Authorstream, a website which allows users to share powerpoint presentation with others has raised an undisclosed amount of funding led by Rajan Anandan, former MD of Microsoft India. Authorstream is one of the two presentation sharing platforms with operations out of India: the largest being Slideshare; the differentiation is that Authorstream allows animations, multimedia and other elements of PowerPoint to be retained, addition of images and videos from YouTube, convert the presentation to flash format and export to YouTube, make live presentations, or download as FLV, MP4, AVI or WMV. It has a desktop app, which plugs into Microsoft Powerpoint, allowing users to search and insert into PowerPoint slides, images from Bing and videos from YouTube. Authorstream intends to use the funding to provide sharing of PowerPoint presentations on desktops and mobile devices, "both asynchronously and in real-time." Authorstream has been spun off from Authorgen Technologies, a company which Educomp had acquired a majority stake in, in 2007. AuthorGen has a product called AuthorPoint, which allows conversion of presentations into multimedia formats. Another venture from the company include WiZiQ.com, which is an online learning platform. Authorstream has claimed that it gets 5 million visitors, 10 million monthly pageviews, with over 100,000 presentations uploaded a month; the press release states that "AuthorStream purely focuses on PowerPoint and does not support PDF, video or job postings," almost as if it is a badge of honor that it doesn't do what other platforms do. Slideshare, for example, has gone beyond presentation sharing to…
