Idea
Presentain’s iOS and Android apps helps presenters and their audiences connect on a whole new level. The application lets a presenter broadcast slides and get audience feedback in real-time. It also allows audience members to send questions to the presenter, effortlessly connect with presenter’s social media accounts, and even record the presentation.
Real-time presentation broadcasting
Presenters can broadcast the slides on a projection screen and straight to audience members’ smart devices.
Presentation recording
Lets you record the presenting session to get a slidecast with voiceover.
Access control
A presenter can control presentation access, recorded slidecast, and slide sharing.
Polls & stats
By creating and conducting polls and surveys, a presenter can engage the audience with post-insights. Stats show which answer has been chosen most and which poll is the most popular.
Questions from the audience
Presentain allows audience members to send questions during the presentation, and a presenter can show them on the screen while answering.
Insights
When the audience connects, Presentain offers to join the presentation via social networks. A presenter gets the audience list with contacts. Also, every recorded session contains its own stats.
Estimate
Presentain is a long-term project we have been working on for 2 years. The project activity included:
Design
Web
iOS
Android
Quality Assurance
Discovery
We’ve extended the mobile functional - ‘Upload a presentation’ and ‘Create poll’ options were added, as well as new features: integration with cloud services, embed code feature for web to generate HTML that can be embedded in a site or blog.
On a new Presentain logo, we wanted to translate its functional versatility.
There were several challenges on the tech side. Many Presentain users connect to the presentation via one WI-Fi spot. When the internet channel gets overloaded, the connection crashes and Presentain stops working. Also, we needed to minimize a delay between the action on the presenter’s device and broadcasting on the screens.
During the development process, we received a request from one of the most valued Presentain customers - US Air Force - to increase the number of connected audiences by 4 times for their great upcoming presentation.
Development
Master’s comment
We have implemented Node.js in a project backend and updated it to the latest LTS release. This lets us increase synchronization speed with the server and reduce the delay between actions on a presenter’s device and its appearance on the audience’s devices. Also, we used REDIS to store click statuses on the Node.JS server. Considering the request, using Node.js let us increase the maximum number of clients to 10000. Also, we’ve updated a converter to decrease the size of uploaded slides to optimize the connecting speed to the presentation. We added an Internet indicator, so a presenter could make sure the internet will not let him down when he gets on stage.
Master’s comment
We needed to solve a problem with the real-time presentation uploading progress. To make the indicator work properly, we used Faye to provide message servers for Node.js. In addition, Faye synchronizes polling results when the presenter shows them on the screen. Presentain is being used on four types of screens: smartphone, tablet, desktop, and projector. We’ve enabled on-demand crop, resizing, and flipping of images by using a smart imaging service, Thumbor. We need not store 4 copies of 1 picture in different sizes anymore.
As for the iOS version, we have simplified the code by getting rid of global variables. Now, the information transfers between the activities by events.
Duration
24 monthsTeam size
2 peoplePlatform
WebIndustry
Entertainment and MediaWebsite
presentain.com
Full Technology Bundle
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Faye
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mongoDB
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node.JS
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Ruby On Rails
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Stripe
Faye mongoDB node.JS Ruby On Rails Stripe
Launch
The last changes were made on July 2016, and 2 months later, we achieved impressive results:
Increase in
32.7%
monthly installsNew signups
+61.9%
Daily visits
+130.4%New sessions
+30%
Master’s comment
Sergium Sagadeyev — UI/UX Designer