FW Editor: What are your plans or objectives in the near future?
Jiang Chen: First of all, continue to improve WebPoint. Better software will always be our purpose. I myself am also very eager for a small vacation now after such a long time coding, :).

FW Editor: How and when did you start writing the code for WebPoint? What inspired you the most? Do you plan to develop new software, or are you more focused on optimizing the current ones?
Jiang Chen: We start WebPoint project about one year ago. I am actually a teacher in university. You know many teachers use PowerPoint to create courseware and play them in class. I myself do so too. However, after class, when I want to put coursewares on web to share with students, PowerPoint PPT became useless. I searched the web for softwares which might help to convert PPT to web based presentation but none could satisfy my need. That problem obsessed not only me in the university. Soon, some of the young teachers gathered and a project was established. What we see now is WebPoint, a powerful tool to convert PPT to HTML presentation. Currently we are focusing on optimizing WebPoint. There's still much room for us to improve it. For instance, we are eager to support animation path and some more complex transitions in PowerPoint, we want to enable conversion of video/audio to HTML, we are planning to introduce more CSS3 features and even SVG in HTML presentation... There is still a long way to go.

FW Editor: Can you tell us more about the team behind WebPoint?
Jiang Chen: As I just said, our team is a little special. Not a group of professional programmers, we are several university teachers. Idea aroused in our daily work, we just grouped up to implement it.

FW Editor: 5 Why do you think WebPoint is superior to any similar software? What is the thing that makes it so good?
Jiang Chen: Powerful and standard. There are many other softwares that can help user to publish PowerPoint presentation on web. Some convert PowerPoint file to Flash. Flash is really powerful, especially for animations but it is a little "substandard", additional plugins must be installed before viewing Flash-based presentation in web browser. Flash is also often abused for advertisement on web pages. Some people even forbid Flash in their browsers so you will surely lose those audiences. What's more, Flash is unfriendly to search engine, you can hardly find your Flash based presentation on Google, Yahoo or Bing. The other approach (including WebPoint) is to convert PowerPoint file to HTML while HTML format is a web standard and supported by every browser theoretically. PowerPoint itself can do that job by "saving as HTML" but the HTML PowerPoint generated is notorious and highly unstandard. No browser can show it properly except IE from Microsoft itself. Many PPT to HTML conversion softwares do no better than PowerPoint actually. Some others generate standard HTML code, but lost all animations in original PowerPoint file. WebPoint provide you a revolutionary solution. With WebPoint, you can get both benefits easily. WebPoint generates web presentations with almost 100% standard HTML and 90% of common PowerPoint animations. You can enjoy the power and standard at the same time. It will be really a great to pleasure to have a dynamic and lively presentation in every browser, from IE to Firefox, Opera, Safari, Google Chrome, on every system, from Windows to Mac OS, Linux, even on every terminal, from PC to mobile phone.

FW Editor: Are you planning to release any free version of WebPoint?
Jiang Chen: Honestly, we have not considered such a question yet. However, it is a good suggestion. Perhaps someday we will release an "express" version with some features off, or an "academic" version which can be freely used in education.

FW Editor: Can you tell us more about the next project? Is it going to be something similar to WebPoint or something totally new?
Jiang Chen: We do have some future plans on new project. During the cooking of WebPoint, we built a powerful framework to support HTML presentation and slide show. This framework is the foundation of HTML presentation converted by WebPoint. But why a PowerPoint file is needed before converting it to a web-based one? Can't we create and edit a web presentation directly? Our next software will try to solve that problem.

FW Editor: WebPoint has success already but with success, more responsibilities are coming as well. Do you plan to extend the team in the future?
Jiang Chen: New members are always welcomed in our small but passionate team, :). Thanks for your questions.