Today SlideShare launched the Pfizer Channel, a first for regulated industries. The announcement was made this morning at the ExL Pharma 6th Annual Public Relations and Communications Summit – the leading pharmaceutical industry event for communications professionals, hosted at Pfizer worldwide headquarters in New York. The channel provides investor and corporate presentations, documents and videos in a custom-branded space with the controls required for regulatory compliance. From the press release:

“As part of our expanding effort to reach customers across the social web, we’re pleased to be the first company in a regulated industry to create a Custom Channel on SlideShare,” said Ray Kerins, Vice President, External Affairs & Worldwide Communications, Pfizer. “This channel offers an integrated social media experience, delivering a variety of content – presentations, video, blog posts – via the largest online resource for sharing presentations.”

“With 30 million data-seeking visitors each month, it is clear that SlideShare’s new channel feature has real value for today’s business and brand leaders looking to syndicate content to customers where they want to be reached,” said Bob Pearson, Chief Technology Officer, WCG. “The channel customization offers the flexibility to meet the needs of regulated industries and, importantly, we see this type of service as having a growing role in the future of investor and analyst communications.”

“We are pleased to work with Pfizer to expand our Channel product to include features required by government regulations,” said SlideShare CEO Rashmi Sinha.”Every day more businesses find new ways to leverage the SlideShare platform and engage our professional community.”

Bob Pearson noted on the WCG blog that the new SlideShare Channel is a must for business:

In my view, SlideShare is one of the more important social media channels for today’s business.  It is one of the better places to learn and share information without a lot of noise.   It  has potential to become a solid location for investor relations professionals to share their latest information.  Increased use by IR, alone, will add tremendous value to this community.

I see this as a great leap beyond your Traditional Investor Relations sitE (TIRE). Far richer and more engaging. While many early corporate adopters of Channels are in tech, such as Symantec, HP, Cisco & Dell — its great to see how they can be a fit for industries that have to operate within regulatory constraints.

We are at present shifting our CDN service provider. This is a bid to further improve the user experience on SlideShare.

During the transfer period (a period of 2-3 hours from now), there might be some irregularities with the site’s functioning. We are working to get this set up with minimal problems.

You can also follow updates from us on twitter @Slideshare

SlideShare will undergo a scheduled maintenance on 22nd July 2010 10:30 pm PST. The maintenance will last for about 3-4 hours.

NOTE: All uploads will be disabled for this duration. The rest of the site will be functional.

We’re pleased to announce the release of the LeadShare API along with its first application: Slide2Lead, an integration of LeadShare with SalesForce!   That’s right, with your SlideShare business account, you can now synchronize leads generated by your presentations into your SalesForce CRM account.  Businesses are using SlideShare to generate leads every day using LeadShare. Now you can synchronize SlideShare documents, campaigns, leads and statistics, create SlideShare campaigns, and schedule synchronization with SalesForce.  Slide2Lead is a must-have for marketers who want to automate lead collection.

Here’s a presentation that Mansa Systems uses to capture leads with LeadShare — and have those leads automatically added to their Salesforce account:

Mansa systems fast_track_salesforce_integration_package

View more presentations from manasystest.

Mansa Systems has developed Slide2Lead, now on AppExchange for free and immediate installation. You’ll find detailed information in the Slide2Lead Configuration Guide (pdf).

Developers, see how you can build applications that utilize the SlideShare and LeadShare APIs.

Congratulations to the winners of Best Professional Video of the Week Contest! Hundreds of entries were retweeted and shared on FaceBook to compete for the Best Video prize.

Week 4 Winner: SOAP – State of the Art Presentations of White Plains, New York.

Is PowerPoint a media?

View more videos from SOAP – State of the Art Presentations.

Grand Prize goes to Vineet Arora of Chicago, Illinois.

Hospital Handoffs for Intern Orientation

View more videos from Vineet Arora.

Each of the winners will receive a new iPad! Thanks to all of the contestants for submitting your videos. All of the contestants are listed here. Continue reading »

ReadWriteWeb is making its Future of the Cloud report available for free through SlideShare’s LeadShare service. This is the fourth premium report produced by ReadWriteWeb and through the generosity of their partners Intel & VMware, this is the first one they have provided as no cost to you.

Future of the Cloud: Cloud Platform APIs are the Business of Computing

View more documents from ReadWriteWeb.

Check out RWW’s Cloud Channel for ongoing coverage of the strausphere.

Have you ever wanted to play your slidedeck in synch with the video of your presentation? Now you can synchronize them yourself, without the expense of an editing service! Zentation.com has built a cool tool to synchronize your presentations and videos (both need to be on SlideShare).

Here’s an example:

This mashup was built using the SlideShare API. If you are a developer, there are a lot of cool tools like this that you can build on top of the SlideShare API (go check out the API here).

How you can build your own mashup!
Upload your video and Powerpoint or Keynote slidedeck to SlideShare, then synch them using the ZenSync™ tool on Zentation.com! Detailed steps are below.

Step 1: Upload your video and your slidedeck to SlideShare.com
Step 2: Go to Zentation.com and create a free account
Step 3: In your account, select “New Presentation”
Step 4: Follow the prompts to link to your SlideShare video and slidedeck
Step 5: Use the ZenSync™ tool to provide precise start timings for each slide in your presentation.

We want to hear from you. Send us your feedback and the link to your synchronized presentation.
For more information, see the Zentation FAQ.

Want to give the people in your Windows Live network an easy way to get your SlideShare updates? You can now add SlideShare as a Web Activity in your Windows Live Profile! When you add SlideShare to your Windows Live Profile, your network can easily view all of your SlideShare activity. This is a great way to let everyone in your network know that you have added a presentation to SlideShare.

Connect to SlideShare and updates will automatically appear in your Windows Live profile. And the people in your Windows Live network will see the latest updates of your SlideShare activities in their ‘What’s New’ feed. Follow the steps in this short tutorial to get connected!