InsideGoogle

Google Announces Plans For Online Presentations Tool

Google just announced on its blog plans to launch a web-based presentations tool this summer.

The Presentations software (currently unnamed) will be part of the Docs & Spreadsheets suite of office tools, a suite that will probably need to get its own name once it has three parts. Google Docs, Spreadsheets & Presentations doesn’t quite have a good ring to it.

The technology is coming from Tonic Systems, which Google has just bought. From the new FAQ on Tonic’s site:

Tonic Systems is a San Francisco-based company that provides Java presentation automation products and solutions for document management - Tonic Systems Builder, Tonic Systems Filter, Tonic Systems Transformer, Tonic Systems Viewer, and JarJar Links. Features of their products included text extraction for indexing documents, presentation creation capabilities and document conversion tools.

Tonic’s site says they provide Java-based PowerPoint solutions, including “Java library to extract text from presentations with full contextual data”, “Java library to convert presentations into high quality images and PDF documents”, “Java library to programmatically read, create and manipulate presentations” and “PowerPoint viewer application for Windows, Mac, and Unix”.

Their old company description, before Google took down their entire website:

Why Tonic? - Experience in the Enterprise

We are the experts at automating PowerPoint related tasks to meet your business information management needs.

Our TonicPoint® products are a cost effective solution and provide a high return on investment for small, medium and large businesses alike that use PowerPoint. They can save your business 100’s or 1000’s of hours of labor each year in manual, repetitive PowerPoint content creation, cutting and pasting. They enable you to view and access presentations in new ways—from on the web to Unix servers—wherever and however you need.

Tonic Systems provides superior products along the key factors of Quality, Features and Price, and our existing customers agree.

We have developed, tested and refined these solutions over several years. The result is a suite of powerful, pure java products that is robust, reliable and flexible enough to perform at the Enterprise level.

Our products provide unique solutions to enterprise PowerPoint document management. With features such as efficient text extraction for indexing documents, powerful presentation creation capabilities and high quality conversion, our products offer a range of solutions to real problems faced by today’s businesses.

The supporting manuals and developer guides make deployment quick and easy for your development team. Or Tonic Systems can provide a full range of deployment and integration services if you require them—from quick consulting as to how best to use the products, to enterprise application implementation.

With offices in San Francisco, California and Melbourne, Australia, our products are in use in the world’s leading companies.

Their TonicPoint Builder is “a library that provides a 100% Java API to read, create and manipulate PowerPoint presentations”. It allows you to work on PowerPoint files without the PowerPoint application. It appears that if Google were to break the software’s ties with PowerPoint, it has the capabilities to create presentations without a PC. That would be the online presentation creator tool.

Also, Tonic’s PowerPoint viewer application would allow viewing of its presentations offline, removing the problem of not being connected to the internet during a presentation. Presumably, Google will tie the two together to make a great application that is safe from connection problems, which would obviously be a disaster during a live presentation.

Here are just some of the ways to use the TonicPoint Builder:

• Create entire presentations from existing data sources, e.g. a database or spreadsheet
• Process presentation templates to generate standardized presentations
• Extract data, images, multimedia files from PowerPoint templates
• Build new presentations from existing slides and presentations

This is all very exciting stuff. Tonic’s stuff works with PowerPoint, so transition should be easy for current PowerPoint users. Presumably, in the Google tool, you’d be able to drop in PowerPoint files or spreadsheets, create presentations, and view those offline, making it a great package.

I’m surprised it’s all in Java, and it would be strange to see Google release a tool that requires Java, but I guess we’ll see.

More as this story develops.

UPDATE: Ionut Alex found this screenshot of TonicPoint’s Viewer application:

UPDATE 2: Five months ago, Salah-Eddine Benzakour said (translated by Google):

Here a service which surely tries to be made buy by Google.

Good call!

April 17th, 2007 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | General | 3 comments