Built-in vidcam and crappy microphone? You can do better
 
Are you waiting for services like Zoom and Teams and all the others to offer tools to make you look better, sound clearer, and be more charismatic? That would be a pretty neat trick. But you can do better than connecting your notebook and yammering on. Way better. And let’s not kid ourselves, virtual presenting will be with us long after Covid – in our offices and in our spare bedrooms.
 
Presentation expert Rick Altman called his own dare, took over his daughter’s bedroom, and created a Zoom studio. Professional-grade cameras, sophisticated switching unit, an excellent microphone, and top-quality lighting, at a price far lower than what you might expect. In this hour, he will take you on a guided tour of what he did, how he did it, and what you can do, regardless of your budget or your company’s, to improve your virtual presence.

Rick Altman has been hired by hundreds of companies, listened to by tens of thousands of professionals, and read by millions of people, all of whom seek better results with their presentation content and delivery. He covers the whole of the industry, from message crafting, through presentation design, slide creation, software technique, and delivery. He is the host of the Presentation Summit, now in its 16th season as the most prominent learning event for the presentation community.

Away from the conference, he regularly leads private presentation skills development workshops within organizations and is working on the fourth edition of the popular and provocatively-titled Why Most PowerPoint Presentations Suck, and how you can make them better.

Altman came to presentations through publishing and graphic design. He claims to have invented desktop publishing back in 1982 and can show a galley sheet of type that was produced by connecting his Osborne 1 computer to a typesetter across town with a 300-baud modem (that cost $800). An avid sportsman, he was not a good enough tennis player to make it onto the professional tour. All the rest of this has been his Plan B…