Mmhmm, that’s cool!

Streaming PowerPoint instead of Among Us

Mmhmm is a fascinating new software coming straight out of the creative minds from All Turtles, a “mission-driven product studio” headquartered in San Francisco, with other offices in Paris and Tokyo. Mmhmm promises to help you “step up your Zoom game and say goodbye to boring decks”.

Take the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on the remote workers market. Take the importance of the PowerPoint ceremonial in nearly all large corporations (I witnessed it first hand at Samsung, Ubisoft and Microsoft, and this sometimes made me envious of Amazon’s famous positioning). These led to the creation of mmhmm, according to the company’s website: “In 2020, many of our social and business interactions moved to video chat. To be honest, we didn’t love it. Suddenly we were all just bland heads-in-boxes, and it was harder to present, collaborate, and entertain.”

Now, take the thriving YouTubers and Live Streamers scene, whose momentum is growing even among star politicians in the making. Take the more authentic, human aspect despite the physical remoteness… and try to combine it with the more serious stuff that you include in your PowerPoint decks. This is the goal of this app born of necessity, built for fun: “We built mmhmm to add a little joy to our virtual presentations.”

Mix and match both ingredients while simultaneously focusing on ease-of-use: badaboum!, you get mmhmm, an app whose name can be pronounced even while eating.

Make your presentations great again

Led by Phil Libin, a Russian-born American who served as CEO of Evernote, the innovative startup provides a service at the intersection of enterprise and consumer software, which positions itself alongside existing video conferencing (eg. Google Meet) or streaming (eg. YouTube) platforms. The company is backed up by Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, and Eventbrite co-founders Julia and Kevin Hartz.

The target audience is not limited to marketers or salesmen; it extends to YouTubers or even friends & families who want to spice up virtual happy hours. After all, the goal is to help elevate your content, let yourself shine and collaborate more naturally on presentations. You will understand all its potential by watching this great 5 mn video:

Mmhmm is available immediately for download to Mac OS users (Big Sur, Catalina or Mojave) and an exclusive feature leveraging machine-learning capabilities is even included for Apple M1-powered laptops. It is released with a freemium business model à la Evernote: Premium provides customizable rooms, presenter controls and more fun possibilities such as laser pointers, and Basic provides the core functionality of presenting, recording and collaborating on presentations. For more details on the premium tools, including how to get a year for free if you are a student or teacher, check out this page.

The Windows version is coming soon, and like me you can sign up to be a Windows Beta tester.

Enjoy your Saturday,

Antoine