The art world, influenced by what happens in the business world, has picked up PowerPoint as an art medium some time ago. The most prominent example is “Talking Heads” founder David Byrne, who published a DVD Rom as well as various art installations exploring PowerPoint as an artistic medium.

Now a new art movement using PowerPoint has emerged: It is called “Pecha-Kucha” (“peh-chak-cha”), which means “chit-chat” in Japanese, and takes on the form of quasi-Poetry Slams using slides. The rules are simple:

• Create a 20 PowerPoint slides about any topic
• Show each slide for 20 seconds only

The result is a concise 6 minutes, 40 seconds presentation, which is quite fun to watch. This 20×20 format is slowly adopted in businesses as well.

[more about pecha-kucha]
[pecha-kucha official website]
[pecha-kucha examples on youtube]

The ReadWriteWeb blog says that Enterprise 2.0 – i.e. web 2.0 apps applied to business settings – will become a $4.6 billion industry by 2013:

“The top spending category will be social networking tools. (…) After social networking, the next-largest category is RSS, followed by blogs and wikis, and then mashups.

(…)

What this means is that much of the Web 2.0 tool kit will simply “fade into the fabric of enterprise collaboration suites,” says Forrester. By 2013, few buyers will seek out and purchase Web 2.0 tools specifically. Web 2.0 will become a feature, not a product.

(…)

Over the next three years, millions of baby boomers will retire and the younger workers brought in to fill the void will not only want, but will expect similar tools in the office as those they use at home in their personal lives.”

[Link]