Microsoft has made an attempt to one-up the presentation suite market with a new acquisition.
Collaborating with others on important presentations for a business audience usually involves lengthy email strings, countless Powerpoint attachments and a burdensome revision process. Microsoft’s recent acquisition of a start-up called liveloop could change that for the better.
LiveLoop is a startup which has successfully developed plugins for business products and PowerPoint. The plugin enables collaboration through cloud networking amongst groups to work on the same presentation together in real-time. In LiveLoop’s own description on their website which describes their projects as
“converts presentations into Web URLs that can be viewed from any computer or phone *without* installing any software”
As a result of the acquisition, the start-up began sending out a notification on its website that the service will shut down on April 24th. All user activities were disabled and the company advised users to back up their data before the mentioned deadline to avoid permanent data loss.
In a statement from Microsoft
“Microsoft is excited to welcome the talented team from LiveLoop to help build great collaboration across Office applications, as part of our strategy and vision to reinvent productivity”.
Microsoft said that using LiveLoop’s technology will allow easier web access to PowerPoint in the future. The current PowerPoint web app is available on the web but Microsoft wanted something ground-breaking.
Microsoft currently offers subscription based services that provide access among Office users to files and documents across several devices. This allows users in the same network to collaborate and exchange files where they are given full access to the work they access.
This move follows Microsoft’s recent shopping spree for the past few months as it acquires new talent and products that will help it advance its own products and reduce competition. In December, Microsoft bought mobile email app Acompli which was later integrated into Outlook for iOS in January. It was followed by the purchase of the rising Calendar app called Sunrise worth a sum of about $100 million.
