Despite living in an age where it’s just as easy to chat face-to-face with someone on the other side of the world as it is to switch on the TV in your lounge, time zones, conflicting schedules and heavy workloads often mean that while doing so is plausible, it’s not always feasible.

Present.me offers solutions to the logistical problems of online remote communication with a slide-sharing video service that allows users to record video alongside slide and document presentations, to better explain the content to viewers. The ‘Presentmes’ – hosted in the cloud – can be shared privately among secure business networks, with individuals, with key industry sectors or with the whole world, and merge the intimacy of video conferencing with the convenience of email.

Indeed, it’s an ingenious idea that has many lamenting ‘I wish I’d thought of that’; a strong contender for SlideShare’s crown, the service adds a vital dimension to business communication. Of course, SlideShare has made its mark in the shareability of its content, bolting on an array of analytics and monitoring goodies to its service – Present.me focuses more on the user-to-user experience.

Just as tools like Skype and DropBox had their heyday, the service could well revolutionize the way we work, especially since Present.me has now launched ‘Present.me Team’, which enables multiple users to use Present.me.

However, while viewing and consuming content is free, there is a fee to create Presentmes: $49 a month for 5 creator licences. Not a enormous sum, admittedly, but a sum nonetheless, which may deter some key demographics: start-ups, for example, or creative teams.

But Present.me is on to a good thing – the beautiful ingenuity of its service means that companies are likely to stump up the cost, because the alternatives are confused emails, Pictionary-like phone calls and 4am video conferences. And we could all do without those.