Alternatively, in April 2009 the web-based presentation tool Prezi was officially launched and
immediately it was regarded as a possible ‘PowerPoint killer’ (Genelius, 2011). One of the main
differences between Prezi and slideware programs is that Prezi uses a single infinite canvas instead of
the traditional set of slides, which allows you to create presentations in a non-linear way. Furthermore,
you can group the visual elements into frames and zoom in and out on these different objects (N.N.,
2010). At first, Prezi seems to be an innovative product, but the ideas and technology behind it have
been around for several years. Flash-based presentations are nothing new to presentation
professionals employed by communication and advertising agencies. Moreover, in “Reinventing
Comics” the concept of the infinite canvas and the zooming camera were already introduced
(McCloud, 2000), and since then many online comics have escaped the boundaries of the
conventional page. Furthermore, since 2008, Microsoft Office Labs had been working on ‘pptPlex’,
which should give users the power to zoom in and out of slide sections and move directly between
slides that are not sequential in a presentation. In April 2011 they finished the project, but apparently it
was decided not to include it into the future standard versions of PowerPoint (N.N., 2011). However,
Prezi could outperform the alternatives, because it encourages using graphic organizers, which are
similar to concept maps and mind mapping. Surprisingly, research into presentations which
incorporate this type of visualisations to represent information is scarce.