selected for presentation yesterday. I was one of the selected participants and I spoke on the following topic "Decoding Indian General Elections 2009". Since we were presenting from Mumbai for a worldwide audience and video conferencing options are not that trustworthy given bandwidth issues, we decided to record a video with the presentation playing by the side and send it across for the conference yesterday. Here is a link to the video and here is a link to my presentation (Pls ignore the weird master slide formatting differences coming up on the slides, I didn't have enough time to work on those). Play both of them side by side, and you can see the slides rotating every 15 seconds with the audio output playing simultaneously. I had fun presenting my first Ignite style presentation, let me know what you think.