Presentation is the practice of showing and explaining the content of a topic to an audience or learner. Presentations come in nearly as many forms as there are life situations. In the business world, there are sales presentations, informational and motivational presentations, first encounters, interviews, briefings, status reports, image-building, and of course, the inevitable training sessions.

Although individuals most often think of presentations in a business meeting context, there are countless occasions when that is not the case. For example, a Non Profit Organization presents the need for a capital fund-raising campaign to benefit the victims of a recent tragedy.

Presentations can also be categorized as vocational and avocational. In addition, they are expository or persuasive. And they can be impromptu, extemporaneous, written, or memorized. When looking at presentations in the broadest terms, it's more important to focus on their purpose. There are three basic purposes for giving oral presentations:

  • To inform
  • To persuade
  • To build good will

There are three types of presentations

  1. Informative
  2. Analyzing
  3. Persuading

Audience is one of the most important part of a presentation. There are far more types of audiences than there are types of presentations because audiences are made up of people and people come in innumerable flavors. Individuals could be invited to speak to groups all across the country. What the individual says and how they may say it depends on the makeup of those groups. They may ask you the individual to address a room full of factory operations managers who have no choice but to attend their talk, you they may go before a congressional committee looking into various environmental issues. When an individual stands up to deliver a presentation before an audience, it’s essential that the audience know who the presenter is, why they are there, what specifically they expect to get from your presentation, and how they will react to your message. You won’t always be able to determine these factors, but you should try to gather as much background information as possible before your presentation. There will be times, especially with presentations that are open to the public, when you will only be able to guess.

Audiences can be classified into four basic categories

  • Captives
  • Pragmatists
  • Socially motivated
  • Committed

Hosting means Act as host for (a Web site or other electronic data) on a computer connected to the Internet.

So, basically hosting presentation means to host a presentation online i.e. one can explain any topic to another individual or a group of people who are sitting thousands of miles away from him on the internet with the help of slide show or with diagrams.

Hosting presentation became very popular in such fields as eLearning and web-conferencing. Many electronic courses contain videos, audios, animations, which is easy to accomplish within a PowerPoint presentation.

After uploading a presentation to a presentation hosting service, a user receives an HTML code, which allows embedding it to a website or blog, or sharing it with a friend afterwards. Presentation hosting services’ users can join groups by interests and debate about any subject they are interested in. These portals are also used in advertising purposes.