Haiku Deck Blog

We are pleased to announce Haiku Deck Presentation Collections, a new feature on the web that lets you curate and organize presentations that you or others create for your own use or for sharing with others. Only paying subscribers can create Haiku Presentation Deck Collections, but anyone can view a Haiku Deck Presentation Collection, regardless of whether or not they are a subscriber.

Here are the primary ways to use Collections:

1. Use Haiku Deck Collections to organize your own Haiku Decks: If you’re a teacher, you might want to have a collection of Decks for each class or unit. If you’re a professional, you might want to have a collection for functional decks like ‘sales pitches,’ ‘status updates,’ or ‘strategic plans.’ If you’re a real estate agent you might create a collection of ‘listing presentations,’ ‘comparative marketing analyses,’ and ‘team update’ Haiku Decks.
2. Use Haiku Deck Collections to curate and share decks you create and/or public Haiku Decks that others create for sharing: Using the Haiku Deck Gallery Search or links that other Haiku Deck users share with you, you can create collections that are for sharing with others. For example, an event organizer or attendee can share collections of Haiku Decks from a conference or meeting or an educator can search for a topic to create subject-matter collections related to a curriculum.
3. Use Haiku Deck Collections to curate and save decks you might want to use for inspiration later on: Let’s say you’re surfing the Haiku Deck gallery and you find a deck that inspires you. Just copy the URL and add it to a collection so you can easily find it for reference later on.

Only paying Haiku Deck subscribers can create collections, but anyone can view a collection when they have a link to it. If a deck is added to a collection and later made private by the author, it will be automatically removed from the Collection.

Learn how to create Haiku Deck Collections in our user guide.

Learn more in the Haiku Deck Collections FAQ

We’d love to see the presentation collections you create! Send us a link at gallery@haikudeck.com.

We are pleased to announce a new feature for Haiku Deck Premium subscribers, Presentation Analytics. If you’re using presentations to raise money or sell or conduct marketing, this is a great new way to see how your presentation content is being consumed by viewers and to get notified when key people engage with your Haiku Decks.

Invitations: Allows you to create a custom link to send to anyone in order to get in-depth analytics based on their actions related to your Haiku Deck. Presentation Analytics will track when the invitation is clicked, how long the viewer spent looking at the deck, and trigger an email notification to you when the link is clicked.

Recent Viewers: Provides high-level data on recent viewers of your individual decks or all of your decks in aggregate. This includes time spent on the deck(s), the location of the viewer, the date and time of their visit.

Views: Provides a line chart showing the number of views received for the deck and time frame you select.

Downloads: Shows a line chart of all of the downloads that you deck has received over the selected time period.

Shares: Show the number of shares of your deck to different social media platforms via the share buttons on the playback page. Specifically, you will see the number of shares of your deck to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Plus, Google Classroom, as well as the number of time a link to your deck has been copied.

Though Presentation Analytics will apply to all of your Haiku Decks, data for this feature is only available beginning from the start of Presentation Analytics tracking on September 15, 2017. Learn more about Presentation Analytics in the Haiku Deck user guide.

As with any new feature, we’re eager to hear your feedback! Click here to learn more about Haiku Deck Premium and to upgrade. Also, if you’re a qualifying nonprofit, be sure to take advantage of our 50% off pricing. Drop us a line at team@haikudeck.com and let us know what you think!

More and more presentations are being shared in virtual spaces- from webinars and blogs to social media and online forums. As a result, our top feature request has been to let users add audio to their Haiku Deck presentations and give the option of saving presentations with audio as video presentations. With the launch of new Haiku Deck Presentation Video beta, we are delivering on this request.

Our test-release will be available for a limited time at no additional charge to Haiku Deck Pro Subscribers via our web site only.

What better way to introduce you to Haiku Deck Presentation videos than with a Presentation Video about this very topic.  (I know, it’s meta)

While Presentation Videos will be offered at no-additional charge during the beta period, we do expect that it will eventually be paid upgrade for Haiku Deck Pro users.

We came to Presentation Videos based on feedback from thousands of users who told us they need a better way to create all kinds of videos. Here are a few examples of the requests:

1. Create videos for webinars
2. Create videos for corporate training
3. Quickly create and deliver lesson videos for students in flipped classrooms or traditional learning environments
4. Create team update videos
5. Reach more customers online with remote sales presentation videos
6. Inspire donors and share your story with fundraising videos for nonprofits and other organizations
7. Keep your group engaged with community update videos
8. Easily build promotional videos for events, products, and services
9. Drive listeners and readers to your blog and podcast by creating presentation videos that summarize your content for easy sharing through social media
10. Create informational videos for customers and partners

As with any beta, some users may encounter an issue along the way. Please share any problems you encounter or ideas you have so we can make Haiku Deck Presentation Videos the best possible solution for your needs.

For more information about creating Presentation Videos in Haiku Deck, please refer to the Haiku Deck User Guide and our FAQ.

Audio Playback for Haiku Deck Presentations

In addition to creating videos, we also now support audio playback through the Haiku Deck playback pages. When you record your audio, a small play button will appear in the lower left corner of your slides. Online viewers can click to hear your audio track for each slide. For more information on adding audio to your Haiku Deck, please refer to this article on the Haiku Deck User Guide. For information on audio playback, please refer to this article.

Long time readers of our blog know that from the beginning, Haiku Deck’s vision has been to make it 10x faster to create  presentations that are 10x better. One way we’ve done this is through our apps on iOS and the web. Another way we’ve done this is through Haiku Deck Zuru, our Artificial Intelligence that automatically creates presentations from outlines, Wikipedia topics, or even existing .pptx files. We’ve also achieved this through our creative community who have shared millions of presentations with one another. Today we’re happy to announce  a brand-new feature that makes it easier than ever before to find and remix decks from the millions in our library of publicly shared presentations.

New Haiku Deck Gallery Search is available on the web only and it allows you to keyword search all publicly shared decks created in Haiku Deck. Keywords can include topic matter or author name. After running a search you can sort the results by relevance or date.

When you find a deck you want to save to your gallery or remix, first click through to that deck’s playback page. Then look for the COPY button beneath the slides. Learn more about copying decks in this article.

Decks not designated by the author as reuseable will not have a COPY button visible on their playback page. This is a setting authors can adjust in the privacy controls for each Haiku Deck. Learn more about allowing reuse of your decks in this article. Once you copy a presentation to your own Haiku Deck account, you can edit it as if it is your own.

When we launched Haiku Deck in 2012, our goal was to make it 10x faster and easier for users to build presentations that are 10x better. In our quest to reach this goal over the past 4 years, our product has evolved and so has our business. During this time we’ve made several changes to the business to ensure a bright future for Haiku Deck and the members of our community who rely upon us. This means that we are increasingly asking users to support our efforts by becoming subscribers.

One recent change to our business is that we are now asking Haiku Deck Basic users with more than 1 deck to become paying subscribers (3 decks if you’re a teacher or student).  

Why start limiting decks now?

Over the past year we have eased reluctantly towards this decision. In July 2015 we introduced paid Haiku Deck accounts for users who wanted advanced privacy, deck download, custom branding, and access to Zuru Beta. At the same time, we added ‘unlimited cloud storage’ to the list of paid features. We didn’t ask existing users to pay for unlimited storage at first because we hoped to support our costs without putting a limit on the number of decks users create. After a year of trying this approach we have to ask a little bit more from users who use the app regularly, but have not become paying subscribers.

Does this mean you’re going to delete my decks if I don’t pay?

No. It means that when you go to create a new deck, we’re going to ask you to pay. Your existing decks will remain exactly as you left them. You’ll still be able to view, edit, and share existing decks. If you like what we’ve built and want us to be there for you in the future, we hope you’ll decide to upgrade. If you don’t upgrade, we hope you’ll stay with us as a free Haiku Deck Basic user.

Why subscription instead of a one-time fee?

Most cloud-based and mobile productivity tools, from Evernote to Microsoft Office, are subscription-based businesses. This industry-wide shift is a function of the costs involved with continuously creating, maintaining, and servicing cloud-based software. The cost of creating and maintaining great software is high. Software engineers are expensive. Storing data and providing customer service are expensive. To ensure that we’re here for our users when they need us and to remain competitive, we had to move to this model.

The Future of Haiku Deck

In  4 years of having Haiku Deck on the market, we have earned over 5M downloads on iTunes and grown to over 2M+ registered users. This is an achievement reached by very few startups and one that we couldn’t have dreamed of when we began. We do not take the support of our community for granted and remain committed to delivering on our mission. We regret that with this change we may lose committed members of our community, but we hope that many more will join us as subscribers. If you’re a student or educator, we offer a 50%  price break for you to help ease the cost of upgrading.

Your feedback means the world to us, so please drop us a line if you have questions or concerns. We read and respond to every email.

Thanks,

Team Haiku Deck