• Introduction video. This will give you a good short overview about SR. 
• Free trial signup. Sliderocket is free for personal use, but to access all the 'gee-whiz' features, especially collaboration tools, You can signup for a 30-day free trial of a full business account here. 
• Collaboration. This is important. To get the full collaboration functionality of SR you need to have just one account for each team. One person can signup for a trial account, then within that account give additional usernames and passwords to the rest of their team.  If every team member signs up for their own personal account collaboration on a presentation is a lot harder. (it's a subtle distinction, but tripped up a lot of folks in my last class. If you have questions about this email me)
• Training. Sliderocket runs a free 45 minute online seminar every Wednesday. If you're still a little unsure of how the whole thing works and how to get started this is a good place to get help.
• Presentation hints. You should see a link below to a presentation I put together a few months ago about presentation tips. Not all will be relevant to this assignment, but they will be to your week 6 final presentation.

I hope all of you have started your assignment by now!  I thought I would share some materials and hints that might help you along with your paper. First some information that might help you form your thoughts:

• The New York Times has an interesting article a couple months ago about standing room only airline seats in China
• Billshrink.com put together a nice graphic outlining all the fees airlines have been implementing

• Plagiarism. I'm sure none of you are considering this, but sometimes we all get desperate late in the morning before a paper is due. You should know that in the online version of this course, plagiarizing the Class Airlines paper is the #1 reason for failing MKT571. There are a lot of papers for purchase out there. Most all are garbage, and the faculty plagiarism checker will catch them 95% of the time.
  
• As you can tell from the links above, I love informative graphics, tables and graphs. You don't have to be Picasso, but if you develop a meaningful graphic that gets your point across it definitely won't hurt your grade.
  
• There are a lot of 'problem solving models' and ways to write business plans. These two articles, while not precisely on-point for your assignment, represent what I find most useful / compelling when reading a business plan. 
  1. Business planning, Aug 10th 2009 – From Economist.com (their basic model/outline, the people – the opportunity – the context – the risk – the reward is great)
     
  2. Why Business Plans Don’t Deliver, June 22, 2009 – From MIT Sloan Management Review