Thursday we presented at Under the Radar in Mountain View. It was a lot of fun. I didn’t see all of the company presentations due to my own preparation and there being two separate, parallel tracks.

The two startup company presentations I liked the most were SlideRocket and SlideShare. I liked them for different reasons. Here’s my take on each.

SlideRocket is a really impressive presentation creation tool. SlideRocket is to PowerPoint as blist is to Access. That is to say that SlideRocket is a web-based, beautifully designed, updated version of PowerPoint. Like blist, SlideRocket is a rich Internet application (RIA) built on Adobe Flex. As much as I like what’s there already in the private beta version, I love the vision founder/CEO Mitch Grasso has for where SlideRocket is going. Leveraging its position “in the cloud,” two things really set SlideRocket apart: 1) it has a pluggable architecture that allows the content on a slide to be dynamic. Imagine a table created in blist being live and dynamic on a slide inside a SlideRocket presentation. 2) SlideRocket understands that presentations are often used for marketing and has built in analytics. You can easily determine how many people have viewed the presentation, where people are abandoning, how long they’re spending on each slide, etc. It’s really useful data. SlideRocket recently closed their first funding round, from Hummer Winblad. It’s a really promising application. Congratulations to Mitch and team.

SlideShare, while sounding similar to SlideRocket, takes a very different approach. Where SlideRocket’s emphasis is on content creation, SlideShare focuses on presentation sharing and distribution and a community around presentations. SlideShare users create presentations in PowerPoint or other presentation creation tools that allow you to save as PDF (for example, you could upload Visio docs if you want). SlideShare is a great place to share, discover and discuss presentations that matter. I was unbelievably impressed by SlideShare CEO Rashmi Sinha. She’s smart, articulate and full of passion and energy. SlideShare has demonstrated strong traction since launching in late 2006. One of their investor/advisers is Dave McClure, one of the smartest Internet marketers around (warning: Dave could exercise better constraint over his language. Sometimes its tough to reconcile his intelligence with his potty mouth ).

To show you how cool SlideShare is, here’s the blist Under the Radar presentation:

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Keep an eye on both of these promising startups. I look forward to integration between blist and SlideRocket and also look forward to getting to know and sharing experiences with Ramshi at SlideShare. You should check each of them out.