David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails and partner at 37signals shares his ideas on creating a profitable startup company in a presentation titled "The (a) secret to making money online." I was tipped off to these presentations from Startup School '08 because a reader found the online presentation of the talk noteworthy. I watched the talk initially just to see how the video works, but then I got interested in David's talk. Actually, it's quite good (raw and honest, no bullet-point snoozer, etc.). Although the audio quality and camera work are not great (not the presenter's fault) I thought this is a really good talk. Smart content from a credible source and a simple straight-forward delivery. Checkout the talk in the format below (click on the arrow to go to full screen view), or go to the source here. If you'd like to just watch the video of David's talk (low-rez) see the video on the 37signals site here.

As for the online display of the presentation (slides on the left and below with video on the right) I think it's really interesting and it might work very well in some cases. Personally, I prefer to see the presenter and the visuals in the same frame with some good camera work, something like the videos you see on TED. This seems simpler, but it requires a good video footage of the presenter and the on-stage visuals and some good editing in post. I also watch a lot of video presentations on my iPod where videos of presentations like those on TED work pretty well so long as the slides used in the talk are simple and very visual. (Nonetheless, I'll have to play around with Omnisio in future.)

Checkout the other talks at Startup School 08.