We’ve written before about the ubiquity of Microsoft Office products and their transition to mobile environments. Admittedly, they’ve been a little slow on the uptake, which created an opportunity for a number of companies to develop software meant to replace these seemingly irreplaceable office tools.
Bunkr is one such of those tools—a new product from a French startup that explicitly wants to be a PowerPoint killer. Whether it can dethrone the reigning champion of the slideshow is a separate question, but it does offer a lot of nifty features if you’re looking for an alternative to Office. For starters, Bunkr looks and feels a lot like PowerPoint. If you’re familiar with using that, making a switch to something new shouldn’t feel that weird. But Bunkr offers a few features that make it stand out.
For one, it’s entirely cloud-based, meaning you don’t have to worry about emailing files, you can have multiple users edit a single document, and all those other features we’ve come to expect from a truly cloud-optimized product. But even better than that, Bunkr builds your presentation through HTML5, meaning that you can take a look on pretty much any computing device you have on you—no need for Flash or a reader designed specifically for viewing your favorite slideshow file format. Everything can be done on your iPhone or your computer at work. All it takes is a web browser.
Bunkr also solves a problem endemic to anyone who makes a lot of slideshows—finding and keeping content for your presentation. Bunkr solves this problem by creating a convenient bookmarklet that lets you keep content in your Bunkr archive to use whenever you want. This makes it easy to embed audio, YouTube videos, pictures, and more into your presentation. And if you find yourself consistently reusing certain images or quotations, they’re all there in a convenient place for every new slideshow.
Best of all, Bunkr uses a “freemium” model, meaning that the basic software is yours to use whenever, and you pay a small fee for the rights to use expanded services. (There’s actually an interesting story about how Bunkr chose and optimized its freemium model from its original standard payment model if you’re interested in good pricing practices.) The free version will only let you store two slideshows at a time, but you’re able to store more with the paid version.
With Steve Ballmer resigning as CEO of Microsoft, who knows what’s next for the old giant of productivity software. Perhaps the new guard of apps will be as commonplace as Office products have been for decades.