So no one really likes to give presentations. They are nerve-wracking, and lead to a lot of stress, at least in my experience. On top of the general anxiety that comes from giving a presentation, the software is somewhat clunky. The software has yet to catch up. This is especially evident in the classroom. For example, if an instructor wants to show a YouTube video in the middle of a lecture, they have to leave the presentation and click through all the way to the video. There are a ton of similar examples. One company, Movenote, wants to make this a more fluid process. We had a chance to ask Sini Hyytiäinen, a partner at Movenote, a few questions about their software, and how they make presentations much more fluid and intuitive.

Movenote

What is Movenote?

Movenote is an online video presentation tool that is quick, easy to use and available to everyone. The idea in movenote is that it lets you combine your slides with yourself presenting them with no extra hassle. You can add documents from your computer (any type of documents you would like!) or from your Google Drive. Movenote is completely synched up with Google Drive and Gmail, making it possible for you to work with movenote directly through the Google products.

It seems like teachers and educators have taken a liking to Movenote. Were they the original target market?

As already stated, the original target audience was everyone! Once the online version of movenote published, the path it would take was not clear to us. Later, especially through social media (twitter to be exact) we have noticed how liked movenote is in the education world. Movenote is mainly in the favor of teachers and technology coordinators of schools. Students themselves have tweeted about movenote, but mainly to complain about the homework they have to return with it.

But movenote isn’t all about schools. It has also been used quite a lot in businesses and actually at the very moment we are trying to figure out further how much potential we have in the business world. Movenote has been used so far in sales, marketing, recruiting and internal communications. The idea with movenote is so simple that it can be adapted to virtually anything. It is a truly versatile product and we believe that it hasn’t found all of its audiences just yet.

What makes Movenote different from other presentation software?

Most services that allow you to edit and combine video with slides are either very complicated, or then you can buy them with the service and they become very expensive. We have aimed at keeping movenote as simple as possible so teachers, business men, and whomever can make videos with no added time and no added learning process.

Was there a conscious shift towards the education sector?

Movenote was originally created as something for everyone; for teachers, students, bloggers, business owners, sales personell; but at some point we noticed that especially the edu-field had taken a liking to movenote. That is when we decided that this is the direction we would like to be going in. Teachers and students use movenote to flip the classroom, practice speech and presentation skills, give feedback, self reflect on work and also to learn languages. Its a great tool for a very simple reason: its extremely easy to use!

Tell us about your team and their backgrounds

Our team consists of Ville, our founder and CEO, Mikko and Tatu, our advisors and investors, Noora, Sini and Maite, our social media, communications, customer services and content creators, Lauri, our sales-guru and Mikael and Aapo, our developer-masterminds. We are a very driven bunch and work closely together in Finland.

Most of us have earlier experience in our respective fields. Our CEO Ville Palola started his career in the communications sector and became interested in how communications could be improved with simple technology. This is where the idea for movenote came from.

What is the next step? What do your current goals look like?

Our next step is to find our new audience in the business world. Movenote for education has found its users and is spreading on its own. On that front we are developing new features especially for our Android devices and looking to integrated into bigger learning environments such as Moodle. But also, now we would like to show other sectors on how much they can benefit from putting their voice and face to their presentations.

We would like to thank Sini and the whole Movenote team for answering out questions. For more info, check out Movenote.com or click on one of the social icons at the top of this page.