AUSTIN, Texas -- PowerPoint presentations go better with sausage, wacky Venn diagrams and trend charts that show the convergence of cheese and libido or friends and liver.
At least that's the way it seemed at BattleDecks II, a Friday night panel at South by Southwest that was billed as a cross between PowerPoint and karaoke.
In the game-show-style competition, contestants struggled and sometimes soared as they stood before a packed room with absurd slides flashing on a screen behind them. Ted Rheingold, founder of Dogster and Catster, scored when he barked out the phrase "ebola-scale virality" as a photo of Amy Winehouse flashed on the screen.
Anil Dash of Six Apart took top dog honors as he crafted an unbelievably polished off-the-cuff talk on "opting out of the meme pool" after making a rock-star entrance.
When confronted with a Venn diagram showing the convergence of helpful and Fail!, he let it rip: "There is no overlap," Dash said. "This chart is a fucking lie."
Dash even survived being Rickrolled during his presentation, masterfully turning the potentially fatal distraction into a bonus laugh: "Sometimes you just have to roll with it," he said.
Photo: Mike Essl, a graphic designer from Brooklyn, New York, identifies a major bottleneck during his BattleDecks presentation on the podcasting pickle.
Credit: Jim Merithew/Wired
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