The Best Fonts for Making PowerPoint Presentation Slides

The fonts that you use in PowerPoint slides do play some role in making your presentations successful. The typeface should be readable and font size should be large enough so that people at the back have no problem reading the text.

Here’s some expert advice on selecting the right fonts (font family + size) for using in PowerPoint (or Keynote) presentations:

Guy Kawasaki: Guy says that your PowerPoint presentation slides should contain no font smaller than thirty points or just find out the age of the oldest person in your audience and divide it by two. That’s your optimal font size.

"Force yourself to use no font smaller than thirty points. I guarantee it will make your presentations better because it requires you to find the most salient points and to know how to explain them well."

Seth Godin: He recommends picking up a font other than Arial for presentations.

"Hire a pro, get a font you love and stick with it. Don’t change fonts over time (at least not often)… The right font becomes your handwriting."

Scott Hanselman: Scott, a great presenter and geek, recommends Lucida Console font, 14 to 18pt in bold for PowerPoint presentations.

"This [Lucida Console] is the most readable, mono-spaced font out there. Courier of any flavor or Arial (or any other proportionally spaced font) is NOT appropriate for code demonstrations, period, full stop. "

Garr Reynolds: The world’s best know presentation expert says that san-serif fonts are generally best for PowerPoint presentations, but try to avoid the ubiquitous Helvetica.

"Use the same font set throughout your entire slide presentation, and use no more than two complementary fonts (e.g., Arial and Arial Bold). Serif font are said to be easier to read at small point sizes, but for on screen presentations the serifs tend to get lost due to the relatively low resolution of projectors."

Related: PowerPoint Presentations: Avoid Last Minute Surprises

And finally, do watch this excellent presentation by Garr Reynolds that he recently delivered at the Google office.

Download Multiple Web Videos Into a Single Movie or MP3

While there are tons of tools that let you download web videos with ease, MovAVI offers one unique feature - it can join multiple videos from YouTube, Metacafe, Break.com, etc. into one single file all by itself that you can later download in any format.


Using Movavi is simple - just add the different video URLs (5 is the limit) and select an output format. You can either request the combined video clip as an MP3 audio file (great for music videos) or in regular formats like iPod MP4, AVI, Flash Video & Quicktime.

Movavi will not join your videos instantly - it sends out an email when the video to ready for download. If you are looking for instant conversion, check this Flash Video Guide. MovAVI can also be used to join video files that reside on your local hard drive.

Most expensive cell phone - Catch the EyE

Goldvish Le million made it to the Guinness Book of World Records for being the most expensive phone.

The hand-crafted cell phone made of 18-carat white gold, mounted with 120-carat VVS-1 graded diamonds. The phone comes in platinum or white and yellow solid gold studded with diamonds. The phone has a TFT display and supports 176x220 pixels. The phone has Bluetooth, Java, EDGE, WAP and USB port.

The phone was first introduced in September 2006 in Europe at the Millionaire Fair. There are only 100 of these phones made and it is only available on special request.

GoldVish also make the ‘Illusion’, which comes in 15 different incarnations, encrusted with diamonds. The phone is priced at $1,000,000.

Deadlock for Google,Facebook Continues.....

Google Inc's online communities have little traction in the United States, but the search leader continues to seek a spot in the social networking hierarchy.

First, it must contend with Facebook, the No. 2 online hangout behind MySpace.

Days after Google unveiled Friend Connect, which lets the sites of musicians, political campaigns and others incorporate profile data from several social networks, Facebook began to block the programme.

Although Google was taking advantage of the same tools that Facebook made available free to other outside developers, Facebook said Google was violating Facebook's restrictions on data sharing. The two sides remain in a stalemate.

Google, whose Orkut social network has tens of millions of users in Brazil, tried to reach further into social networking with the November unveiling of a consortium called OpenSocial, which lets developers write applications for use on multiple social networks.

News Corp's MySpace has joined, but Facebook hasn't.

This month, Google unveiled Friend Connect, which promises to pool profile data from Facebook, Google Talk, Orkut, LinkedIn, Plaxo and hi5, though not MySpace.

The profile information gets incorporated into other sites -- a political campaign, for instance, can build communities of supporters by tapping existing networks -- with Google serving as the intermediary.

Facebook quickly objected, citing privacy concerns. Normally dealing with other companies one on one, Facebook can block a service it feels violates its rules.

With Google as the intermediary, Facebook lost that leverage, so it decided to block Friend Connect entirely.

In a blog posting, Facebook developer Charlie Cheever said Google's Friend Connect “redistributes user information from Facebook to other developers without users' knowledge, which doesn't respect the privacy standards our users have come to expect.”

Google responded, acknowledging it passes along data. But it said sharing is limited to links for profile photos of users and friends who have expressly consented to sharing with that particular site.

The user's name and numeric ID on Facebook are replaced with Google's own identifiers, Google said in a company blog post.

Google also said it purges Facebook data from its systems every 30 minutes, more frequently than the 24 hours required by Facebook.

Facebook has run into privacy challenges before, most recently when it unveiled a marketing tool called "Beacon" that tracked purchases Facebook members made on other websites and sent alerts to their Facebook friends about the transactions.

But Rachel Happe, research manager at IDC, said the dispute is ultimately about control rather than privacy. She said Google's Friend Connect "starts to eat into other people's value proposition, which is why you saw Facebook object to it."

Buying Smartphones - Here is the Guidelines while Purchasing

They used to be once considered elite devices that were meant only for those with deep pockets. But recent times have seen enterprise phones come off their ivory tower and become increasingly mainstream. Today, one can even get a decent enterprise device for as little as Rs 10,000. And there’s plenty to choose from as well-- every cell phone manufacturer worth his or her salt has an enterprise device or two up their sleeves.

Some, like Nokia and HTC, have several. While the economists might blather about more choices empowering the consumer, the fact is that more choices also do end up confusing one about just which model to pick up. Well, there are no hard and fast rules in this regard but keeping the following points in mind might just help.