It's not often that anyone out is there is gutsy enough or, indeed, mad enough to give Bill Gates and the ubiquity of his Microsoft empire a run for its money, but a small Glaswegian software company thinks its can.
The company, Itsnotrocketscience, is not exactly taking on the full might of Microsoft, of course, but is instead concentrating on the presen tation product Powerpoint with its own product called Pollenate. Pollenate is a nifty little application that differentiates itself from Powerpoint in three crucial aspects.
First, it allows real-time video streaming presentation graphics, allowing organisations to differentiate the delivery and design of business presentations. Second, it allows you to write on the presentation with your mouse thanks to a technology called Scribble Layer, recreating a "flipchart" presentation. Third, it enables corporate control with different levels of administrator levels for editing. This is designed to ensure brand and corporate consistency as company logos and so on can only be changed by a certain administrator level.
But perhaps the most interesting point of differentiation is that it is, in fact, not too different. Pollenate is designed with the traditional Powerpoint user in mind and uses the same amount of hard disk space despite numerous additional features. Itsnotrocketscience has also worked Bluetooth technology into the mix to allow more remote presentations via a speaker's personal digital assistant for instance.
Why does Istnotrocketscience believe additional features will be enough to grab a healthy stake of the $200m presentation market? It argues that users are bored with Powerpoint. The argument goes that no one ever set out to buy Powerpoint: they got it as part of their Office package.
Yet this is not to say the company thinks there's anything wrong with the success of Microsoft or the giant's dominant marketing strategy. Instead, it sees Pollenate as a niche product aimed at professionals in certain sectors, such as Apple is in the publishing or design sectors.
