We started this project in a very organic way; Adam and Peter, an artist/designer and a computer scientist have been lecturing extensively for many years, and due to the limitations of slide presentations they developed their own methods, scripted maps, to hold these lectures. Over time (last 4 years) this method matured, got refined, and only the most important features stayed.

At the same time, due to the many requests they got from their friends to use their presentation systems, Adam and Peter decided to develop a public software, which many more can use. Becoming coordinators at Kitchen Budapest medialab, a perfect context to develop something new, they found the needed time and atmosphere, so ZuiPrezi was born. After the proof of concept application, in 2008 Zui LTD was formed, the project received seed founding, and intense development has started...

Today we are a dynamic team of various experts with a strong international network. If you feel that you need some customization of ZuiPrezi please contact us.

Gabor Bacsa - COO, Business Development
Marketing and marketing communication background, worked with major multinational and local marketers, developed and delivered thousands of presentations.
ZuiPrezi LTD
Daniel Feles - Developer
He does compute art flashing when he is laid back, reads, listens, and looks, shoots photos, picks a guitar, does archery with arrows, does sports and thinks...
ZuiPrezi LTD
Szilveszter Farkas - Lead Developer
Third year computer science student at BME, who loves Python and both traditional GUI and Web development. He is an open source enthusiast, and contributor to various projects. He blogs occasionally at phanatic.hu
ZuiPrezi LTD
Peter Halacsy - CTO, founder
Peter has a degree of electrical engineering from BME Budapest, he is a coordinator at Kitchen Budapest, and a researcher at MOKK Media Research, at the department of Sociology.
ZuiPrezi LTD
Viktor Kelemen - Lead Developer
Front-end developer interested in beautiful script languages, social web and cutting edge technologies.
His portfolio can be found at yikulju.com
ZuiPrezi LTD
Peter Nemeth - Lead Developer
Graduated on computer science at BME last year. Tried to meet with robots, generate 3d graphics, build sensor network, program microcontroller, generate random 64k intro, create PCB and develop for web. Likes hacking thingies. Interested in visual design/art, and music.
ZuiPrezi LTD
Peter Racz - Copy writer
Final-year English and Theoretical Linguistics major with a profound interest in vibrations which travel through the air or another medium and are sensed by the ear.
ZuiPrezi LTD
Adam Somlai-Fischer - Lead designer, founder
An architect and interaction designer, Adam is interested in the cultural qualities of new technologies, and to explore these he creates installations and experiments that blend spaces, technologies and interactivity.
more at aether.hu
ZuiPrezi LTD

Our thoughts

Some history to start with..
Slides are transparent photos you slide into machines. They are not the ideas.

The ideology of ZuiPrezi is based our natural knowledge on how to coordinate ourselves in space; traditionally all information we have had to process and store used to be linked to physical space. That is where our minds have developed good skills in orienting ourselves. Despite all this digital information today is mostly presented to us as a moniker of printed matter. Of course printing has served us well to store (and shape) information for the the last six centuries, however, with the wide appearance of computing we saw the same old pattern: old forms got translated to new media without exploring its full potential. Most of the computer systems which present us with information today use the old paradigm of prints and slides: arranging information on a framed 2d static space. We could argue that these (at least their forms) are merely the side effect of Gutenberg's galaxy.

This does not only help in orienting ourselves within, but also helps us to develop our ideas better.

Prezi is the message
Presenting or thinking? Function follows form.

ZuiPrezi is not about a simple effect of moving from slide to slide, using a zoomable space changes the way we work dramatically.

Ever since we started building ZUI presentations, we constantly have found ourselves wanting to use it on meetings where we have to develop ideas together, or while writing, where we need to keep the overall structure and the details in our minds at the same time, creating and working on a structured map would help out us a lot. ZuiPrezi can help you to create a map of points, structure your ideas, see overview and details at the same time. Throw in you keywords, images, videos, arrange and find out what you want to say.

And besides all this, ZUI offers infinite space.

Where innovation comes in

Zoomable user interfaces have been written about for a while, just as mind mapping is a practice for many in the creative industry. However, while being aware of all the software and scientific papers about this topic, we still found ourselves writing our own code to do something that is more simple, intuitive, fast, and looks beautiful as well; As both of us have an extensive background in presenting as well as idea mapping, we combine theory and practice, as we needed to do that already for our own needs.

ZuiPrezi is not a theoretical project, nor is it yet another office application; while being aware of the long term social aspects of using computers and sharing / shaping information, we worked down to the core to develop something very useful and simple, yet innovative and culturally intriguing.

With all this in mind, the work has just begun, there are still a myriad of possibilities lying ahead, mapped out for the near future.

Team

Our thoughts

Where innovation comes in